James Parry - Growing Fame

Growing Fame

In the early 1990s, as public awareness grew of the Internet and Usenet, Parry received a great deal of national publicity, including a cover story in Wired magazine, and mentions in Playboy and Time magazine. His fame later grew to be international, with appearances in such publications as The Times.

He became known on Usenet for grepping all occurrences of the term "Kibo"—whether intended to refer to Kibo himself or not—and replying, often in a fanciful manner. A typical exchange:

Mary Rose Campbell wrote: >At CMU, we also have something called Gray Matter in the center of Skibo >(our student union substitute). It's a bunch of shapes, walls, holes, >and steps covered with the same dark gray carpet that's on the floor. >It looks like a giant cat toy. Actually, it's a life-size model of S. Kibo himself, my great great grand-uncle. This was before he evolved past the 'giant metazoic amoeba' stage a few aeons ago. Now he's a trilobite. -- K.

This practice became known as kibozing.

He is perhaps best known on Usenet for his famous (or infamous) "Happynet Proclamation" (1992), circulated to many newsgroups, some absurdly unrelated, which satirised the endless flamewars on the network, with Parry posing as a godlike being issuing an edict full of in-jokes and humor targets that claimed to unify all news into one glorious totality, "happynet". In the article, Kibo claimed that:

********* HAPPYNET: THE NET THAT'S HAPPIER THAN YOU! ********* UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE ALL-WISE LEADER KIBO, THE NEW NETWORK SHALL BE ORGANIZED THUSLY: Three hierarchies encompassing ALL HUMAN DISCOURSE. => nonbozo.* => bozo.* => megabozo.* Existing groups will be moved into the new organization scheme, resulting in nonbozo.news.announce.newusers, bozo.rec.pets, megabozo.talk.bizarre, nonbozo.comp.virus, bozo.alt.sex, megabozo.alt.fan.lemurs, bozo.postmodern, etc., as determined by scientific measurements of the bozosity of the groups, measured by Leader Kibo's Council On Scientific Bozosity and the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY), world leaders in bozosity assessment. It is estimated that the breakdown will be thus: 1.0000% nonbozo.* 90.0000% bozo.* 9.0000% megabozo.* (Computations courtesy of Bell Labs) Bozo.* will, of course, be subdivided logically: bozo.nerd.*, bozo.tv.*, bozo.inane.*, bozo.boring.*, bozo.sex.*, bozo.argue.*.

The term "bozo" and related jokes like the physics particle the "bozon" were Parry hallmarks. Revisions of the Manifesto were published in 1994 and 1998, and HappyWeb was introduced in 1999.

In 1992, at age 25 (ten years younger than the constitutional minimum age for election), he launched a spoof campaign for President of the United States. For a short time, the official White House website listed "Kibo" as a candidate, with links to statements by him, because it had mirrored a university candidate speech archive including him with George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot.

For reasons unknown, after constant daily changes for over a decade, his personal website stayed stagnant from late March 2004 until late December 2005. It has since been updated, though not nearly as often as years past. Kibo has hinted at a possible site redesign. But as Kibo noted on his site in early 2006, the amount of posting to USENET he's done is truly enormous:

"By the way, by my official estimates, having posted an average of 20 articles a week to alt.religion.kibology during the past 15 years, probably about 500 words of original content per article, that's... seven point eight mmmmillion words. Equivalent to about 100 books. Suddenly I'm frightening myself. (And the "20 per week" number is my low estimate.)

"Asimov wrote 400 books, but he didn't have to contend with writing his own Web backend to index, typeset, and publish 'em. Also he didn't talk about himself nearly as much as I do."