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*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
*                                                            *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
* Direct comments and questions to:                          *
*                                         *
*                                                            *
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When my column lands on a holiday, I tend to ignore it. I 
prefer to write about anti-government lunatics building pipe 
bombs than, say, Christmas. I don't have a lot of original 
things to say about Christmas. What new can be said about a 
holiday that has been kicking around for 2000 years?

I should also ignore Valentines Day but given finding love has 
been the central and ruinously expensive preoccupation of my 
life for the last two years, maybe I have some small insight.

Currently more email is sent than regular mail. Hopefully the 
same can't be said about greeting cards. I've never been 
terribly impressed by people who send me those web-based 
virtual cards. I figure I'm worth at least the price of a 
stamp. Likewise I've never bothered to send one out. There's 
something rewarding about finding a cute card that says what 
you want to say all for the price of $2.75. Then again, some 
things are better left unsaid. Once I discovered a "On the 
Death of Your New Born" card that tried to console the grieving 
parents by suggesting "you must have loved your baby very much 
even though you didn't know it for long."

Words fail us from time to time. Words even fail highly paid 
greeting card writers. While hunting for Valentines day cards 
last weekend, I found a card that read "I love you / I farted". 
Someone is actually going to buy that card for someone that 
actually loves the purchaser. If you feel you can't top an ode 
to your own body odour, I suggest a visit to the Cyrano Server 
(www.nando.net/toys/cyrano.html). As the name suggests, the 
Cyrano Server generates romantic prose suitable for pasting 
into an email or a virtual card.

If you think your relationship is dying, and you're over the 
age of 25, try to resuscitate it. Spark up the romance. Do 
/anything/ but give up on it. As I can attest, it's not easy 
out there to find new love. The few people that are over 25 and 
are not in theoretically permanent relationships are usually 
either really busy with work or harbouring so many resentments 
about the opposite sex that you're more than likely to get a 
face full of pepperspray than a coffee date.

You might find some relationship-saving tid bit at 
www.loveadvice.com. Alternatively check out 
lovingyou.com/index.shtml. Not that all of the advice here 
passes muster. A page on Top 10 Romantic Cities lists "Italy" 
as a city. /Mangia cakes/!

If you're having doubts about your relationship, punch up the 
Love Calculator (www.lovecalculator.com). You enter your name 
and the name of your significant other and a CGI script 
determines the probability the relationship will have any 
chance of success. It's a fine bit of pseudo-science, but hey 
why not? Since when does logic rule love?

If you're currently single, the net provides some means for 
finding love. There are a number of matchmaking web pages where 
you fill in biographical data about yourself and hope beyond 
hope someone decent reads your profile and emails you. Probably 
the best free matchmaking service out there is American Singles 
(www.as.org).

These matchmaking sites tend to work better for women. At times 
they work too well. Female friends who have posted ads report 
getting two or three hundred emails in the span of a few days. 
Emails ranged from an oil executive in Thailand offering 
marriage, a $20,000 a month allowance, and a chauffeur driven 
car to a creatively punctuated message from one deranged fellow 
who only managed to correctly spell "meat", "train" and "you 
pay". Needless to say, never give out your work or personal 
email address in these ads.

Since the release of /You've Got Mail/, there's been a lot of 
talk about finding love through IRC chat rooms. IRC tends to 
work better than web romance ads. Email gets boring after two 
or three exchanges and there's a lot of pressure to meet the 
person quickly. On IRC, you can yammer on for months, getting 
to know the person, before it ever occurs to you to meet in 
Real Life. If you don't have an IRC client installed you can 
get one at www.tucows.com. The best is mIRC.

For the truly desperate, there are dozens of web pages 
advertising foreign "mail order" brides. These sites make money 
by selling you the mailing addresses of women who so want to 
escape crushing poverty, rioting, and bad plumbing that they're 
willing to marry someone who is incapable of finding a decent 
woman within four time zones of home. While many of the 
**women** depicted at these sites are beautiful and well 
educated, should a life long romance really begin with an order 
number?

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

               ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs)                   ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson)