Google's new logo

"Are you trying something new? You got a haircut? You aren't wearing any deodorant? I give up."

I remember the morning my father shaved his mustache. He'd been growing it out for a few months and trimmed sparingly. The resulting hairy mass of tangled and prickly hair created an effect I dubbed the "Dead Caterpillar." My father took offense at this designation, but didn't seem quite as peeved when I insisted my high regard for his deceased Lepidoptera. My comment even earned an Archaic smile which, for those of you who slept through ancient lit, means I'm the only one who actually thinks it's a smile. Anyway I woke up one day to a different father than the one I said goodnight to the day before. And I didn't know what had changed.

It's like those little puzzles they put on the kids menus at family restaurants. Spot all the differences between Lindsey and Lindsay so your parents don't have to entertain you and can enjoy a more tranquil dining experience. I was never good at those and I am similarly atrocious at picking out the changes in my dad's appearance.

A few mornings ago, I had a déjà vu moment. I loaded up Kato, my trusty unPC, to check my email or maybe do something more frivolous, I don't recall for certain. For some reason I had to google a term. This was easily accomplished. But when I tabbed back to the frivolous page, I couldn't find my search query. My eyes patiently roamed the tab bar, looking for the familiar white box with a bold, uppercase "G." Odd, I thought, I wouldn't have exited the screen without first reading the search results.

So I scrolled through my open tabs. A court decision someone sent me, a news article about Billary, an unfinished FCN post, an article about Greek Kouros (hence the Archaic smile reference), email, a couple of sports pages and, voila, my search. For the record, F, I was egogoogling your mom. Not the phrase, the actual name. I always google people's names before I go out on a date with them.

But back to my story, instead of the marker I expected, Google's page was accompanied by a cursive "g" that, to my caffeinated brain, looked more like an "8" written by my physician.

My beautiful morning was shattered. The trusty boxy "G" I'd come to rely on, trust and believe in as an accurate source of information was replaced by a hip and altogether lowercase character. It was like seeing Daniel Craig play 007 or Lindsay Lohan duplicating the timeless Hayley Mill's classic. It was counterfeit!

Soon Wikipedia will have a cursive "w" instead of its bold mascot, the New York Times will create something legible and Blogger will try something even more postmodern.

I can't leave Google behind. Not for an infraction so minor, so aesthetic. But for one fraction of one second I thought about it. My boundless faith and gaga love of Google found a rare challenge.
Larry and Sergey: I'll never let anything get between us, but you might try warning me next time, okay? Communication is important...

I am AxxO

Online piracy, long a thorn in the belly of the IRAA and a boon to bandwidth wholesalers the world over, is as much an industry as the entertainment off which it siphons its life blood. We pirates put countless hours into developing, marketing and distributing our product to a pimply faced consumer base while hiding our activities from the authorities. We take music, movies and other media and make them accessible for free on the internet.

Expressed acronymically, we bring MMM to the WWW.

My name is AxxO. That's not my real name, of course. That jealously guarded secret is housed with a cool million in cash where the FBI will never find it. AxxO is the name I use on any of the millions of piracy sites where normally expensive media are available for free, not unlike the gum beneath eye level at a convenience store.

I purchase movies and rip them to my hard drive, using a pirated proprietary software that is, I am sure, really expensive for most people. I then upload these ripped files to millions of users the world over, who share them with others in a big commune of entertainment equality. My files are relatively small (often a tenth of the size of the original film), but they maintain most of the quality, leaving pirates with the impression that they are watching the real thing, not a cheap knock off.

Only my name, AxxO, identifies my product.

You may have seen my moniker on various piracy websites (my name is the most common search term on several of them) and you may even have one or more of my ripped (off) files on your computer, if I can truly call them mine.


I am a sworn enemy of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a terrorist organization with ties to Hollywood and Tom Cruise. I will do everything in my power to see the record labels brought to their knees and to keep the owners of intellectual property from making money off of their media. I am the Marxist of the internet world and the file housed in your share folder is my manifesto.


Funny Class Notes is my online home. That's right. I, AxxO, am a contributor to FCN.

For years I have kept my identity secret. Despite pleas from thousands of webpages and tens of thousands of fan emails, I have not revealed my true identity. And I will maintain my secrecy even through this post. Know, however, that one of the authors of FCN leads a secret life as AxxO. Now you know; don't tell the RIAA.

This post should answers a lot of questions. I hope it clears the air on what has become an unnecessarily convoluted subject and an issue that has divided many in the peaceful world of cyber stealing. It is such a relief to get this off my chest in my own way and own time, exactly the way Roger Clemens didn't. The truth was bound to come out eventually: IP addresses can only be concealed for so long and a demanding public loves to uncover embarrassing connections. Why not reveal the truth on my own terms? You know my work; now you know my blog.


Thanks for believing. Thanks for uploading. Thanks for reading. Please, upload what you’ve downloaded, and then some.

Tire Rotation

Like women, cars need maintenance. That's a fact that found its place firmly ensconced in the back of my mind when I first took up driving, but it moved to the front like a bad headache when I first had to change the oil. Or rather, had to pay to change the oil. Greasy hands and the smell of a car's underbelly are deemed too pedestrian for starving college students who work at General Mills, so we hire that sort of thing out to uniformed professionals who can afford to eat.

If changing the oil was a headache, tire rotation was Gusii Trepanation. For those of you who are deathly curious, but for some reason don't want to click on the link (get DSL, you dial-up Baby Boomer), a Gusii Trepanation is a surgery designed to relieve cranial stress wherein (and this is where it gets gross) a hole is drilled in the skull. The practice is based on the same ideology as the blood leeches that killed our first president, except that it is still used today.

So maybe tire rotation isn't Gusii Trepanation, but it isn't Office Supplies either.

Please tell me that one doesn't need any explanation. Thank you.

I found myself at my local mechanics shop, watching as my precious wheels were lifted slowly above an oily cement surface and as several young men looking like the bumpkins in a Rodney Atkins music video (minus the Skoal cans) scrambled around like a pitt stop in slow motion. Very slow motion. I sat in the establishment's under-furnished waiting room for just under an hour, occupied only by a game show so stupid it was picked up by the Discovery Channel and some car magazines that depress readers with all the horsepower they don't and never will have.

When an front desk attendant finally mispronounced my name, I got up with a relieved sigh and extended my had to a young man who looked too young to support the hair on his chin but compensated for his youth with a very earnest demeanor. The complimentary tire rotation was complete, but the mechanics had discovered a number of problems with my car in the process of moving the rubber. Apparently my brakes were worn down almost to nothing, my alignment more crooked than Jessica Simpson's pre-surgery nose (my words, not the attendant's) and my shocks were, well, shot. The entire situation could be resolved for the whopping sum of five hundred bucks.

Deep breath. A pain that was almost physical started tingling in my toes, exactly the way Colbie Caillat didn't intend. The car had run so well on the way in. The rotation was supposed to be routine. I hadn't felt anything wrong with the alignment and my shocks had given me no static when I took the hill where Peltier meets the train tracks at eighty. I had the funds, but the money, in my mind, was already spent elsewhere. Why did cars have to be so expensive? First the Saudis and their gas gouging and now mechanic's mania.

"Would you like to take care of this now?"

I turned to Goatee Boy with a tight smile, glancing down at his nametag in the same motion.

"Actually...Tony...I think I'll shop this around. Thanks for the rotation."

I walked out of the building and to my waiting car with all the confidence I didn't have. On my way home I noticed my car had a new rattle, I could feel an alignment error and my brakes were not as responsive as they used to be - all problems I hadn't noticed an hour and a half earlier. Sigh. "Free" tire rotation, indeed.

Or maybe it's all in my head and these problems were there all along and only now has my attention been drawn to it. Maybe the mechanic had altruistically pointed out a flaw in my car that, if unattended, would have been a danger to me or others on the road. But I think not. Something about Tony's goatee shouted "hood tinkerer" and I don't mean that as a compliment.