Clips and Phrases 
A Personal-ish Sometimes Blog by Miriam Jayne

Alan is kind of a Dave Barry freak.  Seriously, we've got a full shelf devoted solely to the Barry and his words of wit and wisdom.  Besides Bill Cosby, Dave Barry is the only person on earth who can get Alan laughing until he stops breathing and I legitimately fear for his well-being.

Over the last two days of our clearly very spiritual Passover, while Alan and I were both fighting off nasty colds (his came complete with a mind-blowingly painful earache), we read through "Dave Barry in Cyberspace."  Written in 1996, its observations on the internet are antiquated to say the least (I don't know if "internet" and "America Online" were ever interchangeable terms, but they're definitely not now).  Nonetheless, it's pretty funny stuff.

While reading, we somehow got to talking about email addresses, and ranking the domains by relative coolness.  It seems to be deeply ingrained in both our heads that an email address @aol.com is lame, while @gmail.com is cool.  We both agreed that having a vanity domain, like say @stereosinai.com, is by far the coolest (unless it's a family domain - @smithfamily.net is pretty blah).  Where then fell into a heated argument about the relative merits of @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, and some of the lesser-used domains.  Like I said, out Passover was way spiritual.

Where did this come from?  Do others feel this way?  What makes one email address cool, and the other worthy of hipster snubbing?

How would YOU rank the email addresses?

Take a moment to watch the video below.

Now consider this.

Think about the amount of technology that went into bringing this video to your screen.  The sheer accumulation of human innovation is mind-boggling.

Humans can shoot themselves into space in metal cans.  Humans in other metal cans can watch the other, while sitting comfortably and being offered free drinks. They can take out a mobile device, which works half-way up into the stratosphere, and record through the window.  They can take that video and upload it to a worldwide network.  I can access that network, watch the video (along with almost two million others, as of this writing), grab a couple of letters and place the video into my own space on this worldwide network, and comment on it.  Then you can comment on my comments, and so on.  

It's pretty freaking cool, I think.