I don't get snow. What is so fucking fun about black ice or perpetually cold feet?

GATEISM: A week back I emailed someone I hadn't seen or heard from in years. This person was one of those young, ambitious computer geek types with an ever ballooning ego that didn't really hide his inner insecurities or his rampant paranoia.

The rampant greed, egos and narcissism of the Nineties should have a name: Gateism. (After Microsoft's Head Freak.) Guys who were beaten to a pulp during recess in the 8th grade, became assistant CEOs of tech firms (usually in the San Francisco area) and revelled in their collective delusion by wearing Birkenstocks, dating girls (who wouldn't look twice at them before they nailed the 100k a year job) and driving cars that had higher insurance premiums than their parent's yearly salaries. Then a funny thing happened on the way to the NASDAQ ... and the geeks got bitch-slapped by a reality check.

All disgruntled former assistants of these too-powerful nerds, if you were lambasted for being a single mom who answered phones while your "employers" had rubberband fights and told you to "hold their calls," I'd love to hear it .

On the up-side of Generation X or as Tom Tomorrow called them, Wedgies, ain't all bad. There's a few doing good that doesn't revolve around their computers, their navels or their suburban homes that are just the right shade of tan ala The X-Files' "Arcadia" episode. And here's one: Folk Media, m' mate Marcus Page. He gleefully admits he's a freak, a punk and a devout anarchist. And if the code on his website sucks, it's because he's too busy feeding homeless people and protesting against the Bush Regime to be bothered to improve his HTML. Kudos to you, Maximum Porridge.

-- Mz M.