What is Digg?431 Comments
- Brian48216, on 10/12/2007, -8/+166it's like a gay version of the davinci code...
- Nobi-Wan, on 10/12/2007, -11/+142She read waaayyyy too many Nancy Drew novels.
- maswell, on 10/12/2007, -17/+128What a great article! I must say, as someone with no bias or relation to the author, that this has got to be one of the best diggs of the year...no...no...the DECADE.
Seriously, good stuff.
We're all proud of you Sarah! - orthodonticjake, on 10/12/2007, -6/+97Here's the third (and final) page:
I find him on a Friday. Chamo’s newest character, “Pilldown Man,” leads me to the home page of “Chillee UmGum.” Chillee’s page is the oldest personal Web page of Chamo’s that I have found. It dates back to 1999. I know Chillee is Chamo, because at the top of the page sits the toilet seat with beans balanced on top. I highlight the page and find a secret message. It’s a link that says, “This is my maker.” I hold my breath and click.
His name is Richard. He likes to farm, and his real-life Web page is about organic farming. The image at the top of the home page is the telltale jack-o’-lantern I’ve seen so many times before. I click on the “résumé” link and his life pops up before me.
First, his picture. An awkward-looking, overweight, middle-aged man with glasses. He lives in Memphis. He went to college in western Massachusetts and lived there for 10 years afterward. He grew up in Lawrence, Kan. His father had taught at the University of Kansas, where the latest duclod letter had been sent to a male senior. He links to Camp Arrowhead. I look at the Web address and see the term “shavescats.” I remember well the strange message in my own letter.
I have found my guy. I have found my guy, and he loves gardening.
I had thought finding him would satisfy me, but almost immediately I’m thinking about what to do next. I now have his name, address, phone number, and real e-mail address. I want to out him somehow.
I call Grinnell College and talk to the head of student affairs again. She’s intrigued but points to an obvious flaw—I can’t connect Richard to Grinnell College in any way. He doesn’t mention it on his home page, and he isn’t an alum or a former employee. All I have is a boatload of circumstantial evidence, all of it from the Internet.
I sulk for a few days and then decide to try to contact him.
First I call. I don’t plan on saying anything; I just want to hear his voice, either in person or on his answering machine. But when the machine picks up, it’s just that, an automated female voice, telling me to leave a message.
I e-mail him. But I do it from my fake address. I use my alias because I’m still scared and because Chamo has taught me how to act like him. More and more I want to conceal and confuse, I want to find out about him without him finding anything out about me. I write him three times: “Are you Chamo?” “Why do you do this?” “What’s your problem?” And he is silent.
I find out more about the real Richard. Not surprisingly, he designs Web pages for a living. Not surprisingly, he spends a lot of time on Internet forums, ranting about same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court, and other political issues.
I e-mail him again, taking a different tack. I write him something I think he will like. Q: What does a duclod do on Sunday morning? A: A boy, then a girl. I make sure it’s nonsensical, make sure it’s not actually funny. I wonder if this completes my transformation into Chamo.
He writes back within the hour, “Pretty funny.” I write him back two more times: “How are you connected with Grinnell?” “Why do you do this to people? Are you a duclod?” But he never writes back.
I find him lonely, sad, absurd, and I wish that was enough for me. Grinnell’s spring break ends in a week, and I imagine letters trickling in from some strange corner of the country. If even one of the recipients feels shame for who they are, did I fail?
April 2006
I take my duclod letter out of its worn envelope. I write across it, big: “This is Maggpie. Stop sending letters, Richard.” I write it in a style that might be called “serial killer.” I put my duclod letter in a new envelope with Richard’s address on it. I put that letter into a larger envelope addressed to my sister, who lives in western Massachusetts. When she puts it in the mail for me, it will be postmarked in an area far away from me and significant to him.
I don’t know what I expected from Richard. A confession, an explanation, his life story, an apology? More important, I still don’t know what I expected to get from my search—recovery or revenge?
I wish I could have played a different game than the one he taught me. I wish I could have written him a letter trying to explain that there’s a community for him if he could accept himself. I wish I could have told him I forgive him.
But my greatest desire isn’t so magnanimous. More than anything, I hope he had to turn on the TV and all the lights when my letter arrived. I hope he’s scared of Maggpie.
*Some names and locations have been changed. - merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+88Asking a troll direct questions about why they troll is bound to fail.
- t3hCyborg, on 10/12/2007, -13/+101Sorry for the comment abuse, if someone else has a working mirror or copied the article, please reply here... I only got the first page before the site died:
Chasing the duclod man
When Iowa college students began receiving anonymous letters referring to them as “duclods” and darkly alluding to their bisexuality, one recipient became obsessed with finding the sender’s identity.
By Sarah Aswell
From The Advocate March 27, 2007
As early as 1992, students at Grinnell College, a small liberal arts school in Iowa, began receiving strange, anonymous letters in the mail. The letters contained homemade greeting cards with crudely drawn pictures—men crawling on the ground, toilets and trash cans, twin closet doors—and jokes that didn’t make any sense. Q: What would a duclod like about the land of the giants? A: Standing in two closets without touching either knob.
In one mysterious letter the sender defined the made-up word duclod as the fusion of two words, dual and closeted, meaning a person who hides his or her sexuality from both gay and straight people. Another letter described the duclod as “bisexual, homophobic, heterophobic, confused.”
The letters were always sent in groups, from four to seven cards reported at a time. They were always postmarked from different, seemingly random parts of the country and always sent during school breaks. Mostly, the letters targeted gay and bisexual seniors. Sometimes they were sent to the student’s school address; sometimes home, possibly in an effort to out the student to his or her parents.
That’s all anyone knew for 14 years.
Spring 2004
I receive my own duclod letter during spring break of my senior year at Grinnell. There’s no return address, but it’s postmarked Hartford, Conn.* My address is scribbled on the front in big, rough block letters, a style that might be called “serial killer.” Inside the envelope is a piece of paper folded like a greeting card. Inside the greeting card are sheets of paper with photocopied text running crooked off the page. On one side, a strange message: “if you like shaving cats, try shaving crayons.” On the facing side: “it takes two hands to handle a duclod.”
I’m alone in my small studio apartment; my friends are all out of town on break. Reading the letter, I feel a tightness in my muscles and heat on my face, like when I have a close call on the highway or when a man brushes by me the wrong way. How does he know me? I live off campus, and my address isn’t listed in the student directory.
I turn on the TV and all the lights.
I’m somewhat familiar with the duclod mystery; it’s Grinnell’s rural legend. A friend and a few acquaintances of mine have received letters, and I think they’re harmless, probably nothing more than an elaborate, albeit malicious, joke.
The next morning I walk to the student affairs office. The director shakes her head and shows me the letters they have on file, from the crisp white letters of recent vintage to the aging, creased pages from the early ’90s.
“These are just the ones reported,” she tells me. “We have no idea how many kids are too scared to tell.”
She fills me in on everything they know, which isn’t much. The head of campus security has been investigating the case with no luck. The Grinnell police have been informed. She tries to take my letter for the file, to put it with the others, but I hold on to it. It was sent to me, it’s mine.
I call an old friend, Fred, who I know received a letter a few years ago (even though he’s straight). He wrote an article about it for the school newspaper in February 2001. He tells me what he knows. The letters were often sent from Boston and Worcester, Mass., and Memphis, Tenn. For years there has been duclod graffiti in the men’s bathrooms around campus. "Duclods die twice" was scrawled on a wall in the library basement. Fred talked to the head of student affairs, the resident-life coordinator, and the security chief. They all had their own pet theories. He had to be a student—how else could he know who the bisexual students were? He had to be a Grinnell staff member—he had been sending letters for over a decade. “He” had to be a group of students, a sort of sick club, that passed down the tradition as older members graduated.
Fred also tells me I can find duclod jokes on the Internet, that someone named Chamo Howards posts them in random online forums and on message boards. I look online and find more jokes and pictures: Find a duclod with a dingdong that goes ticktock and tell them they’re closets!!! I’m infuriated that someone accusing others of being closeted uses the anonymity of the Internet and the postal system to harass. I click from page to page, from joke to joke, without discovering any new information about Chamo.
It takes me two years to find him.
“Chamo Howards” isn’t his real name, of course. Neither is “Red Kuller,” “Gordon Craft,” “Pilldown Man,” “Chillee Ugum,” “The Quarft,” “Professor Xlhoip,” or “D. Trapper.” I track him through dozens of fake names and Web sites created over the last decade. Each name leads me to a new batch of sites, a new set of data containing more leads. Each new page reveals something darker about the man I am looking for. He is obsessed with bodily functions; his favorite drawing is a crude toilet seat with beans balanced on top. Each discovery makes me more obsessed with finding him.
I slowly begin to recognize patterns—the way he constructs sentences, his diction, the types of sites he visits, his calling cards. A picture of a jack-o’-lantern. Puns that don’t quite work. Posts at 4 or 5 in the morning.
::EDIT:: echoforever posted the second page below. - mwosh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+84I've got $5 on it becoming a Lifetime original mini-series by the end of the year.
- echoforever, on 10/12/2007, -6/+87@ Kale
Page 2:
Fall 2005
I’ve entered graduate school for creative writing at the University of Montana, but I haven’t forgotten the letter I received before leaving Grinnell. A big break comes the day I find Red Kuller’s home page. I’m in a dirty joke forum that contains duclod jokes. Q: How does a duclod match a boy with a girl? A: By trying both of them out secretly, separately, and sexually. Chamo links directly to it with a link called “I made an uhoh.”
I click on the link, and my mail client automatically opens and tries to send a mass e-mail from my personal account. The heading reads, “The bad machine doesn’t know it’s a bad machine,” and the body of the message says, “***** OF THE WORLD UNITE!!!!” I close the message without sending it, and a Web site pops up, titled Welcome to Destruction.
The Web site is full of conspiracy theories, ramblings, and strange pictures. But in between the creepy gibberish and end-of-the-world rants I find my first real insights into the person who sent my letter. He likes the Red Sox and the Celtics, once again linking him to Massachusetts. He loves researching Nostradamus. He’s fascinated with the number 666 and has a special formula for finding words that “add up” to that number. He loves wordplay, particularly made-up words and puns. Besides duclods, he’s also obsessed with garbmuts—half men, half dogs. Q: What’s more fun than throwing up? A: Throwing up on a garbmut while he drinks out of the toilet.
Among the links to Web sites about the apocalypse, the devil, and theories of a hollow Earth is a link to Camp Arrowhead, a small summer camp located in Massachusetts. It’s a tiny glimpse of normalcy. Did he work there?
Each discovery of a new fake word or new fake name leads to more pages, jokes, fake words, and names. I spend nights on my bed with Scrabble tiles trying to unscramble his world into something I can understand. I find forums—an anti–Hillary Clinton site, a fishing site—where Chamo has pitted five or six of his other characters against each other. Each post contains different links, but the destination many times is Welcome to Destruction. I find more and more disturbing interests. He poses as a 13-year-old girl named “Sunflower” in a forum about autoerotic asphyxiation. In a forum for battered women he writes a long treatise on how men should teach their sons to hit their future wives. I’m finding more information, but none of it links to a name, a place, a real person.
I’ve formed him completely in my mind. He’s male, middle-aged, awkward-looking. He worked at the IT desk at Grinnell. That explains how he knew the students and how he knew my unlisted address. That explains his interest in computers and his ability to open my mail client and send e-mails from my account. He’s single, outwardly quiet and polite. He grew up in Massachusetts and has family in Memphis. Too many letters came from these two places for it to be otherwise. He is, I decided, bisexual. He is a duclod.
I don’t have any solid evidence to back that last point up, but I feel the truth in it. He sends the letters to shame, to out, to accuse, but he wouldn’t care so much if the issue weren’t personal.
Winter 2006
A duclod joke is found scrawled in a bathroom at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Fred forwards me an e-mail from a student at the University of Kansas who received a letter over break and had no idea what it was about. Chamo is widening his field.
Every time I hear something about the duclod letters I resurrect my investigation. A simple search for “duclod” turns up a man using that screen name to post on a Web site for people in the IT field. Although every once in a while he says something strange or becomes oddly enraged about an issue, most of his posts seem to be from an ordinary person interested in computers. “I tell 3.5 lies a day,” he writes in one post, and I know it’s my guy.
I begin to collect the dozens of e-mail addresses Chamo leaves in his wake. I write to them from a fake address I’ve created, calling myself “Maggie Pie” or “Maggpie” for short. “What is your real name?” “Who are you?” “Answer me.” My e-mails don’t bounce back, so I know the accounts are active. But he never responds.
My next break comes in February. It’s 3 a.m. and I’m on one of Chamo’s many Web pages. This one has a picture of pigs and is run by someone he calls “Professor Xlhoip.” I type “Xlhoip” into his words-to-numbers calculator and “666” pops up. As with the Red Kuller site, my e-mail client opens, and Xlhoip attempts to e-mail people from my account. I scroll through the addresses that have automatically appeared in the To field as I have a hundred times before. This time I notice one address that is always, always on the list. I nervously type the address into Google, and a single page pops up. Her name is Melanie Owings and she lives in western Massachusetts. I have the real name of a real person.
I Google her full name, and what I find once again scares me. Melanie is mentioned in many of Chamo’s strange forum postings. He writes hidden messages about her, matching the color of the font to the color of the background. I figure out that when I highlight the pages, the secret messages pop out. “My name is Melanie,” he writes, and I know he’s lying.
I wait three days, unsure of what to do, before I e-mail her. “I’m looking for someone who wrote me an anonymous letter,” I write vaguely. “I think he’s connected to Grinnell College in some way. Please, I know this is strange, but please write back.”
She writes the next day. She doesn’t know anyone connected to Grinnell College. I write back, stupidly, “Are you sure?” She doesn’t answer. I know she knows him, but there’s no way to get her to tell me. I wish I had asked her about Memphis, about Camp Arrowhead, about any shy, awkward middle-aged men she might know.
Suddenly I realize what I’ve been doing—e-mailing strangers from an anonymous, fake address and harassing them. I’m following this trail of clues that Chamo and Red Kuller and Xlhoip leave for me, just like he wants. He’s looking for attention, for someone to care, and I’m caring about him. My big break is a dead end and a wake-up call. I’m no better than Red Kuller, or whoever he is.
I’ve learned to navigate the Internet’s maze, the forgotten pages in ancient HTML, the boarded-up houses of the World Wide Web. I’ve trolled joke sites no one has visited since 1996. I’ve lurked in guest books that are no longer connected to home pages. I’ve highlighted Web pages to look for secret messages.
I’ve forgotten my friends and responsibilities. I’m often up in the middle of the night, the only light the glow of the computer screen, thinking about Chamo doing the same thing in some other part of the country. - GamerzCorner, on 10/12/2007, -9/+84I Feel SOOOO ripped off
I was on the edge of my seat the whole time and then....it ends with no answer... - riccohasdug, on 10/12/2007, -1/+68This is creepy...not "makes me nervous" creepy, but "Lifetime Movie Of The Week" creepy.
- Applemacmad, on 10/12/2007, -2/+63Da Duclod Code
- hyperpasta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+59Seems to be accurate. Look what I found on UrbanDictionary!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=duclod
Check out the author of that second comment... - maswell, on 10/12/2007, -3/+60Of course it was sarcasm! I'm her brother. It's my job to selfishly promote the family! ;)
- Asianwaste, on 10/12/2007, -1/+56I think it was Woody Allen who said, "Bi sexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Friday night."
Probably my favorite bi-sexual joke. - DiggsOnlyNeoCon, on 10/12/2007, -7/+58Dugg for the "Hot Bisexual Local Guys" ad at the top of my screen.
- AnotherAaron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+50Am I the only one who thinks this guy might actually BE a serial killer?
- Karnov, on 10/12/2007, -6/+52The duality of the bean on the toilet seat is something to truly consider.
- M1ndless, on 10/12/2007, -3/+47You idiots shouldn't be filling up this guy's guest-book with this crap. There's no way to be certain that this is the right guy from the "evidence" in this article. What would stop Chamo from just linking to poor old Robert's organic farming site. I don't know if you cunning internet sleuths have figured it out, but from the archived resume, it mentions nothing about web design and a lot about agriculture. And from the look of his site (no offense Robert) if he is a web developer, he really should just stick to farming.
- axiomata, on 10/12/2007, -10/+53I agree, one of the best diggs of the year. She's an amazing writer.
- pbaehr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+39He was getting work as a web-designer? That's frightening.
- eggloaf, on 10/12/2007, -2/+41Here's his personal webpage:
http://members.aol.com/shavescats/ - VModulus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+38I bet a million Digg users can find him in a few hours... and make him very sorry to own a computer. ;P
- berfmurret, on 10/12/2007, -1/+37coolest article i have ever read linked from digg. fantastic writing. captivating story!
- Augie1969, on 10/12/2007, -3/+38Wow. Seems like this guy's party is over. I have the feeling that the entire internet is going to be all over this sad (likely mentally ill) man.
- TheGeek27, on 10/12/2007, -3/+38This is bizarre.
- redbullet, on 10/12/2007, -6/+40This is a perfect script for a thriller movie. Great article and interesting subject.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+36My only question is why protect the name of this guy?
- aywwts4, on 10/12/2007, -1/+35Heh, He changed his resume page to say
"Robert W. McEwen
Address and telephone no. not available at this time due to the recent coup in the nation where I now live." - mrfish, on 10/12/2007, -9/+42How do we know that the writer is not him and this is just another ploy to get attention! Well either way it's a great read!
- beukema, on 10/12/2007, -1/+32Hey everybody. I'm the Fred that Sarah referred to in her Advocate piece, and who authored the Scarlet & Black article on the subject in 2001. I assure you all that this is real, and not an ARG or viral marketing or anything like that. I've been in touch with an alum from '99 who still has his duclod letter and is going to scan it for me. I also took a photo of a duclod joke in the restroom of a deli in the town of Grinnell when I was there for reunion a couple years ago. Will post that.
For those of you who also peruse MetaFilter, there's been a lot of good discussion there, too. (http://www.metafilter.com/59384/Duclod-man-uncovered) I'm excited that people are talking about this, and that in particular information is starting to come from outside Grinnell.
As for the many theories and comments flying around:
- "shavescats" is no certainly no web designer. My old personal webpage is absolute crap, and is better than his.
- I just read the guy's father's obituary for the first time, and the number of geographical hits in it is uncanny. I knew of postmarks from Amherst-area NH, Tennessee, Boston-area MA, Little Rock AR, and Tucson, AZ. All of these fit the guy's family's bio.
- Still missing is a motive. Why do this in the first place, and why do it for more than a decade?
- Still missing is the link to Grinnell, and how/why he sent letters to the particular students he did. Why was I targeted? Why was anyone? - Yoshi39, on 10/12/2007, -2/+33"If you think there are a million Digg users, you are in an alternate universe."
Yes he must have a screw loose or something ;)
http://digg.com/tech_news/1_Miiiiiillion_Users - Rivetgeek, on 10/12/2007, -3/+34DONT call the number
http://www.google.com/search?q=(501)-614-9166&hl=en&safe=off&pb=r&sa=X&oi=rwp&ct=title
It's already been relisted to someone else. - maddoxdigg, on 10/12/2007, -2/+30I checked out the source to http://www.angelfire.com/ny/garbmut/ (don't click) and found all sorts of pop-up pages, and a zip file containing source code to some programs that he wrote. I downloaded the file called "Hangup.zip" which contains two executable programs (I don't recommend anyone download or run these). I ran "strings" on each file (app that extracts printable strings from files) and found the following:
In 666.EXE:
This program, saved as 666.exe, if allowed+
to use default values, generates words that
you should NEVER EVER SAY and stores them in a)
file named BADWORDS.ARF and BADWORDS.HTM.:/
Their ASCII values each add up to 666 in eitherk1
lower case, all caps, initial caps, or an average
of all three. Can even choose a number divisible.
by the word length, leaving a remainder that's4
exactly two thirds of the word length (.666.....6). (
Can also choose the number 444, wihch is,
(666 * .6666666....). This program, written.
in Qbasic, can run on the DOS platform without1
Windows, without extended or expanded memory, and
even without a hard drive. Use at your own risk,'
it can MESS UP YOUR MIND if you let it.
Enter a 3-digit number (minimum 366) or just hit ENTER
Hangup
Name of file to open or create (number recommended)
taboo.
Enter L to look up a word or just hit ENTER
Enter word (listed recommended) to jumble or just hit ENTER to continue
Save in file (Y or N or Q to quit)
Any word in mind (enter any word or N for no)
Save in file (Y or N)
badwords.htm - elhaf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+28OMG! If you highlight all the text on his main page, nothing happens!
- maswell, on 10/12/2007, -4/+31Shoot me an email when your story gets on Digg, I'm really interested to read it.
Ass. - saleem, on 10/12/2007, -5/+32@ M. Aswell
Unless I missed a /sarcasm tag, M. Aswell has no relation to Sarah Aswell, despite the "goooo sarah!" line? umm... - treas, on 10/12/2007, -4/+30@ t3hcyborg
"From The Advocate March 27, 2007"
It's a cyborg...from the FUTURE. - EruLabs, on 10/12/2007, -3/+28Some deeper (hehe) looking shows the possible subject titles for those emails (along with a huge set of intructions to randomly assemble messages with email addresses)... Check it out.. there are 30 different titles:
Little Boy Blue come blow your CLAAAAAAAAAAAACKERS
The people at the factory know
This will be cockroach heaven
He must have been the Dancing Bear on Captain Kangaroo
Do not look so sad Just close your eyes and smile
I saw her parents recently I was at the zoo
Now this is just plain pathetic
Bad machine doesn't know he's a bad machine
My computer cannot do the work of a man
It's way past your bedtime
Horses do not talk and bears eat people
If you cannot go no further then turn back
I am strong and mighty
Brave New Fads
My computer is just having a bad day
My computer is in a bad mood right now
I did not send this It was the little people
Maybe I just dint know any better
About time we declared war between men and women
Little boys shouldn't play with matches
You can smoke Rector, you can smoke
Did you ever see a broom walking?
Feminism Equals Terrorism
Open this quick before you start snoring
The GREAT PUMPKIN has FINALLY ARRIVED
Read any good books lately?
Maybe I just dint know any better
I am as indigent as a newborn baby
Feminism Equals Terrorism
Have a handful of blanks
There may be more, I didnt go into to much detail. You can clearly see some of the images she describes seeing around the web... The pumpkin, the war between men and wemon. Also, the email adressing system is, to me, a longtime programmer, pretty random. Its almost as if it was only meant to work some of the time, by chance. For instance, for quite a few of those "catchall" adresses, he has the code do something like this
(in pseudo code for digg people)
var A = "random number between 1 and 40"
var B = "random subject header from array of 30 above"
var C = "random email address taken from huge list provided in array" (lets say C is everyone@thiscollege.com)
the code does this:
split up var C at the '@' mark
Insert var A after 1st section of var C before '@' mark (so something like everyone21@thiscollege.com)
send an email with the subject "var B" to the address just created
As you can tell, this would rarly work... To me its little creepy.. Its as if he knows that page/server will be around for long enough for his psuedo-virus to work (I call it that because of its fake spreading attributes).
Edit: I just found an even more sinister message in the code I dugg up... check this out, it was sitting in a fake javascript call... Setting a varible that doesnt exist to a value noone uses, IE, the only way for someone to see this is to get the exactly correct random number for this to be generated, or to look into the javascript files attached.
Edit again... Now im hunting this guy across the nets... This is more bizzare, nonfunctional markup that seems to exist only for the purpose of existing in-source.
document.write('n');
document.write('n')
document.write('n');
document.write('');
document.write('n');
document.write('nPlease add your message here:');
document.write('nBECOME INVISIBLE--Go to http://www.angelfire.com/ny/garbmut/bluehead.html to find out how, or go to http://www.angelfire.com/ny/garbmut/444.html if you want to help postpone the revolution (may be your last chance). This is a chain letter. Do not alter or delete its contents. You may add your own message if you wish.');
document.write('n');
document.write('n');
document.write('n');
document.write('n');
document.write('n');
document.write('n');
document.write('n');
document.write('n');
There are some really really really weird URLS in the above code.
I need to give up now, Ive already spent 2 hours now searching websites and bizzare email associations and running perl scripts out my wizwang to try to locate this guys path... - Crass22, on 10/12/2007, -2/+26Everyone please digg iiLucas and his digg down to oblivion. That sort of behaviour shouldn't be accpeted on digg (trying to ruin an interesting part of a story for self-gratification) (I found his site on my own by google searching and looking around, it was fun and gratifing when i found it, so i posted it here awhile ago)
He argues knocking the duclod mans site down is going to hurt him cause he hurts others. But its a frakin anglefire site that he doesnt have to pay for or anything. all hell have to do is make a new site and sink farther into the boarded up houses on the internet. - merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+25Here's the resume mentioned in the story:
http://web.archive.org/web/20011213030224/members.aol.com/shavescats/fset.htm - CBanga, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24If this guy can take up a career in web design, I could take up a career in the NBA.
- portilaj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+22I know Sarah, I went to Grinnell, we both worked for the campus paper and were on an improv team together (along with Fred!) and I remember the duclod letters. It's a real story.
This is my Grinnell hosted website: http://www.math.grin.edu/~portilaj/ - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+23DUCLODS DIE TWICE = DECODE LUCID WITS
Google "lucid wits"
Find "The Life and Letters of George John Romanes".
See page 235:
"My Dear Sir, -- I should like you to set your LUCID WITS to work upon the following questions, and let me know whether you can devise any answers.
On pp.220-226 of your book, you state with extreme felicity, and much better than he does, Weismann's theory of the causes of variation. But it does not occur to him, and does not seem to have occurred to you, that there is a curious and unaccountable interruption in the ascending grades of sexual differentiation, for in the VEGETABLE KINGDOM these do not follow the grades of taxonomic ascent; but, on the contrary, and as a general rule, the lower the order of evolution, the greater is the tendency to BI-SEXUALISM."
Okay, so I've connected his interest in vegetables to his interest in bisexualism.
Possibly the bit about "the lower the order of evolution, the greater is the tendency to bi-sexualism" resonates with our weirdo in such a way that he perceives bisexuals as a lesser order of beings, resenting those who hide their true identity.
Grinnell is left as an exercise for the rest of you. (In other words, I have no effin idea.) - jetsetgo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+23gaaa!
Don't stop there! - Crass22, on 10/12/2007, -2/+21@asianwaste
Did you even read the ***** story? From page two:
"A big break comes the day I find Red Kuller’s home page. I’m in a dirty joke forum that contains duclod jokes. Q: How does a duclod match a boy with a girl? A: By trying both of them out secretly, separately, and sexually. Chamo links directly to it with a link called “I made an uhoh.”
I click on the link, and my mail client automatically opens and tries to send a mass e-mail from my personal account. The heading reads, “The bad machine doesn’t know it’s a bad machine,” and the body of the message says, “***** OF THE WORLD UNITE!!!!” I close the message without sending it, and a Web site pops up, titled Welcome to Destruction.
The Web site is full of conspiracy theories, ramblings, and strange pictures. But in between the creepy gibberish and end-of-the-world rants I find my first real insights into the person who sent my letter."
She labels it as welcome to destruction, but the site says "desolation". I found the site by googling "Red Kuller" and following a link from a forum he posted. Also re-check the people in the To: list in the email that pops up, I doubt you know most of them. - darkamster07, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20was anyone else on the edge of thier seat the whole time?, amazing writing, the best I have seen on Digg in a while.
- chump1039, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18So I must have missed it in the article. Did it ever explain HOW he was getting these people's names and addresses?
- beukema, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17I honestly don't think that the majority of students who got the letters were bi or even gay. When I looked at the stack in the campus security office in 2001, most of the students whose names I recognized were openly straight. According to the dean of residence life, for a time members of the Stonewall Coalition, the primary GLBT resource group on campus, seemed to be the primary recipients. But that hasn't usually been the case. No offense to orthodonticjake, but his Digg title is misleading.
I hope to have the scan of a full letter up in a few days, but here's a couple temporary things for now:
1) The illustration ((c) 2004 The Advocate, by Isabelle Cardinal, reprinted without permission under assumption of fair use -- will remove if asked by mods) that was published with the article:
http://www.mydocsonline.com/pub/beukema/duclod%20article.jpg
2) Detail of same. Sarah was able, after all, to get the Advocate a copy of one of the letters -- she'd been trying to reach administrators at Grinnell for this. The letters were typically 11x17 folded into a 4.25x6.5. The drawing on bottom is the front cover of the letter -- a bunch of odd-looking frattish guys. There's a banner above them, but I forget what it said. The is the big DUCLODS DIE TWICE thing, and is faced by the definition shown underneath ("bisexual homophobic heterophobic confused"). As I say, I hope to have a full scan of the whole thing in a few days.
http://www.mydocsonline.com/pub/beukema/duclod%20letter.jpg
3) A picture I took of a duclod joke graffito. This is in the mens' room of the Back Alley Deli in Grinnell, IA. They have fantastic sammiches (OMG, it's all an elaborate guerrilla marketing stunt!). Anyway, I took this on June 3, 2005 while in town for reunion. While I was a student, there were 4-6 duclod jokes around campus. By now most have been painted or renovated over. But this one remains, and was a pleasant surprise to me, since the duclod stuff has been my white whale for years (if Ahab had sort of forgotten about the whale for a couple years at a time until Starbuck called him up and told him he was looking for the whale now). The joke reads "Q: CAN A DUCLOD BE JAILED? A: ONLY WITH A GOOD CLOSET DIVIDER." Har har.
http://www.mydocsonline.com/pub/beukema/duclod%20joke%20no%20flash.jpg - rondeth, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19Web designer != programmer.
Third possibility: most will forget this by 8PM tonight.
Cheers! - 1010011010, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18Obviously, the guy is an agent working for Operation *****.
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