The origin of Surfin Safari:

Candace Clemens, who was at the time the head of Communications for Progress Software pinged me with an email. She was hoping I’d be able to provide her with URLs of what she called “Cosmic Web Sites”. She was writing a weblog that focused on Progress Software but she always finished each posting with a link to some strange (i.e. “cosmic” site) – for the sake of entertainment or, perhaps, to tempt the timid to go surfing.

Of course, I had no real idea what she meant by “Cosmic Web Sites”, but like a programmer with the most meager of specs, I fire up FireFox and went Googling in search of the wierd.

I started by offering Google the words “alien” and “Mormon” and found, to my dismay, that Google returned 104,000 links. I thought it was bound to bring up something wacky – but I never expected an avalanche. I guess that there’s some kind of connection? Either that, or there’s a strange bug in the Google search engine.

Encouraged, I then tried a variety of other wacky combinations which eventually led me to www.davidicke.com, which is truly wacky. Cosmic? I can’t be sure. Wacky? Absolutely.

I then visited Candace’s blog to see what the last cosmic site posted was. This proved to be flash-based dive into some kind of Lord of the Rings fantasy land. That set me on the trail of psychedelic stuff – of which there is a ton out there. Most of it is graphic and looks like clips from “2001″ or “The Matrix”. It was so sixties, that I began to feel young and irresponsible again.

I changed tack and put in a search for “giant”, “lizard”, “god”. It returned a page that had the strap line “chemically-enhanced neural rewiring, on a semi-regular basis”. Convinced that everyone should have a piece of that, I read on. The headline said “Giant Lizard Attacks Japanese Coasts” and the article began “The signs are unmistakable; the End of Days is approaching”, but then it started getting sensible, which was a pity. (I think this page has mysteriously disappeared from the Internet as I can no longer find it. Spooky, eh?)

I tried “alien sex pills” only to discover, to my disappointment, that those three words do not occur together on the web anywhere. (They do now, it’s the title of this blog post). I had better luck with “tree worship” and “mushrooms”, which led to a site that specialized in Sex Magick (but clearly not in spelling). “Brujo”, “ritual”, “toad” - was no better, but surprised me in turning up 150 hits.

“truth”, “shaman”, “DNA” - got me to a site with this URL. At this site Mystress Angelique Serpent boasts that “kundalini awakenings happen in my playroom”. To be honest, they happen in mine too, but I have the decency to keep quiet about it.

I sent my results to Candace and got back to work.