Oddities

I've posted lightly the past couple of days, due to FCS -- Fried Computer Syndrome. Thanks to the good offices of the Los Angeles Public Library, I can update the vote fraud story.

But first, some of you may want to take note of a niggling mystery.

While doing some research into the "Jack Seymour" weirdness (an unimportant sideshow of the vote fraud stroy -- at least, I think it is unimportant), I stumbled across this page.

The page, lacking all introductory material, assembles many a political and parapolitical reference without rhyme or reason. The reader receives nary a hint as to the author or his purpose. What struck me as particularly odd was the fact that Cannonfire is cited as the reference point for some material about the Ukraine that never appeared on this site.

All of which reminds me of an earlier enigma. In the days when the web was a-borning (1994-1997), when search engines were new and bandwidth relatively pricey, the diligent net-surfer occasionally stumbled across bizarre web pages that functioned as parapolitical dumping grounds. These sites simply listed names and places from eldritch espionage lore, arranged in no order: "Richard Helms -- Richard Deacon -- Gordon Novel -- Oswald LeWinter -- KAL007 -- William Seymour -- Georgi Markov -- Ladislav Farago -- Nugan/Hand Bank..." Paragraph after paragraph of that sort of thing paraded across the screen, as though someone saw a purpose in publishing hundreds of names culled at random from several dozen spy book indices. The sites contained no other information. The browser always displayed IP numbers instead of "www.whatever" URL listings.

Does anyone else recall those mystery sites? I always assumed that they were the private project of some mad espionage buff. In more romantic moments, I wondered if these lists constituted some sort of code. One couldn't be sure!