Ian Stoba

January 1, 1997

I’m one of the people who runs the Hoboken Chicken Emergencyclopedia and I thought you might like to know that the site has been getting a lot of traffic from employees of the federal government over the last few days. In the last two days alone, there have been visits from the EPA, the Patent and Trademark Office, the Bureau of Land Management, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and, (most ominously) the Navy’s Space and Sea Warfare Systems Command.

I don’t get it. Is there something subversive in your books (alien invasion, plastic fish, Walter Cronkite) that it would attract attention from all of these authority figures? Or is it just that, now the Cold War has defrosted itself, the guys hunched over the screens in the war room have the time to diddle on the web and look up pages devoted to their favorite nuclear-holocost-is-inevitable predicting author?

Are you kidding? Do you really not know why the goverment types are hitting your site? They're backroom boys. They think it's code. Is it? I thought it was.