Ten Usenet newsgroups to read when you're really, really bored

1. alt.religion.wombat: You can use this group for enlightened discussion about any of several stocky, burrowing, Australian marsupials of the family Vombatidae. Or you can pay homage to the great Wombat God. Your choice.
2. alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork: Foren discussion eff da Svediah Chef. Bork!
3. alt.silly-group.radish-therapy: If you have to ask, you don't need to know.
4. alt.spam: "But I don't like Spam!" Whether you do or not, this is the group for discussion of Spam. Is it a tasty treat or the dreaded anti-food? You decide.
5. alt.sex.boredom: For those bored in bed and out.
6. alt.pinecone: For the discussion of pinecones, I suppose. Most of the time there I've just seen weird messages from folks claiming to be pinecones.
7. alt.flame: This is a place where people exchange heated, often nasty, comments about each others' moral character, philosophy of life and use of farm animals. I find it uninteresting, except when exceedingly bored.
8. misc.test: This group is where people post test messages to make sure their news posting software works. It requires that you begin with a stunningly high boredom level, then it will take your ennui to new heights.
9. junk: I know this newsgrop name is abnormally short, but it's a special newsgroup, and "junk" is really its full name. This group is where your host puts postings when it can't figure out where they're really supposed to go. For instance, if a posting shows up bound for alt.cornflakes, but your system doesn't know of any such group, the message gets dumped in junk. Therefore, there is often a smattering of very odd, discontinuous messages in that group.
10. control: Even more dull than junk, read the control group to turn your average workaday boredom into an everlasting blue funk from which you may never recover. The control group is where special requests from news software go- -it's an internal control mechanism for creating new newsgroups, canceling messages, and performing other low-level news maintenance. For instance, if I sent a message to alt.internet.services, then later wanted to remove that message, my news software would put a "cancel" message in the control group. That message is sent to other Usenet sites and acted upon by news software there. These aren't really meant to be read by humans- -who'd want to? A typical cancel message looks like this: cancel <1994Jun24.184220.3099@news.wrc.xerox.com>. Go ahead, read a few thousand of those.

Copyright © 1994, 1995, 2004 by Kevin Savetz. The information in this book was collected in 1994-1995 and has not been updated since.