F-Links.
©David Knopfler 15th September 1996
Waking this morning with the sound of little voices in my ear - I'd left the TV on - thoughts were rising through the fog. Having never written an article with the sole purpose of publishing it on the net rather than via a forest of felled trees, I was suddenly seized with a certain excitement about the possibilities, as only a deluded zealot rationalising could be. Clearly online articles have certain advantages - instant links to Peruvian goat herders from a list of say Alexie Sayle's favourite pubs would not be unheard of in the lateral world of VDU's and chips. It was innervating - it was technologically advanced - it was the future - it was dumb.
If I nipped downstairs smartly and turned on my computer now, I could take my wife a quick cup of tea and feign great interest in my domestic responsibilities, while waiting for my computer to load up it's five thousand free applications accumulated across a number of late night casual sojournings of my terminal with cyber-sites around the world. I could have my thoughts down on hard disc faster than java script can crash a PC running windows '95. I looked blearily into the mirror. I looked worse than Kevin Costner in the middle of shooting Waterworld - ... er hang on - no I didn't . I didn't look into the mirror at all, who's telling this story? I dispensed with the bathroom entirely in fact - threw on yesterday's clothes - which wasn't hard, as I hadn't taken them off - and headed to my mac. Five years old and still worth hugging. I live in the middle of a forest of trees as it happens - mind you, forests usually do consist of trees don't they - and if we ever have a fire then there will probably be a photo of me the hero emerging from the smoking wreckage with some exotic treasure under my arm - beige with a half eaten apple as it's logo, while above me at the window stand my tear stained clan waiting to jump into the fireman's blanket. "Make the work and they will come" that was what I was thinking -I knew there was a Costner connection - and they have - with numbers of virtual visitors swelling gently like a happy nipple, I was ready to rise to the occasion. Stubbing my toe on my son's Play-station, with four letter alliteration in fine flow, I was ready to firm up to the challenge.
There was one slight snag with this rush of revolutionary ardour I was experiencing. I had no subject matter. Nothing to make my virginal maiden voyage, my epic historic moment, my one small step into cyber space appropriately meaningful. Freed of the cash nexus and enjoying a fully fledging art attack of IAD (Internet Addiction Syndrome), the only deadline I had to meet was getting it written before the family came downstairs and realised that actually I hadn't taken Lassie for a walk and that the sound of a front door closing was followed by me tip toeing with a puzzled dejected dog back to my office.
Yes the machine was up and humming happily. Good. Two clicks and I'd be off, but it wasn't going to be entirely easy. Netizens are a curious mixture of formidable intellectual ability combined with a light hearted superficiality of quite dazzling disparity, the latter being essentially by consequence of the net being American in it's origins, the former by dint of PCs rather than macs having become, against all sensible logic as far as I can see, the dominant beast of the web and you needed a very good brain just to turn Amstrads on, as I can personally testify. So, I thought, I'll just have a little browse around for inspiration. After visiting Australian items on Aboriginal rights, and c/o a quick visit to Amnesty sending a quick letter of protest to the Australian PM about a man I'll almost certainly never think about again, I wandered off to Louisiana where I learned that if you bury bodies they will simply float straight up again because the ground is below sea level. A cautionary tale for corrupt rock managers I would have thought. No, that wouldn't be an article - that would just be another winge. I needed something special - something different. From the stalls I hear a muffled friendly cockney greeting "Get on with it you C&*T!" but I can't I'm stuck. My quest had ended in failure. I was the third man, left on the module, who would never be remembered when Neil and Buzz went down to glory unless I could publish this article.
I returned to Hampshire and downloaded my e-mail enveloped in a sigh of defeat. "Food Fair" "fame" - all the f -words. Was I a real vegetarian or did I eat chicken and fish? I wrote back, my Email entitled "Fowl Fish Fart" or some other four letter F word and hit send, then suddenly I had it. I'd hit on it. I knew intuitively and definitively that I'd hit on the right idea - an opus worthy of such a grand occasion - an idea fit for any indolent PHD air head - an olympian idea and one that would synchronise perfectly - would meld beautifully - into the gargantuan adolescent sprawl that is the internet. It would be a work of monumental importance - a day to be remembered in the annals of history - never before had an author hit on such a moment of rare brilliance. I was going to make a list - a list of all the four letter F words I could muster. I was going to Farm the dictionary, fist the air, flap, flop and flip to ecstasy on a plethora of f words - not just any old f- words - no the brilliance was so bright I had to adjust my monitor - four letter f words only would qualify - I couldn't fail. I could see it now <h1> F-Links. end H1. I was triumphant. For once I didn't need to worry about it being translated into the German (I mostly publish magazine articles in Germany) - this one was staying right here in cyberspace and in my native tongue and what a tongue. The tannin of my half cold tea sloshing lustily across it. Fist flop flap - fill flob frib - what could go wrong? I didn't even need to flog it.
The gentle reader has by now I assume begun to see that despite certain humourous possibilites this was actually a bird without feathers - a boat without a sail - a computer without a brain, but the flaw (aha! you see there was another one) in my reductive reasoning had not yet struck home. I'll never forget an editor once telling me that Germans do not really take kindly to this kind of flip (!) writing - they simply assume (some might say with just cause) the author is a fool. They must find trawling the wit and wisdom of the net an agony of disappointments then. Personally I find subjects like "why cats paint" or "eighty nine uses for a dead tortoise" [make link - to page saying okay I made that one up ] endlesly diverting.
From here on in, it would only be a short flit to add a form for new f words to be added, like foil or fate or toss ( what was that doing there?) and convert the list to a html file. Fine! I would do it. F-Links: it couldn't fail. Then I was siezed with an aperplexic moment of even higher delirium. Wait, Arette, HALT, Gott in Himmel - I could create hidden fields - a meta maze of mystic F words dredged from all twelve corners (sic) of humanity, from the very fabric of space and time - every time zone - every language - why restrict myself? Adult sites could have tits/ass/bum but I could have flab/flop/flap. I had to take a break - the blood was rushing from my head and besides my screen had frozen again.
Private Foot (!) Note: On the 9th of April owing to a series of misadventures too bizarre to write about, this article was returned to it's rightful owner by way of a series of friendly Heffalumps and Woozles who having over the months had the good grace to point out certain shortcomings in my grammar, were also kind enough to finally point out that this page could be found only by not looking for it. "Well f--- me!" you might think, "I was that Heffulump! That's very zen man." . . . or not, if you happened to be a Woozle.