Until very recently I was fairly certain that everyone I know who is a moderate-high web user was aware of Fark.com. It wasn't until I was in Strategy class this past week that I became saddened by the fact that Fark.com is not the online current events juggernaut I believed it to be. The case we were covering that day had to do with daily newspapers and our teach surveyed the class on what each of us uses for a daily news source. I quickly shot my hand up to advocate my #1 source for the best farking news headlines evAr: Fark.com. I told Dr. Blunden that if it's not a big enough news story to be warranted for it's weirdness or to be horrifically made fun of and dumped on, then it's not news at all. This is the premise behing Fark.com.

Back in the mid-90's, a man by the name of Drew Curtis made a habit out of sending weird news stories to some buddies of his in England via e-mail. Drew soon found that weird news was pretty easy to come by and instead of sending e-mails he decided to post the links to his web domain, Fark.com. Drew had registered the farking domain because it was a word he had a tendency to use in chat rooms as a replacement for a similar word (that would get you banned if used) and because it was a word he eventually worked into his daily vocabulary. Other people, besides aquaintances of Drew's, quickly caught onto the website and Fark received 50,000 page views in its first year.

During all of last year, Fark.com received over 400,000,000 page views! The site is updated multiple times a day with headlines such as "Bad: your new sex doll turns itself on at random times. Worse: it turns itself on at the post office while you're trying to return it. Worser: this causes a bomb scare" under the "Amusing" tag, or "McGwire (refuses to say if he) took steroids" under the "Obvious" tag, and "99-year-old celebrates with his seventh consecutive birthday party at Hooters" under the "Spiffy" tag. There are also daily features such Photoshop contests (MUCH better than any of the ones you'll find here) and my all-time favorite, Boobies and Weiners links. (Self-explanatory.) They also dedicate space to "popular" news under "News Flash" tags.

For no charge you can register an account with Fark allowing you access to the Fark Forums where you can comment on the various headlines or post photoshop submissions. A paid account gives you Total Farker status where you can get headlines in advance and in real time plus numerous other benefits that regular Farkers and Farkettes don't have.

So there you have it. My rant on what I believe to be a very underated website. I recommend it to anyone looking for a good, yet funny, daily news source. Especially those who have jobs that leave them with a lot of free time during the day or jobs that make you wish you had a lot of free time during the day, and without further a due.....