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 Volume I, Issue 5. 23rd March, 2004
TAMPERE, FINLAND: Pers Pekkinen, known as the Linux Colonel for his path-breaking work in open source operating systems development has been admitted into the Lapinlahti mental institution following his forty-eight hour degeneration to madness after he sat through a "David Lynch Compendium" at the University of Tampere. After seven hours of non-stop film watching, Pekkinen felt utterly baffled, and shrieked out in a rare moment of combined grief and Englishdom, "Confound it!" The Lynch episode was a tragic climax to a series of events that had been contributing to Pekkinen's festering self-image of cerebral erosion, when his first trysts with American avant garde popular culture began after he moved to San Francisco, CA at the height of the tech boom. In 2000, he first watched 'The Matrix' which he found incredibly difficult to keep up with, in fact failing altogether to get the connection between "those guys underground" and "those damn telephones." Nonetheless, he kept up the act of liking the film, and even installed a screensaver which had little alphabets falling down the screen. This is largely believed to be a turning point in his degeneration to lunacy - since he would often spend hours trying to read the falling characters and make sense out of them. 
His colleagues, concerned about his increasingly distending eyes, uncanny
bouts of prolonged grinning thought a change of climate could work,
and had him shifted to the New York office, away from the madness of
flower-city, known for a reputation of being welcoming of everything
- except people who don't get 'The Matrix.' Said Sonia Reddy, Pekkinen's
short-time personal assistant and dominatrix, "He's really just a sweet
little guy who's into slapstick and steak. Just because he's brilliant
and famous does not mean he should be forced into keeping up with all
these thingies."Tragically, New York turned out not to be the best place for the unwitting migrant worker to escape urban popular culture and the 'discourse frames of humor.' Pekkinen's feelings of intellectual oddity were exacerbated when he was encouraged by a friend to join an indie alternative mailing called alt.soc.indie.humerr run by New Yorkers, who actually live in Hoboken. This exposure to urban counterculture was ominous - months of seemingly incomplete witticisms, repeated references to Bowie, beta-babies, yetties, cappuccino cowboys, flowies, lumpy-gravy, and the new age terrestrial underground had 'The Colonel' in a fragile emotional state, waking at night frequently screaming in shivers "What's so cool about 'Oy Vey Armani pimp'?" As word of Pekkinen's slow descent to psychosis got around, perky schoolboys set up a group called de.alt.soc.kernelkrash devoted to jokes about jokes that Pekkinen did not understand punchlines to. Pekkinen did not get the joke on the group, and in a state of some sadness, left New York for Tampere, heavily sedated. After seven months back home, Pekkinen was apparently getting a lot better, when he was tragically persuaded to go watch the Lynch series. Janghia Prufrock
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