We've all seen those jokes, skits and songs that circulate the net endlessly, from newsgroup to mailing list to website. Those that weren't obviously written by Dave Barry seem to have arisen spontaneously, their origin untraceable and their author forever anonymous. This is the story (so far) of one of those mysterious beasts, presented from the point of view of the one person able to track it right from the beginning - the original author.
Some time in late August 1996, someone on Monty Python's Flying Talker made the chance remark, "I am the very model of a chatroom individual". This seemed to me like a good idea for a piece of casual satire, so on August 30th I trawled the Web for a libretto of "The Pirates of Penzance", downloaded the Major General's Song, and started rewriting. The regrettable necessities of work meant that this stage took until September 16th; I then posted the result to the newsgroup alt.fan.monty-python (slightly inappropriate, but I was a regular poster at the time), and thought little more of it.
Bonni Hall, maintainer of the homepage for a.f.m-p, loved the song and promptly reposted it to alt.humor.best-of-usenet. From there, it presumably reached a much larger audience. Within a week, it had been reposted to another seven newsgroups, and I had been e-mailed with requests to repost it to a newsgroup, a humour mailing list and a student magazine at the University of Idaho. A day later, a copy found its way (thankfully without attribution) to an internal newsgroup at work. Round about this time, I started to take a serious interest in the monster I had created, so I started compiling a diary of events. I had kept copies of all the e-mail messages, and DejaNews enabled me to retrieve the Usenet postings; any e-mail propagation was much harder to follow, and relied mostly on sightings being passed on by friends.
On October 10th, by which time the song had appeared on another seven newsgroups, made a second or, in one case, third appearance on some of the original ones and been sighted by a friend on a mailing list for lawyers interested in office automation (!), I was asked for permission to print it in Yahoo Internet Life. I agreed, and an edited version appeared in the December 1996 issue. By this time it had also appeared on eight Web sites, to my knowledge.
From mid-December 1996 to mid-March 1997 I was off the Internet for personal reasons, so I was unable to track new appearances. By the time I returned, the Usenet reposts had tailed off, but I found the song on another nine Web sites. If it's still going around the Internet, it's probably now doing so by e-mail; if you've seen a copy, I'd appreciate a sighting report.
Finally, a couple of interesting observations. The first throws some light on how quickly the origins of e-mail lore, and presumably other items of urban folklore, can get lost: the first unattributed repost was a mere three days after the original post. Secondly, the time taken for the song to come back to me (via the internal newsgroup at work) was only eight days.
The current tally of appearances (March 16th 1999) is:
| Appearance | Number |
|---|---|
| Original postings | 1 |
| Original mailings | 1 |
| Usenet reposts | 46 |
| Newsgroups | 35 |
| Known WWW sites | 89 |
| Known mailing lists | 10 |
| Known remailings | 12 |
To mark the first anniversary of the initial posting (and, it seemed at the time, the tailing off of new appearances) I included a graph of cumulative sightings over the first year.