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You know, a lot of people when they see me, they come rushing up to me and say "Hey Sylvester, how'd you get to be so damn popular?" I usually tell then it's from my 40 years of Looney Tunes, or some sort of gypsy spell. But invariably my mind comes back to one thing: ES.com. This pithy page which is a synopsis of events that no one really gives a crap about has been a springboard for me in terms of lucrative endorsements. For example, next month I am posing for Armani, then it's off to the Merck offices to do a spot for Viagra, with Rafael Palmeiro! And without the .com, it wouldn't be possible.. | |
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But I digress. Let's get back to the beginning. Once upon a time (let's say around 1996) there lived a boy named Stemme. An angst-driven teen with gangly arms and an underappreciated wit, he enrolled at the local highschool to finish his secondary education. For reasons unknown, he chose to associate with a fat kid named Terry as he began to find his place in his new school. (Speculation is, the weight of Stemme and Terry combined with each other, putting them both at their ideal weight. Considering that Stemme is somewhat of a fatass himself now, the scenario has been rendered moot.) Anyhoo, one day Terry said to his beanpole friend: "You can get a FREE website from this Geocities place!" Being a red blooded American Stemme was drawn by the offer of "free" and he promptly designed himself the greatest crappy webpage in the history of the world. And this is what it looked like. |
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From here, it was only a matter of weeks until he adopted the lame pseudonym ZombieMan and started work on The Aerosmith Tribute. While completely sad and pathetic, it served him well because this is where he learned the HTML code that is essential when trying to program in HTML. This page underwent several transitions before he started a spinoff of the Tribute, the Tom Petty Pictorial Shrine. But he then realized how shitty Aerosmith was as a band, and soon there was something bigger on the horizon... | |
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May of 1997 was noted for 2 things in Stemme's webpage career: the threat of the Twins moving and the media-ownership shakeup of FM stations. This led to the "Stern Sucks" page (of which no archive exists anymore) and the "Save the Twins" (later the MSC) page. Neither of these got very far at all, content-wise, but are notable because they were the first pages to feature collaborations with other people (Terry and Andrew on the Stern site). Then in July Stemme got satellite TV. Now, satellite TV and techie tendencies work against you when you spend a lot of time by yourself. Thus we have the DiSH Network Tribute. Not much exists of the original site, but it represents the first time he actually dove into the HTML language and using tables and frames. |
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