A cautionary EGWPATF this week as we examine society moving apace, faster than most of us bother to keep an eye on it. So, everybody who had a problem with MyDoom last week, raise their hand. That’s right, your beloved author sits here, hands firmly buried in his lap with a permanence that implies either perversity or glue. MyDoom, oddly geek friendly as it might have seemed, hunting down the website of SCO, the company that geeks love to hate, and punishing it with the tiny fists of a thousand thousand home computers unknowingly recruited, operates on the same thing that most viruses operate on: human stupidity and Microsoft Outlook Express. Just don’t, people. That’s all there is to say about that.

In the wider cultural arena, the story of Janet’s fecund silicon boinger, revealed for all the world to see, has been replaced by the story of Janet’s Evil Boobie, which has apparently begun to crumble the moral underpinning of American pop culture like a horde of intergalactic termites. The twinkling metal of her teat covering has apparently fixated the media outlets of our great nation like a tiny death star, growing in the view screen of our collective Millennium Falcon.

Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that the moral underpinning of American popular culture never existed in such a fragile form as to be vitally wounded by a middle-aged bazonga.

Possibly, the complex subtext to the show is what’s really needling folks; a recrudescence of the Oedipal ickniess that surrounds mainstream America, the image of an older black woman being sexually assaulted by a trim, arrogant, rich white boy. This lingering image of mammyism and interracial sexual violence speaks to this nation’s hangover from slavery, refreshed by the subconscious knowledge that white America still consumes black sexuality as a guilty pleasure.

Or did you miss that part? I don’t blame you, that half-time show was just about the biggest pancake-makeup, big-hair havin’, smoke-machining disaster since the R.A.T.T reunion tour.

In other news, the future approacheth, in the form of corporate enforcement of copyright laws. Now, when I say enforcement, I mean body armor, boots, and bang-sticks. Just last week, Sharman Intl., the home of FastTrack, home itself of Kazaa, from which millions of young people download porn and music, was raided by a private consortium of recording industry companies who felt that Sharman infringed on their intellectual property. And it was all perfectly legal. How you ask?

Little known on these bright shores, in European, Australian and Canadian common law, there is a provision for issuing an “Anton Piller” (note the spelling, googlers) order, which lets the aggrieved party raid your home or office and carry away material they think infringes on their copyright. Anton Piller is most often executed in regards to software license non-compliance or piracy operations, like flea market CDs. What fun! Thankfully, here is the good ol’ USA, we have a constitutional right to private property and person; we only get messed with by the duly constituted authorities.

However, what makes this incredible act of corporate sabotage important is that the United States has entered into a “Free Trade Agreement” with Australia just now which, much like NAFTA, makes enforceable, to a certain extent, intellectual property claims cross-border. It won’t be tomorrow, but it can’t be long before corporations decide to test the waters knock your door down with freshly minted Australian “Anton Piller.”

The future’s getting closer, folks.