pud.com

Every once in a while, someone comes up with an idea that can change the world.

There was Robert Kearns, who came up with intermittent windshield wiper blades. Joseph Heller, who gave us "Catch-22." Robert Chesebrough, who thought of Vaseline. A-Ha, who graced us with "Take on Me."

All of them had a great idea. One great idea. Exactly one great idea.

We may now be able to count among these innovators Philip Kaplan, better known as pud, better known as the man behind Fucked Company, the dot-com deadpool that started dot-com deadpools.

Pud, whose neat one-liners burst dot-com bubbles before dot-coms were even described by spherical metaphors (what were they thinking, a company that lets kids buy stuff with their parents' credit cards?) has now created pud.com, a weblog that does absolutely nothing to affect the current state of weblogs.

One of the problems with having an idea, at least in this culture, is that one is then encouraged to think of oneself as a personality. So we have pud giving television interviews on the state of dot-coms. Pud taking his place among Women.com's "Men of the Internet" as one of "10 of the hottest, most exciting bachelors you'll meet anywhere." And now, we have pud creating his own personal website.

It's updated about every day. It's got links, sometimes. It's got journal-like postings from pud and, he says, "a few friends who I think have something to say." It doesn't have all that much to do with companies, fucked or otherwise. Pud is pud. Pud has transcended companies.

So we get Sorinne's observation, "I learn from being alive. Everything that happens, every person that comes along, is all for a reason. You take what comes your way and you learn and grow from it." And this one, from Tyler: "So I was in this porn chat earlier today. I noticed that the chick, 'Desiree', was sitting in a *really* fucking nice black leather executive chair."

"Is this Slashdot for losers?" asks a poster on the discussion boards.

Heavily promoted by pud on the Fucked Company site and newsletter, pud.com was launched two weeks ago as an ersatz pud fan site, written from the point of view of a teenage girl. It might have qualified as a hoax if pud hadn't told everyone he'd put it together himself. Now, references to "Jenny's Pud Site" have been removed from pud.com. As of last Sunday, it's switched to an all-weblog format. A format where pud and his friends can pour out their hearts to real-life fans.

It's amusing to watch pud, who likes to point out at every opportunity that he "never was famous for...political correctness," forced to defend Sorinne's daisies-and-butterflies musings from an increasingly bewildered crowd of semiliterate posters who came here for pud's offensiveness-qua-offensiveness style. But it's really pud's own postings that make it allegedly worth visiting. And they make it clear that the dot-com grim reaper, the detached master of the cruel one-sentence business column, has a heart. And he really cares what you think about him.

One of the most time-honored traditions in pop songwriting is the song where the narrator claims to be just fine. He doesn't care about that abruptly ended love affair, oh no. But — can't you see? — he's crying on the inside. Pud.com is a nicely done example of the Web analogue to this genre.

Pud doesn't care about criticisms that he's racist or insensitive — criticisms that might not seen so far off to anyone who's familiar with the unrelentingly xenophobic, misogynistic tone of the Fucked Company message boards. "[T]his was so ridiculous that at first I figured I wasn't gonna respond. Except I just woke up to take a piss and I can't get back to sleep so here I am writing," he says of a recent article taking him to task for writing about the defunct Urban Box Office, "Musta spent too much money on ho's and 40's." He could care less, or couldn't care less, whichever denotes less concern, about readers who e-mail him complaints. "Anyway, I never asked you to visit it in the first place, and I certainly don't owe you shit. When you complain to me via email, realize you're nothing more than a few pixels on a screen to me, gone with a push of the 'delete' key." And he really, really doesn't care about readers who attack pud.com on the site's message boards, responding only briefly to each one.

In between the choruses of his macho breakup song, pud manages to work in a verse about his newest idea. He describes it, more or less accurately, as "an amihotornot.com ripoff." But don't expect the ordinary with pud. There's one important difference. "I'm hoping mine will have more porn."

— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)