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Company Uses Grain Elevators for Internet Access
hohosforbreakfast writes "Here's a different take on wireless networking...a company in West Des Moines, Iowa says it will use grain elevators to provide Net access in rural areas of Illinois and Iowa. The story is here in the Des Moines Register." Ah, flat country.
So this means that a grain elevator explosion has the potential of taking out parts of the internet.
An entirely new mode of network failure has been invented!
I recently attended training sessions on Breezecom's product in Toronto, ON, CA. I ran into a group of geeks there who were doing exactly this--using grain elevators to host their antennae for 802.11 gear to provide 11mbps connections for rural subscribers.
Now I just wish they'd put some damned grain elevators up in suburbant Detroit. I'm having a nightmare of a time getting a point-to-point wireless link to perform well over 4 miles of trees, houses and commercial buildings. Ever see how difficult it is to get the permits to build an 80' tower in suburbia. Friggin' nightmare, man.
I'm not fan of that whining either. But this particular fixture is not innovative, other than perhaps as a business relationship. People put these antennas on the tallest things they can find. The notion is not new, and it doesn't require any genius to employ it. I gaurantee you that there have been thousands of other installations long before this on so-called non-traditional platforms. I've seen them on top of skyscrapers, water towers, radio antennas, hilltops, trees... why not a grain elevator? What makes this story any more newsworthy than the hundreds of other similar day to day occurences.
If they wanted to write a piece on, say, high bandwidth coming to rural American, I could accept that. But this is just obvious employment of technology, without any real direction...I wish they'd generate real content, rather than producing fluff like this.
Well, the idea of putting 802.11 wireless Internet connections on top of grain elevators is a GREAT idea.
Remember, the northern Great Plains has flat enough topology that the top of grain elevators have a long line of sight out into the country. That is sufficient for most communities to get connected to the Internet using a wireless connection.
Besides, farmers are surprisingly techno-savvy; they want direct access to the weather and agricultural price information to properly plan the year's operation on the farm. In fact, farmers are some of the biggest users of GPS satellites so they can precisely meter out the amount of fertilizer and pesticide/herbicide needed to properly maintain the farm; this has drastically reduced the fertilizer and agricultural chemical runoff that has caused water pollution problems in the past.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
More info on their wireless pricing.
So they're going to send each bit up like a little piece of grain? :)
How is packet loss with a system like this?
Cool idea, and glad to see more folks getting faster internet access.. but how susceptible is this going to be to weather effects?
Admittedly, they define this as using "radio waves", which seems like a fairly fault tolerant medium (compared to, say, a beam of some sort), but they DO say it requires a clear line-of-sight. What's going to happen to your game of Q3A when a tornado decides to rip through the area? Even radio is subject to static, which could be pretty painful for an internet connection.
From what I've experienced, the plains states can suffer some pretty crappy weather. Be it rain, thunder, dust storms, blizzards, or tornados. One wonders about the quality of service these people will get; the news article doesn't really explain this much.
I'm just one to trust a wire safely buried under dirt more than radio waves being flung about.
Which brings up another point.. how easy is it for other people to pick up these signals? Channel scanners, start your engines.
It looks like somebody hasn't seen enough IBM commercials.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I wondered when some of the midwestern states would come up with this idea.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
... now my pr0n will come out all grainy.
;-)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Well the way Slashdot pushed Katz's book which chose an anecdote insulting Idaho as a "hick" state, I'd have to agree with you.
Sorry if I jumped on you about using the word "hick", but there is this double standard around, of which you are apparently aware, regarding insults to rural people (redneck jokes, farmer's daughters jokes, etc.) which amounts to ethnic trashing -- and if you look at the academic achievment rankings, you'll notice there may be a reason for urban cultures to promote this sort of bias:
They're embarrassed at their own performance.
This is, I believe, sufficient cause alone to make this article of interest. I mean what will Katz write about when farmer's sons start becoming millionares by replacing the Chicago commodities exchange with their internet access via the local grain elevator transponders?
Probably something to do with how they're all afraid of showing themselves in person with the real men in the mosh pits of the Chicago exchange or some horseshit.
Seastead this.
A lot things aren't obvious to you.
For example, that there are enormous hidden taxes applied to any physical wiring due to right of ways that exceed even the FCC's red tape by a huge amount.
That the first Cray supercomputer was built on Seymour's farm using guys from rural Iowa and Wisconsin.
That wireless will probably displace physical cable in urban areas once places like Iowa, Montana, Canada, China, Siberia, etc. make the advantages manifestly clear.
That the wireless revolution will relocate the infosphere to orbit.
Or, finally, an example of something that clearly is not obvious to you is the ranking of states by academic achievement.
1. Minnesota
2. Montana
3. Iowa
4. Wisconsin
5. New Hampshire
6. Oregon
7. Washington
8. Kansas
9. Nebraska
10. Alaska
11. Connecticut
12. Massachusetts
13. Maine
14. Vermont
15. Missouri
16. Colorado
17. Arizona
18. Utah
19. Virginia
20. North Dakota
21. Oklahoma
22. Wyoming
23. Illinois
24. New York
25. New Jersey
26. Maryland
27. Nevada
28. Rhode Island
29. Idaho
30. Ohio
31. Texas
32. Michigan
33. North Carolina
34. California
35. South Dakota
36. West Virginia
37. Kentucky
38. Delaware
39. Arkansas
40. Florida
41. Indiana
42. Alabama
43. New Mexico
44. Tennessee
45. Pennsylvania
46. Georgia
47. Hawaii
48. South Carolina
49. Louisiana
50. District of Columbia
51. Mississippi
Now, which state are you from? :-)
Seastead this.
The north central and northwestern part of Iowa is very flat. Southern Iowa has gentle rolling hills, but is still fairly flat. Northeastern Iowa is somewhat more hilly, but far from what most people would consider mountainous. If you compare the lowest point in Iowa to the highest point, you aren't talking about that many feet of difference. You have to look at things comparatively to other places that have much more terrain than Iowa does... Even many of Iowa's neighboring states such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri and South Dakota have significantly more rugged terrain. Tell me a state that is more flat overall than Iowa... About the only one that springs to mind as a possibility is Nebraska... Even Illinois has the tailings of the Ozarks across its southern portion...
Places that have grain elevators in Iowa usually have small towns (300 to 5000 population typically) near them. That is the target market for this sort of thing. Many of these small towns have dialup access (often through the NetINS monopoly -- which is affilliated with most of the rural cooperative and independant telcos), but very few of them have either any significant competition for dialup service nor any other higher speed access available.
The problem many small rural communities face is slowly dwindling population as all of the capable younger people move away as soon as they are able. One of the reasons that the smart younger people leave is that there is a lack of things for them to do. While the Internet may not be a necessity, it is certainly something that is quickly becomming something that many people feel deprived if they don't have access to.
I quote from the article:
"Many Iowa residents have been left behind by high-speed Internet providers simply because of where they live," said Pederson. "Without high-speed Internet access, we can't expect many of those communities to survive."
This is utter and total bullshit of the purest ray serene.
How often does the Internet get touted as the latest and greatest something that nobody can live without? How much of that is true? So it is difficult for rural town businesses to have web sites. Big deal. Does the local corner store have a web site? Not nearly enough people buy things from the Internet to classify Internet commerce as a necessity, like regular off-line, physical shopping.
Rural areas are, by definition, rural. Rural to implies being away from the general population, isolation, privacy. That's what you get, and you also get the downsides, like slow net access (if any). Live with it. Nobody's going to die because their Hotmail is too slow. For crying out loud.
--Markus
BlackholeTV - TV that Swallows
Iowa is in the midwestern part of the US. While technically most of the US speaks something that is often referred to as 'english', it generally isn't expected to adhere to the standards of the 'Queen's English'. And as gor poor grammar, it is hardly something that is relegated to or stereotypical of hicks alone. Some of the worst grammar I see is perpetrated by east or west coasters.
And yes, my grammar isn't perfect. So sue me. And while you are at it, you might try a little attitude adjustment.
"Professor, I tried to e-mail you my paper, but it turns out someone fed it to the cows."
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Which is why you, er, TURN THEM OFF or LEAVE THEM HOME?
Why is it that there are millions of whiners in this country that can't figure out that just because you could be connected doesn't mean you have to be connected? Technology can't take over your life unless you let it; and if you laet it, you DESERVE your fate.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Couldn't they also 'rent' space on the several TV/telephone microwave towers that dot the landscape? They are much taller than any grain elevator the the range would be much better(besides, there are a few rolling hills, the entire landscape isn't totally flat like eastern Arkansas or west Tennessee). Would the existing transmitters cause too much interference?
I hope this service expands into neighboring states to the west. My family would enjoy that. My sister has had wireless cable TV (not satellite) for well over a decade, so hopefully her cable TV provider might start offering internet access too.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Seeing they already do this in central Illinois, I am fairly certain they did their market research and are comfortable that they will be able to make a small profit at least, or run it at cost as a non-profit service. If the latter is the case, the community may kick in some bucks to support the infrastructure.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Do they even have colleges in Iowa?
Yes. I believe the University of Iowa and Iowa State are both Big-10 colleges and one of which (can't remember which one) had a very active Internet-based BBS over 10 years ago. That and Rutger's Quartz BBS were big time sinks for me then. =)
Also, if you would look at this post, you would see that the two states that beat Iowa are Minnesota and Montana. Education is still considered very important in those areas. Since many small rural communities don't have the ability to create the jobs needed for their children, unless one plans on taking over the family business, the only way to get a decent job is through education and moving away. Even then, I know several farmers that have Bachelor of Science degrees. These states also have the advantage of generally being very homogenous populations, so there's no incentive to water the school systems down for political-correctness' sake.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Actually, Internet is quite useful (and quite popular) in rural areas. The reasons: updated commodity prices from Chicago Board of Trade, research into new farming techniques, buying selling equipment (kinda like classifieds, only cheaper), keeping up with children/relatives, - This list goes on and on . . .
The problem with dialup in rural areas is that the local telcos have not done a very good job catching up. My parents (on the farm) cannot get 56k(bits) from their dialup provider to save their lives. Their modem is a USR/3com 56k, and their provider (the telco) swears up and down that the pop they dial into is 56k-ready. After doing some research I discovered that, while all that may be true, if the phone switches between them and the pop are not new enough to handle 56k, then that speed isn't possible. In fact, my parents celebrate when they get 28.8k!!
I personally think that Prarie iNet will make a fortune. There are no other options for high-speed access in rural areas. I mean, my parents can't even get cable (although they do have DirectTV). In case you didn't figure that out - yes, I didn't grow up with cable. Heck, I didn't even have Fox . . .
- mikehWell, maybe. Even if all 4000 of the customers they hope to sign up are only receiving residential service, that adds up to nearly $2M/year income. Office space is pretty cheap in those parts, and I'd bet the cost of routers, servers etc. is folded in with the $10M figure cited. Depending on how the equipment costs are amortized, I could easily see this being profitable, if only marginally so.
And the brethren went away edified.
I find it hard to believe that even slashdot calls this newsworthy. I mean, what is news exactly? That highspeed wireless internet technology requires line of sight? Or that these places are relatively flat and unobstructed? That this can be done economically? That "hicks" might want high speed internet access to? The whole thing strikes me as terribly obvious. The only thing I wouldn't know is that it is happening there and right now. But the same can be said for many many more things.
I won't go on a big diatribe here.. but wireless networks are far easier to set up than cable networks as far as the amount of work goes.
Remember, these rural places don't HAVE the cable infrastructure. THere is no landline to be had... no cable, not enough phone circuits of enough quality to do DSL, and the distances are too big.
How on earth could putting up some towers (or using the roofs of grain elevators) be harder than getting right-of-way and burying cable all over the place?
It says they spent $10 million AND a year.
So... is this profitable?
4,000 customers * $40/month * 12 months/year = $1,900,000/year. And that's just the start.
$2,500 capital cost per customer is in the ballpark with the costs of rolling out DSL. Cost per customer will drop with time.
Unlike DSL in a city they don't have to tear up streets and string more wire all over the place, or test and upgrade existing wire. And they don't have to install a DSLAM in every two-bit switching center and wire up separate pairs for each customer to it.
Instead they have one, or a few, antenna sites, plus an antenna and a box at each customer's house, and only air in between. The customer covers the cost of their setup with an install fee. The base station and internet connection is already set up. (If they need several antenna sites they might radio-link them to each other, too, and only need a landline to one of 'em.)
The small number of antenna drivers also limits the amount of routing boxes they need. (They can probably drop it all into a single Redback box.) Ditto with limiting the number of backbone connections (maybe two, running by divergent routes). Piece of cake.
I won't predict whether THIS one will succeed. (Think how many cable companies went belly up in the early days.) But I can't see anything that would doom it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Not likely, for this reason: the signal frequencies used for the wireless Internet access is very close to that of the frequencies used for telephone and TV systems, and the result is potentially serious interference problems.
By putting them on grain elevators, they already have access to a building with pretty high elevation that have line of sight far out into the countryside.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Kansas. Eastern and southern Arkansas and west Tennessee are pretty flat too. South Dakota east of the Missouri river is about like most of Iowa. West of the river is more rolling prairie hills, badlands, and of course the Black Hills at the extreme western edge...the 'Wild West' part of the state.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
How about we keep kbs for kilobits/sec as its traditionally used and kbbs for kilobytes/sec. Its simple and crazy enough to work!
What makes this article news for 99% of slashdot? I find it difficult to believe that most of slashdot would be suprised to discover that this could be done from a technical point of view. Likewise, this article fails to illustrate the technical side of rural America. Instead, all we have is a brief [and flawed] description of a specific application of well established technology. It's not even tied into a larger message at all.
There are hundreds and thousands of similar installation stories that could be posted here too, but that does not mean they all should be national, or even international, news.
As for your comment(s), I fail to see how they actually apply. I did not say, nor did I mean to imply, that these states are inferior. Though it is apparent that it is a touchy subject for you, I assumed that my putting "hick" in quotes would be sufficient....
I do, however, disagree with you in regards to wireless's future. It will certainly grow, but I'm convinced that most high bandwidth connections will remain in domain of wiring in urban and suburban areas.
Amazing how tough it is in some places to get permission to put up antennas, even for the cellphones that the yuppies who live there use. At least in farm country they're a lot more relaxed about it (just another frob on top of the grain elevator that was there already), and probably get a lot of benefit from it. Next step might be telephone service, if it's reliable enough?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Two nice long contiguous metallic conductors. Even if they are quasi grounded, they'll act as a good RF waveguide at some frequency.
Nope. Their resistance to ground is very small compared with the resistance of the track. Very lossy.
And a train is a rolling short. At best you'd get trains or data but not both at once. B-)
Besides, they ALREADY have LOTS of dark fibers buried alongside them. (Sprint developed from the Southern Pacific Railroad's own network, for starters.) Just rent a couple of 'em and run OC-192 (or whatever) to any convenient population center. That'll beat any concevable data rate you could get from the tracks.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
---------///----------
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
What a lot of people don't realize is how behind techonology wise a lot of rural communitys are. I used to live in Iowa, and there are parts where there is NO chance of Internet access. Even the bigger cities can't get anything abouve 56k. I think this is a wonderful step in the right direction, but I wonder how many other regions in the United States don't have access to a high-speed connection?
The speeds here are comparable to some cablemodems, and for similar prices. I wonder how they manage to do this, considering the wireless infastructure is far more difficult to set up than landlines are.
-Josh
Yes. I believe the University of Iowa and Iowa State are both Big-10 colleges and one of which (can't remember which one) had a very active Internet-based BBS over 10 years ago. That and Rutger's Quartz BBS were big time sinks for me then. =)
:)
:)
Close! Iowa State University, located in Ames, (my alma mater) is in the Big 12. The University of Iowa, located in Iowa City, is in the Big 10. The third state school is the University of Northern Iowa, where I work, is located in Cedar Falls, but I don't reccomend going there.
The BBS you speak of is the legendary ISCA. You can telnet to it at whip.isca.uiowa.edu
It used to be really popular, circa 1995, when there'd be 1500 people on at a time, and hundreds more waiting in the queue, but now it's usually around 300-500 at most.
Just consider us the Sili-corn Valley.
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When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
You don't have to be in the rural midwest to have trouble getting broadband service. I'm right over the hill from the Santa Clara Valley. ("Silicon Valley" for you folks down in LA LA land.) DSL is theoretically available in my area, but in fact the copper's so antique that you can't get broadband unless you live right next door to the telco office.
And the brethren went away edified.
Seems like Prairie iNet are using the 2.4 GHz band, which is generally unlicensed around the world - assuming they are using the same technology as Midcoast Wireless, a Maine ISP, which has a very useful FAQ
This is all based on IEEE 802.11 technology, which is normally used for wireless LANs with a range of a few hundred feet. The trick here seems to be using more power and directional antennae so that you can go up to 9 miles (or maybe much more).
One company making this sort of kit is Breezecom, who have an overview of wireless Internet access here.
This technology, along with the competing licensed LMDS technology, may make mincemeat of DSL and Cable - it involves no rights of way hassles, no cable laying, and can give very low latency plus bandwidths in the 1-2Mbps range. Having used Wireless LANs at conferences and trade shows, I found the latency and bandwidth very similar to a T1 line.
For info on 802.11, see the Linux Wireless LAN FAQ, which also has good links to generic WLAN info at the end. Although the technology for 802.11 long-distance (i.e. wireless local loop) is not identical, it should give you an idea of how things work.
For info on LMDS (Local Multipoint Distribution System), see the Webopedia entry for LMDS, which has links to related pages. One new European telco that is rolling out LMDS quite aggressively is FirstMark - they are also doing cool things with MPLS VPNs, which is how I know about them since my company just sold them the software to manage this
Low latency is important because it's a key determinant of web response time, particularly for sites with many small GIF buttons, and also because Internet routers tend to treat high-latency sessions less fairly, so they get even less bandwidth then they should. It's also essential to winning at Quake, which is clearly the critical driver here
This story matters more for the technology than for the particular ISP using it - it will affect most Slashdot readers in the next year or so, particularly those not covered by DSL or cable. In the UK, BT is being astonishingly slow at rolling out ADSL, and the cable companies have very little coverage, so wireless technology may be the only way to get broadband for many people...
Can you use repeaters in this setup, or some sort of remote stations that link back to base via microwave links? This would make it easier to cover larger areas particularly in towns.
I'm interested to see you are using ATM via the Newbridge kit - you might like to investigate MPLS, which is a way of combining ATM's fast forwarding mechanisms with IP's routing mechanisms. The result is that very large best effort networks and VPNs are very easy to set up - no need for a mesh of PVCs, you just plug them together and the routing sorts things out.
MPLS is not currently so strong on the traffic engineering side, i.e. setting up the equivalent of PVCs to steer traffic along less utilised paths, or for guaranteed QoS or fast failover paths, but Juniper and Cisco routers can already do traffic engineering and the standards are coming along.
More MPLS info is at http://www.mplsrc.com/
I work for a high speed wireless ISP in Toronto, Ontario, Canada named Maxlink. We offer a range of services, from 0-4mbps uncommited upto 10mbps commited rates. We also offer IP-VPN as well as other network services which are forthcoming.
:) :) (we do email, web, dns and voice services also) :) (shameless plug).
This is all done using a combination of Cisco routers/switches for layer 3 stuff, and Newbridge switches for the layer 2 stuff. We use 46020 to mange the layer 2 stuff, and HP openview for the layer 3.
All our customer sites have an antenna on the roof, which is connected to an NIU. The NIU handles all of the RF stuff. The NIU is connected to a Cisco 2924 by an OC-3. A port on the switch is connected to a Cicso 1605r in the users space by a 10mb connection. The users then come off that with their connection to whatever they need.
The transmitting stations (BTSs) are located on the top of medium sized buildings spread throughout our 5 markets (Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal). By the time we are done the expansion, we will have >60 BTS. Each of the BTSs can cover an area between 2 and 4.5 km out depending on the weather in the area. Vancouver, for example, has a lot of rain, but it's very small drops, and has a range for 4km. Toronto, however, has very heavy rain drops, and it's range is only 2.5km. (thats rain fade). Because of the frequency we use (28ghz), we are effected a lot more by weather than something like radio/etc.
The BTS's are connected via OC-3 links to our 'core' where the data is sent off to the internet or through the internal network as required. We are a startup, so there is still a lot of development in the network, but we are currently hosting over 150 customers.
The technology is also VERY line of sight - 1 or 2 degrees off is enough to drop the NIU off the network. Because of this, and a few other things, security is garunteed because as soon as line of sight is broken, which is needed to get the signal, the site drops and the bts stops sending anything other than a "ping" to try and connect. There is no way to 'snoop' because you have to have line of sight, as well as know a bunch of information about the network to break the (admitedly light) encryption.
If you are interested in more info, you can email me and I'll see what I can do. If you are interested in our service, visit the web site
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
I think this is a wonderful step in the right direction, but I wonder how many other regions in the United States don't have access to a high-speed connection?
Lots.
This isn't the first radio ISP for rural areas, by a number of years. (One rural southern valley got wired this way using spread-spectrum quite a few years back, starting from a link from the town, with its phone center, to a college tens of miles up the valley.)
But it's nice to see it's catching on more generally.
This idea has a beautiful symmetry with DSL.
DSL is dandy for dense urban areas. It's distance limited and the costs rise with distance from the central sites, so you need a concentration of customers and infrastructure to be practical.
Line-of-sight radio is similarly dandy for rural areas. It's limited by obstructions rather than distance, but in the absense of urban obstructions the costs are approximately constant out to the horizon. That's quite a distance if the central site is elevated - either by a tall structure on flat land, or a tall peak where things are bumpier. So you can collect enough customers in a sparsely-populated area to support a POP. If your area starts to populate, drop power and add more antennas, until things are thick enough to switch to providing DSL.
(Now we just need solutions for people scattered in dense forest, deep mountaion valleys, spread WAY OUT on deserts, on small islands far from land, or moving about on the roads, skies, and high seas...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Damn, yet another article that confuses kiloBytes and kilobits... At least, I sure hope it's a confusion, because 128 KBytes/sec is not slow at all.
On another note, I'm just wondering how much money there is to be made servicing rural areas. I don't mean to discriminate, but there can't possibly be hundreds of thousands of subscribers (that wouldn't be rural, huh Jim?). But they have interesting technology ideas for what's involved.
Gain access to the net and clean out your colon at the same time. Cool.
I'm wondering if the technology allows for repeaters, essentially maintaining line of site through a third antenna. In Montana, where mountains can run down the middle of communities, the community antenna could be LOS with the mountain top which could then feed out to the rest of the community. If this is possible, what are the potential weather effects on one's internet connection.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Kansas.
The parts of Kansas I've driven through had gentle rolling hills (either wheat or sunflowers as far as the eye could see) much like southern Iowa. Northern Iowa is much more flat than that. Kansas is close, but overall, I'd say that Iowa and Nebraska are more flat than Kansas. Just about every other state I can think of has exceptions with more terrain.
This is a pretty cool idea. I don't think a lot of people realize exactly how much technology goes into farming. Stop by a John Deere dealership and look at the tractors. I'm talking the nice big ones. You'll see everything from GPS units, Satellite hookups, and Weather computers. Some measure moisture and exactly how much seeds to plant, etc. I've been in one that gave the guy a view of his field from above so he knew exactly where to plant or what needs more water. 90% of the work is still done by hand, but at least it keeps the mistakes down and increases productivity.
As for Iowa being flat...I can tell you after having been a runner for 16 years in this state, it ain't flat:)
----------------------------------------- Well damn...so that's what that does...
I don't know, if I go five or six minutes without access to pornography, I just about curl up and die.
The amusing thing though is that they think that because people don't get something they've been surviving without for aeons they, likewise, will curl up and die. It's an awfully arrogant attitude. However, it will be beneficial if I ever have the misfortune to be stuck out in the middle of the midwest, and need to check out bangedup.com or something.
Sometimes, you just have to get your fix.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hey, Ma! The net went down again! Oh, it's coming up again! Going down again, dadblast the consarned, confounded luck!