The New World in a magical place, strange and fantastic. A pyramid of lives, power and data that descends steeply from the pinnacle of the newsmakers and the Monsters of the Universe that regulate our IT lives to the soft, shallow underbelly that squirms and pulsates with a hideous, untanned life.

For the Monsters, it’s been interesting. Mighty cyberbattles that will shape our future have been fought. VeriSign, domain name registry from hell, has backed off its SiteFinder program, which directed non-working TLD searches to its own website and had the side effect of crippling half the world’s mail servers. The FBI has invoked the PATRIOT Act to threaten reporters involved with hacker Adrian Lamo, the largest to-date misuse of the PATRIOT act to repress U.S. citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism. And in the category of Best Excuse Ever, Valve has delayed the release of Half Life 2 because someone leaked a version of the source code.

So much for the top of the pyramid. For them, it’s easy to dismiss those many in the mass of pallid squish that make up the individuals that really have no functional impact on the internet as consumers or subcultures or completely demented weirdos. Or Something.

But they are more than that, they are the very stuff of the Information Age, a corpus populi that wouldn’t exist without it, that engage in activities and associations undreamed of by even the maddest of ancient gods. Into this category falls the humble furry, the geek that other geeks shun, the kind of freak that makes the most repellent, zit-filled landmass of a Toys-R-UsTM video game “associate” look like a hygienic alternative to dating. The furry, for those not in the know, is a person who has a sexual/lifestyle fetish that is preoccupied with plush stuffed animals. To that incredibly weird end, they have formed a subcurrent of weirdness linked by the gossamer strands of technology. They even have conventions.

Let’s flesh this weirdness out a little: in 1996, this columnist came across, through extraordinarily ill fate, a picture that seared itself into my brain with the force of a seven-hundred pound branding iron. To spare the reader any contusions of the forebrain, suffice to say that I will never be able to look at a plush stuffed Husky puppy in innocence.

From that vastly strange sight, one learns, the world of furries has sprung. This world is composed of people who like to dress up like plush cartoon animals and have sex with each other. They dress up all the way in fur suits with giant animal heads. One furry young gentleman designed and built a servo-actuated tail with controls in his “paws” so that it would wag, stand up, and droop. He also created, in a feat of engineering that doubtless would have earned him a B.S. from anywhere had it been in the service of mankind, a 15-pound head that snarled, smiled, and clopped its jaws.

What drives a lonely, nonsocialized loser in a dead end job to become, basically, an ambulatory shag rug with plastic eyes two feet across?

It is the mentally unbalancing conception of yiff, their disarmingly charming colloquialism for humpty. They make yiff amongst themselves while in their suits, accompanied by role-playing, snarling, yipping, and so forth. That is a level of monstrous perversion that this mind cannot encompass, let alone understand.

Lest the furry be thought of as non-inclusive, there is even a branch of furry that likes to get yiffy while pretending to be an infant. You heard me: adult baby Furry. I bet you, gentle reader, thought you were deviant at times; now you know better.

Tune in Next Week for Less Disturbing Topics.