Ahhhhh, springtime. When a young man’s thoughts turn to… golf.
I hadn’t quite been myself the last few months. And finally, I knew the reason why. I had been suffering from golf withdrawal. The symptoms were obvious enough in retrospect. A tingling of the palms, a twitch of the toes, a habit of yelling ‘Fore!’ whenever I knocked something off of my desk, the urge to watch all 48 hours of the Master’s Tournament…
Yes, I should have diagnosed the problem earlier, but even then, there would have been nothing I could have done about it. The golf courses don’t open until April at the earliest around here. However, the cure was relatively simple; take 18 holes and repeat in the morning.
I had just finished the front nine at my local club and was teeing off on 10. It’s a relatively short course (par 3 on all of the holes) but it had one major advantage. It was open at night, with lights and everything. (A serious consideration with my schedule.) The front nine had showed me how rusty I was, so I was more than a little surprised to see my ball head straight for the pin. I lost the ball in the lights as it started to drop towards the green, but I had a really good feeling about the shot. It just felt right.
I didn’t see my ball on the green as the rest of my foursome walked up to take their second shots. I walked across the putting surface to the sound of the other golfers jealous comments. I looked down into the cup and saw it sitting there. My first hole in one.
I removed the pin and bent over to remove my ball from the cup. As the ball was lifted from the bottom of the hole, I heard a click. I froze in place as I heard that oh too familiar voice come from the hole.
‘Agent GEBIV, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out what things you will not find on Evil Glenn’s website, 'Instapundit.com'. If you are discovered, we will laugh ourselves sick at your ineptitude. Oh, and we will be forced to disavow any knowledge of your actions. We don’t want to jeopardize our future chances at getting an ‘Instalanche’ after all.
This message will self-destruct in 5…’
Acting purely on instinct, I quickly jammed the flag back into the hole. A satisfying click told me that the message had been stopped mid-countdown. I muttered some apologies to my golfing partners, shouldered my bag and headed back to my Jeep.
As I locked my Hole-In-One ball in my glove box, I realized that it was yet again time for another…
MISSION IMPLAUSIBLE
(Cue Theme Music)
I was just tying my street shoes back up when a small fireball lit up the night. Oops, I guess I should have told them about the hole, I thought as I watched the burning flag pole from the 10th hole arc across the night to splash into the course’s pond. Looks like the 10th hole just got a little larger.
I swung by my house on my way to Evil Glenn’s fortress of terror, pausing only long enough to swap my clubs for Slinky the Wonder Ferret’s luxury travel case. As I drove, I slipped on my Hands-Free Mobile Phone set. I was going to need some help and I hoped my blogless brother could give it. He answered on the fifth ring, just as I was getting worried that he forgot his phone again.
‘Culbrez, you at home?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m still not sure where I am. But I think it might be Italy.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Well, my phone said “roam” on it when I answered.’
(Groan) ‘Do you have your computer? And can you get online?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the satellite uplink going right now.’
‘Can you hack into Evil Glenn’s computer for me?’ I crossed my fingers. If he could, it would save me a great deal of trouble. Over the phone, I could hear what sounded like an eyebrow twitching as if to say, ‘What kind of fool are you? You should know by now that I can do anything with a computer.’ I was starting to get really annoyed with that eyebrow.
After a few minutes of the sound of the furious ticking of keys, a much chagrined blogless brother got back on the phone. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I looks like Glenn took his personal computer completely off of the net. His web page is still up, but I can’t seem to find anything not posted on the net. It’s like he has the greatest firewall ever created.’ I shuddered at what this meant, I was going to have to practice a little breaking and entering on Evil Glenn’s fortress. ‘But I do have some good news,’ he continued. ‘I just saved a bunch of money by switching my car insurance to Geico.’
‘What!’
‘Just kidding. But I can break into his security system. I can’t shut it down yet, but I should be able to help you get around it.’
‘OK. I’ll call you back when I get there.’ I hate those stupid commercials. I thought to myself as I disconnected the call. And he knows it.
I drove the rest of the way to Glenn’s stronghold fuming. The silence only broken by the sound of Slinky laughing his furry little butt off. He thinks that little lizard is the funniest thing since the invention of the whoopee cushion.
When I arrived at Evil Glenn’s, I called my brother back. ‘All right, I’m here.’
‘Just head on in.’ He said.
‘But what about the security system?’
‘Oh that. I shut it down about five minutes after you hung up.’
With all of the sensors shut down, it was no problem penetrating to the heart of the fortress. The only living thing we saw on the way in was an attack rabbit that Slinky took care of with no problems at all. (I guess when you blend puppies for a living, it’s kind of hard to keep guard dogs around. On an interesting note, we later learned that this rabbit was a direct descendant of the rabbit that attacked Jimmy Carter.)
When I finally found Evil Glenn’s computer I plopped down into his overstuffed leather swivel chair. Ooh, this is comfortable. I knew that with my blogless brother’s help on the HFMP (Hands-Free Mobile Phone) I would be able to break into the computer in no time at all.
Twenty minutes and forty-five swear words later, I was still staring at a blank screen. Nothing we could do would let us in. We couldn’t even get to a password screen. There was just nothing. It was the best computer security I had ever encountered. I was starting to get really mad when I heard the ferret laughter coming from under the desk.
Grumbling to myself about the inanity of ferret humor, I crawled under the desk to see what had tickled his fancy. Ready to dish out a little discipline if he was just laughing at my attempts at computer hacking. Then I discovered that he had pinpointed the source of all of my frustrations. It looked as if one of Evil Glenn’s attack rabbits had chewed through the power cable to computer. Result: one fried bunny and one completely un-hackable computer.
A quick splice later, and I had the computer running. A few seconds later my brother exclaimed, ‘I’m in.’ over the HFMP. Together, we ran search after search on Evil Glenn’s computer. We had access to all of his files and posts; past, present, and even some future ones.
It was discouraging. No matter what we searched for, we found it. As far as we could tell, he had everything. We did find that he had no actual posts showing any sort of human decency, but he quite often linked to it. After what we considered an exhaustive search, we were forced to conclude that he did indeed (heh) have everything on his site. It was like he had some army of underpaid illegal-immigrant workers cutting and pasting for his website 24 hours a day. It was unfair how many hits his site got, but it was absolutely inhuman how many times a day he was able to post.
We left the bastion of evil as quickly and quietly as we entered. I only stopped for a moment to kick the first attack rabbit a few times on my way out. As I drove off into the night, I thought, just for a second, that I heard the sound of thousands of Chinese sweatshop bloggers crying out for help. But I dismissed it the result of a slightly overactive imagination and not enough sleep.
When I reached my home, it hit me that I may have actually stumbled across Evil Glenn’s biggest secret. It would explain everything. All he would have to do is have those poor oppressed illegal-immigrant workers cut and paste everything in sight and they would only have to know how to write a few actual words. And if ‘Heh,’ ‘Hmmm,’ and ‘Indeed’ were too hard for them to learn, how hard would it be to set up a few macros for them to use?
I realized that I had to rescue those poor souls and save the rest of the blogsphere from Evil Glenn’s… well… evil.
And then Stargate SG1 came on. So I shrugged my shoulders and thought, Oh well. I’m sure that they can take care of themselves.