Master Of My Domain
I get asked a lot of questions about this site, and one of the ones that always annoys me is "So is that an "o" or a zero in the URL?" Look, I realise it was a bad choice of address, but I was rushed into it, and Demon Internet charge you money if you want to change it to something else. I never realised at the time what a world-conquering success this site was going to be: if I had, I'd have put a bit more thought into the problems caused by having an ambiguous character in the middle of your web address.
But as you may have noticed by now, this shouldn't be too much of a problem in the future. Internet domain names are getting cheaper all the time, and .co.uk domains in particular seem to be going begging these days. There's even a free ISP called FreeNetName that will throw in the UK domain name of your choice for nowt when you sign up for their service. However, there are some messy strings attached if you want to change provider at a later date, so I decided instead to fork out the extra few quid to register http://www.spank-the-monkey.co.uk with the good people at Global Gold. They do a web and email forwarding service which will automatically send users from your chosen address to the real home page of your site, so none of you regular visitors have to amend your bookmarks or Mind-It change notification thingies - I'm still in the same place I always was, I just have a nice easy-to-remember shortcut to it now.
The big surprise for me was finding out just how much my name is being used on the Internet already. A couple of my first choice URLs have already been bagsied just in the past month or two, since the FreeNetName launch. Thus http://www.spankthemonkey.co.uk was registered on September 1st but isn't in use at the time of writing, while http://www.spankthemonkey.org.uk was grabbed on September 30th and is already the home of the Dragon Venture Scouts and their fledgling page of car crash photos.
Things get even stranger when you investigate the more expensive realms of the .com domain. Yes, Virginia, there is a http://www.spankthemonkey.com, but for the last eighteen months or so it's had a holding page for some clothing company and hasn't been updated. And the owner of http://www.spank-the-monkey.com (as yet unused) appears to have registered it as some sort of joke. Yes, I'm talking to you, Mr Spanker.
Most shocking of all is http://www.spankthemonkey.net, which to my horror appears to be some sort of porno site. (Although not a very good one, if you try the 'enter' and 'exit' links.) I've done a little research into the subject, and it would appear that my name is somehow appearing in the key word search lists attached to web pages of a gynaecological nature. At any given time, thousands of teenage boys with no girlfriends and a five-boxes-of-Kleenex-a-day habit are searching for filth, but are accidentally being directed to my site. How could this possibly have happened? (Bonjour à Jen van Berkel.)Leaving that aside, if you do a web search for Spank The Monkey, not everything you find is filth. Here are ten of my favourite almost-relatives in the Internet monkey-spanking community.
Camp Chaos presents Spank The Monkey
I'm not entirely certain I approve of this one. An online game that uses Shockwave Flash, Spank The Monkey displays a jungle setting with a series of monkeys popping up at various locations at random. Spank them with your hand-shaped cursor, and they explode with a shriek and a shower of monkey parts. Still, you can see why it's popular, and the inevitable Spank The Monkey 2 at least gave the monkeys the chance to fight back by hurling lumps of monkey shit at you. The new version is also available for download, so you don't rack up huge phone bills by playing it online.
"The home of the world's most shit but nice rock band," it says in tiny print on their home page, and you've got to love them for it. A bunch of students from Durham, they specialise in the lo-fi jangly guitar rock that was always associated with students in my day, although I'm sure today's students wouldn't give it the time of day, what with their techno rave-ups and their packets of Disco Biscuits. The band have one MP3 file available for download, Fall Down, which sounds pleasant enough: unfortunately, their gig list only goes up to April 1999, so I'm not sure if you should look out for them playing in your town. Even if it's Durham.
Kandice Mueller's Monkey Spankin page!
Oh, dear. The sort of thing that happens when someone gets a home page, sets up some initial bits on it and then forgets about it, without realising their day 1 attempts at HTML are out there forever. Still, everything you could possibly want to know about Kandice Mueller is here: she's from Canada, she likes the phrase "go spank a pack of wild monkeys", she can't code hyperlinks to save her life, and her favourite film is apparently called Greece.
Not actually DJ Tantrum's home page or anything, but his section on MP3.com, the site of choice for the legal leeching of free music in MP3 format. Tantrum has two songs available here for download - Sex On Methadone and, in case you were wondering what he was doing here, Spank The Monkey. The latter is a truly demented piece of electronica, described by its creator as "Moans, Beats, Spanks, Crys, Screams and Fiends", which is pretty accurate. Freaky as hell and well nigh impossible to dance to, but fascinating nevertheless: and it's less than 100 seconds long, so it won't take you too long to download.
Bokkerz provide a wide range of equipment for all you snowboarding dudes out there. (Does this site have any snowboarding readers? Apart from you, of course, Lou.) Spank Wear? is their range of clothing and hats, enabling you to look cool as you career down vertical slopes on your mum's ironing board. All of their merchandise is embroidered with pictures of their monkey, who is somewhat predictably named Spank. Still, if there's a sudden demand for spin-off t-shirts for this site, at least I'll know who to turn to.
Spank The Monkey leather jewellery
Well, there had to be at least one site with some sort of dubious sexual content in this list. There's not very much, though. The page header announces the site as "Spank The Monkey - your erotic and dominant force in adult novelties and toys". There's a picture of the front of their Spring 1998 catalogue, which implies that leather jewellery is their main item for sale - bracelets and things, I suppose. And that's it. No links elsewhere, no indication where you can get the catalogue, no clues as to where you can buy this stuff from. I've tried rummaging through the main ShopTherapy site for more information, but it's not forthcoming... oh, wait, here it is... bloody hell! That's not a bracelet! OK, forget I mentioned this one. Move along.
"Warning: This book contains actual opinions. Cranial stimulation may develop!" Randy Zimmerman's Spank The Monkey comic is published by Arrow, and follows the adventures of the street-smart Spank and his idiot cousin Shock. The site just gives you cover scans and a brief synopsis of each issue: the impression given is that Zimmerman's trying to get back to the good old days of underground comics, when artists like Robert Crumb could mix cute drawings, dirty jokes and cutting social satire within a single book. Without actually buying an issue, it's hard to tell from the site whether he succeeds or not. Spank The Monkey t-shirts are also available, with the slogan "I'm Cute, Do Me." I can relate to that.
Another band homepage. The Outpatients hail from New York and say they're "a Bar Band and proud of it... basically we are Musical Ho's and will do almost any type of gig." Working primarily in blues-based rock 'n' roll, they play a mixture of cover versions and original tunes. The audio page on their site contains an MP3 of one of their originals, a song called - yes! - Spank The Monkey, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to DJ Tantrum's tune of the same name. Fast, tight and funky, and you can dance to this one.
The introduction, I think, is worth quoting in full. All capitals are the author's own. "HELLO MORTAL I AM SATAN AND I WILL BE YOUR TOURGUIDE IN THE HELL THAT IS SpANk The MOnkEyS UNDERWORLD WITHIN THIS HOMEPAGE YOU WILL FIND THE MOST DISGUSTING,HORRIFYING,PUKE ENDUCING LINKS ON THE NET ANYWAY ENOUGH ABOUT YOU LETS TALK ABOUT ME I AM THE DEVIL I LIVE IN HELL I ENJOY WATCHING PEOPLE EYES FALL OUT OF THEIR SOCKETS, WATCHING PEOPLE DROWN IN THEIR OWN PUKE, DRINKING THE BLOOD OF VIRGINS AND SACRIFING YOUNG CHOIR BOYS TO BUDDAH (BUDDAH THE MASTER...HAIL BUDDAH) MOST OF ALL I ENJOY HATE MAIL SO ABUSE ME ALL YOU WANT AND ENJOY THE RIDE THROUGH THE DEEP DARK FOREST OF DEATH THAT IS MY HOMEPAGE MUHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! PROCEED IF YOU DARE" Ooh, I'm scared. This is obviously what listening to too much Marilyn Manson does to you. Some dull links, twenty-seven billion banner ads and very little else. Go away, little boy.
The Official Spank The Monkey Web Page
Last but not least, the guv'nors. Anyone who's searched for this page in Yahoo! or one of the other engines will have come across this lot fairly quickly. Spank The Monkey are a band from Lafayette, Louisiana specialising in what they describe as "ass-pounding rock". They've got two CDs on sale - Spank The Monkey and White Trash Lullabies - and the site gives you the chance to hear Real Audio samples of every track of the latter album. Recently overhauled to great effect, the site also incudes pictures, gig information and everything else you'd expect. Plus links to all those unofficial fan pages that ensure that Spank the band always comes out ahead of Spank the australopithecine in web searches. Grrr.
So you see, it's not just me after all. There's a whole collection of Spanks out there on the net, each of them deserving your support to greater or lesser degrees. But I hope you realise that http://www.spank-the-monkey.co.uk is the one you'll need to keep coming back to most frequently. Because I deserve it. Being a monkey, and all.
Links
Well, duh. See all the above, with thanks and a tip o' the hat to Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David for inspiration for the title.
October 9th 1999
| Return to archive index | Return to home page |