Many years ago, an buddy and I created the website www.marsconspiracy.com (if there's a site there now, I had nothing to do with it). Back in 1997 you could register a domain name with InterNic and have 30 days to pay for it before they shut it down. Since the landing was so 'timely' we decided to put up a hoax site and use the 30 day grace period because, well, we were cheap bastards and we knew the novelty wouldn't be there in a month.

Anyway, sadly my friend had lost all the code for the site which is too bad because there was some hilarious writing in it*. Basically, I took shots from NASA and Photoshopped them to "prove" some sort of conspiracy. The jokes were over the top and obvious to anyone with a kindergarten education and 10 seconds of reading. However, the response we got to the site stymied belief.

There were 3 basic camps to the emails we received

• Those who understood it was a joke and wanted to let us know it was either funny or stupid (invariably, those who complained about the site had something similar and thought they were original. We had TMC up the day Pathfinder landed).
• Those who thought we believed what we were writing and thought us kooks
• And those who believed what we wrote.

We got all kinds of mail calling us morons. We loved those because it was beyond obvious the people sending them never even read a single line of the site. Of course, those were the ones that we emailed back 'trying desperatly to convince the site was legitimate'. Much hilarity ensued.

The emails we got that completely agreed with us really were freaky, because these people commented on how the picture showing Chiggers the Chimp in the background was absolute proof of NASA's lies.

Why I bring this up is because I see the same type of behavior on blogs. You can find examples of these people at my John Kerry / Julia Thorne divorce paper post. There are those who get the joke, and plenty who think I'm serious (with equal parts "Hot Damn! We Got Him Now!" and "I think you're a GOP mole!" types). And I see it in other's blogs too, where the comments become nasty personal attacks calling someone a liberal or neocon without reading the entire blog and determining who the person really is.

Back then, we found it funny. Now it's just kind of sad.

*I have the images we used somewhere on a harddrive that isn't in any of my 6 systems just sitting around the house. If I can find them, I'll try to repost them in all their glory (although I'll have to reword the captions which were funny as hell)