Kibo

Once upon a time, before blogs, probably before you even had an email address, probably before you even heard of the internet, there was the Usenet online forum. It still exists of course, but it was a smaller town then.

Anyway, in the '90s there was this guy who went by the name Kibo who wrote a little script that checked every day to see if anyone had posted anything mentioning his name anywhere on Usenet. If you said something witty he'd respond, usually with something even wittier. Many folks didn't know how Kibo managed to read all of Usenet, which even then was far too big for a human being to truly survey. It was sort of a sign of good fortune to get a post or an email from the mysterious, omniscient Kibo, and Usenet was eventually humming with the faux religion "Kibology."

No, I myself have never received email from Kibo. (Though who knows? Maybe he checks Technorati periodically these days, and may turn up here.) Which is why I only just now learned the reason for this post --- that he apparently used an extraordinarily long email signature.