Does Humor Belong in USENET?

From January '99 through March '01, I saved off most of the posts that made me laugh out loud from my favorite newsgroups, including:

alt.fan.frank-zappa
rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc
rec.music.progressive

and occasionally

alt.music.mike-keneally

What these groups have in common (besides music and Mystery Science Theater) is that I can usually count on each group to give me two or three good laughs a day. Lately I've been finding less and less time to update these pages, so I've finally decided to stop collecting. But here's the good stuff that I found while I was at it:

January through June, 1999

July through September 1999

October through December 1999

January through April 2000

May 2000 through August 2000

October 2000 through March 2001

MSTings

For years now, I've wanted to do a MSTing. For those who aren't familiar with the term, a MSTing is when someone takes some text found on the net (usually a story set in the "universe" of a popular TV show, but written by a fan, not one of the show's writers - these are called "fanfics") and gives it the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. MSTings ususally include host segments at the beginning and end (and sometimes in the middle, if it's a long fanfic) which use the characters from MST3K. Then, Mike (or Joel) and the 'bots tear into the story line by line, making humorous quips and pointing out flaws just like they do on MST3K. In other words, a MSTing is an MST3K fanfic that makes fun of other fanfics.

Anyway, I read several MSTings on the web, starting somewhere around 1995, and I've always wanted to do one myself. I came very close once, when someone posted a tremendously pretentious music review to rec.music.progressive, but for some reason I never got around to it. Finally a text came to my attention that I just couldn't resist, and so I wrote my first (and so far only) MSTing. Hopefully, I'll find time to do more in the future, because this one was a blast. It practically wrote itself.

So, here it is, my first MSTing - Charlton Heston's "Winning the Cultural War". Since I never do anything the conventional way, this isn't a MSTing of a fanfic - it's more along the line of a commentary on a right-wing, pro-gun, anti-political-correctness rant from Mr. Heston, which sets out to champion free speech and instead ends up arguing against it. If you're extremely conservative, or a member of the NRA, and have no sense of humor, you should probably skip it. Otherwise, enjoy!

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