Dateline: February 10, 2001
Back in my Junior College days, a fellow student, Jack Murphy (not his real name) was fooling around with a friend in our local bank one day. He grabbed a blank savings withdrawal and scribbled out a note on it:
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THIS IS A HOLDUP.
GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY AND DON'T PRESS THE ALARM BUTTON. I HAVE A GUN.
He and his buddy joked around for a few minutes, then Jack wadded up the note and threw it in the trash. He completed his banking business and started to leave the bank, but was met at the front door by several police officers brandishing shotguns. Apparently someone had retrieved the note from the trash and turned it in to the manager, who didn't have much of a sense of humor.
Neither did the authorities, evidently, as we never saw Jack back on the campus after that. Although rumors flooded the JC halls, no one ever found out exactly what happened to Jack, but my friends and I all thought it was a shame that his college days had apparently been cut short by a harmless joke. How could anyone seriously believe a college kid would really try to hold up a bank and then chicken out at the last minute, particularly in light of the fact they were laughing at it?
War of Words
Today, by the same token, students and other supporters of the Bonsai Kitten web site are wondering why so many animal advocate groups can't find the humor in that site. After all, it is only a parody, and anyone who takes issue with it must be too stupid to recognize that, right? On the other hand, animal lovers wonder how anyone can be so depraved as to actually think the site is humorous. Thereby is born a war of words.
A Brief History
For those few fortunates who have no idea what all the fuss is about, the Bonsai Kitten site was developed in December, 2000 by a student or students at MIT, and was first hosted on the MIT servers. The site purported to be a commercial venture, that of developing "Rectilinear Kittens" by stuffing young kittens in a rectangular glass jar, sealing their rectums with Super Glue (to prevent them from defecating inside the jar), feeding them through a tube in the jar, and ultimately to attach little handles to the finished creation so the proud owners of the Bonsai Kittens could carry them around. The site is complete with a section of 'torture tools' for 'do-it-yourselfers' and invites interested parties to email for prices.
An outraged cry by hundreds of animal lovers convinced the hosts at MIT that this site did a disservice to that august institution of learning, and the site was subsequently pulled down just eleven days after its creation. Since then, Bonsai Kitten has moved (and been shut down) several times, but has apparently found a permanent host at rotten.com, which is said to host things that make Bonsai.com look like a Sunday picnic. At the same time, supporters of the "BK" have formed their own grassroots movement and put up dozens of mirror sites, which have, like the original BK pages, become "moving targets" for BK opponents. The end result is that much like my friend Jack's ill-fated "bank robbery joke," the Bonsai Kitten site has also gone haywire, in that the FBI is now investigating it. But more on that later--
