when good jokes become websites…

For those of you who listen to the Semimodest Proposal, a weekly podcast I guest host with Justin and Jerame, you may have already heard this story. But I feel like telling it again, so I’m going to tell it again.

In August 2006, I was in Bruges, Belgium, the headquarters of my 10 week drunken tour of Western Europe. If memory serves me correctly, it was early afternoon, during what we always called Siesta (I’m unsure what the Flemish term is for “nap time”. Either way, a vast majority of the shops in town closed from the hours 2 pm to 5 pm.

We often spent those hours waking up from the previous night’s drinking excursion. Asher called it a ‘Belgian Morning’.

A Belgian Morning is similar to a hangover, in that, it’s an after effect of drinking all night. However, the similarities end there. A Belgian Morning doesn’t give you a headache or a stomach ache, because the beer is so clean and well made. It just makes you crave a sandwich between the hours of 2pm and 5pm…when you can’t get a sandwich.

Needless to say, there wasn’t a whole lot to do during Siesta, so we resorted to watching the only English channel on TV or screwing around on the internet.

One afternoon, we were looking up random stuff on Wikipedia, and we found this article on wet t-shirt contests.  We had a pretty good laugh about it, but Shane wanted to see more pictures of it, rather than just a stub on Wikipedia.

So I told Shane, if he really wanted to find more pictures and information on wet t-shirt contests, he should look at the most comprehensive site on the internet for such pictures, Wikiporn.

Walking right in to my trap, and without missing a beat, Shane chimed in with, “Is that .org or .com?” By this point, I was halfway down the stairs and laughing my ass off.

Turns out the joke was on me.

I mentioned at the top of this story that if you listened to the Semimodest podcast, then you may have already heard this story. It was the last time I told this story before now. It was also the last time I told the story as a punchline to a good joke…

And the last time I make a joke about an internet site with a catchy name without immediately trying to buy the domain, and selling it to the highest bidder….because when I made that joke, no such site existed. But when I told the story, Justin actually found it…

Check it out for yourself. I don’t want to link it to the site, but I’ll give you a hint….

It is .org.