Slugs, Not Hugs, for Barney : Computers: Caltech students, using the Internet, create an evil twin for the beloved purple dinosaur.
It’s Christmas, and the relentless good cheer of television’s saccharine dinosaur, Barney, is wearing down parents everywhere. But now they have a place to turn: cyberspace.
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Hey, Barney! Meet your evil twin, brought to you by two Caltech students via the Internet.
Evil Barney is purple and pudgy, the spittin’ image of the original. But this one really spits. This one’s more likely to murder nice suburban moms. (“I love you, you love me, let me have your family.”) This one gives no hugs.
Evil Barney is on Internet’s World Wide Web, a twisted file created by students Mike Agney and Joe Cates at Caltech, home of 22 Nobel prizes.
The Web’s Barney file--which offers text, pictures and sound to millions of users--includes stories about the Purple One turned serial killer and audio clips headlined: “And you will know the beast by his voice.”
Agney, an undergraduate, did not return calls for comment. Cates, a graduate student, declined comment, saying he is already in enough trouble after Newsweek recently ran a small item on the Barney file. Cates works in the university’s famous Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories, which would rather be known for its fluids research.
After the Newsweek item ran in October, so many people logged onto the Barney file--up to 10,000 a week--that the graduate lab’s computers shut down twice. Some of those who checked out the file were true Barney lovers who assumed they were logging onto a fan club; Newsweek’s item neglected to say that the Barney page is actually an anti -Barney page. And it’s hard to tell from the Internet address, which is “galcit” at Caltech (https://www.galcit.caltech.edu/ta/barney/barney.html).
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The Barney file is not sanctioned by Caltech, which provides Internet access to any student through its university account, said university spokesman Max Benavidez. Caltech does not regulate what students put out on the Internet, which charges the university a flat rate for its accounts with no extra charge for users who create files like Evil Barney. “Not everybody wants to be part of Barney’s happy family,” Benavidez said.
Certainly not the letter-writers to an Agney-Cates feature, “Ask Dr. Barney Hate Mail.”
“DIE DIE DIE!!!” writes one. “I hate you and all of your musty little rug-rat friends!!!”
No wonder Evil Barney hallucinates.
“Mister Rogers speaks to me sometimes when I’m telling the kids to love me,” the anti-dinosaur laments. “He says, ‘You’ve gone too far, I only asked them to be my neighbor.’ ”
This is not the only anti-Barney file on the Internet. There’s also the Jihad to Destroy Barney; Barney on the Prowl, and a bulletin board devoted entirely to Barney hatred. The address: alt.tv.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die.
Merry Christmas.
