The Internet and the Laugh Gap

By JON HOORNSTRA

Bathroom, coffee pot, newspaper and breakfast. That was the order of business that started all my mornings until the personal computer and the Internet changed everything.

Now, the computer is turned on first and the rest follows in a random order because, experts say, we are checking our email first.

Keepers of statistics say half of all U.S. households--there are 97 million such places--have personal computers. So I'm willing to wager that nearly that many people check their e-mail well before the coffee is brewed.

But not all email is created equally. If your in-box looks anything like mine, the serious messages share space with tons of jokes and humorous stories sent by well-meaning friends who zap every funny thing they hear to every wired friend they have.

But laughter has its dark side. Because some 72 million of us access the digital highway from home, any day now social engineers will uncover the "laugh gap." The great digital divide, they will say, means that the millions of Americans who have no Internet must muddle through their early morning routines with only a daily newspaper's grim front page. Half of us head off to work happy and laughing and the other half just head off to work.

The danger in all this isn't that we might become a nation in which only half of us laugh. No, the danger is that social activists will ask Washington to impose a tax to close the laugh gap. That's right: a Laugh Gap Tax.

There is something we can do to head off a laugh tax. We can share our funny email with our unconnected neighbors and I'm going to start by offering some of my favorites. I encourage you to clip them out and pass them on.

1. I especially liked this Dr. Seuss-like computer technical manual from a friend who retired to the remote woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula:

"If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, / The bus is interrupted as a very last resort; / If the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, / Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report."

2. It was well after midnight when the "ding" alerted me that this item, an analysis of the energy crisis, had arrived from a Cupertino middle school teacher:

"The reason for an energy crisis is purely geographical," she wrote. "Nobody could figure out how to check the oil supply because all the oil is in Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska and Wyoming, but all the dipsticks are in Washington, D.C." Wish I had a teacher like her when I was 12 years old.

3. When former Cupertino Mayor Wally Dean left office he had time to send this along, arguably one of the best to come via the Internet:

Five surgeons were debating which patients are the easiest to operate on. The first surgeon liked to operate on accountants because all the internal organs are numbered. But the second surgeon claimed electricians made the best patients because all their organs are color-coded. The third surgeon liked librarians because their internal organs are arranged in alphabetical order. The fourth doctor said auto mechanics or construction workers were the best because "those guys understand when you have parts left over and the operation takes longer than you'd thought it would." But the fifth surgeon insisted, "You're all wrong--politicians are the best patients for operating. They have no guts, no spine, no heart and the head and butt are interchangeable."

If the last doctor is right, there's no doubt they could pass a laugh tax.

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Jon Hoornstra is a Cupertino Courier columnist.

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