WWW.USELESS.COM

Not long ago, a Facebook "friend" gonged a frantic warning klaxon, advising everyone to rush to a certain website, because that dastardly website might be displaying your phone number and address!

Back in "the day," this was known as a phone book.

After I shook off the heinous horror, and changed my phone number, I thought a visit to the vile website might provide, at worst, a harmless diversion and, at best, a target for my Mother-Theresa-like weekly commentary.

On both counts, the website delivered. In spades.

Now, I won't disclose the name of this website, because I'm furiously averse to being sued. I lack that recessive gene that equates "vacation of a lifetime" with "extended time in prison, starring as the dance partner of a very large man in a red cape." But the aforementioned website is so utterly useless that I hate to deny you, gentle reader, the opportunity to visit. So let's imagine that this is a website whose address begins with "www" and ends with "com" (including all the appropriate, obligatory dots), and I'll try to strew a few clues, cleverly hidden within this story. Fair enough? Okay, let's begin.

S) So I visited the offending website, which offers to lay out lots of information about anybody for whom you search. I searched for myself, which wasn't a hard decision, since I've been doing that for over 50 years now. Sort of.

And the website did find me. Sort of. But...

P) Prior to letting me search, of course, the website offered the standard, boilerplate disclaimers, like the data is "not guaranteed to be 100% accurate." There's your first clue that these people are useless. Date is either accurate, or it is inaccurate. You can't be 58% accurate. In life, some things either are so, or are not so. You can't be partly pregnant. You can't be kinda perfect. It's not possible to sorta like (or sorta hate) Glenn Beck. You can be almost home; you cannot be almost human (unless you're in Congress). Consider the Marx Brothers, or Monty Python. You're either in or you're...

O) Out.

But let's get back to the useless website. I looked myself up, at the address I know for a fact is my correct address, where I have lived, by myself, since I bought the new house a little over 3 years back. And I discovered some surprises. According to the crack research department at Useless, there are 3 people living in my house, which was built 15 years ago. And the real...

K) Kicker is this: my house (according to Useless) has no central heat or air, and is in a "below average" neighborhood, but its estimated value is still over one million dollars. Useless says I don't have a fireplace (yes, I do). Useless informs that I have no interest in politics (wrong), I subscribe to magazines (wrong), and I research investments (you have no idea how wrong). In an odd moment of clarity, Useless does admit that I may have a swimming pool, or I may not. They just don't know.

According to Useless, there are 17 Barry Parhams in the United States, and...

E) Every one of them lives in a "below average" neighborhood. Useless confirms that I have 4 available photographs, none of which are actually me, although a Barry Parham living in Lyman, South Carolina, looks EXACTLY like me. In fact, based on the pronouncements from Useless, my name is not Barry.

Oh, yeah. According to the gang at Useless, there's...

O) One more bit of news. I'm black.

But other eyes, apparently, are mining the data at Useless and are making decisions accordingly. The Census challenged my responses, and the IRS sent round a very large man in a red cape. Thinking quickly, which is not my strongest point, I took advantage of some tax status loopholes. I married myself, and then we adopted myself. I'm now the first single guy in history to be in an interracial marriage. Now I belong to 27 distinct minorities, and have my own Congressman (his name is Hillary Mgobo Juarez Convictowitz, a Yankees fan from a Havana shtetl, affecting a Wall Street-inflicted limp and packing an Arizona-threatened work visa).

After learning this new news about myself, I realized I needed some broad-based advice, so I organized a meeting. I invited selected friends, the 3 rent-ducking rat-bait dastards hidden in my house and, given my new heritage, the NAACP.

One of my attending friends cajoled that Useless just collects info (or simply makes it up), hoping you'll subscribe to their fee-based "tell me more" service, which allows you access to even deeper levels of even more utterly useless, nonsensical non-facts. In other words, no big deal. Don't worry about it.

I think he's just saying that because I'm black.