Kibo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article.
Please improve it or discuss changes on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.

For other uses, see Kibo (disambiguation).

Kibo (IPA: [ˈkaɪ.boʊ]) is the nickname, username and e-mail address of James Parry (b. July 13, 1967), a Usenetter known for his sense of humor, various surrealist net pranks, an absurdly long .signature,^[1] and a machine-assisted knack for joining any thread in which his nom de guerre is mentioned (to "kiboze"). His exploits have earned him a multitude of enthusiasts, who celebrate him as the head deity of the parody religion kibology, centered on the humor newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.

1 Background
2 Growing fame
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Background

James Parry grew up and lived in Scotia, New York. He showed early computing skills, such as being able to open up and reprogram ROM video game cartridges such as those for the Atari 2600, but was more interested in graphics and artistic pursuits. In this vein, he initially was a Computer engineering major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, but moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1990 and attended Emerson College, where he studied videography and graphic design. At that time, he also worked as a typeface designer and for the world.std.com internet service provider. He has an artistic eye for typeface and developed several fonts in use today.

Kibo has publicly stated that he has prosopagnosia and is a supertaster. He frequently dyes his hair, which as of late 2005 is bright red.

Many assume his nickname is derived from the acronym KIBO, although Parry himself has repeatedly denied this. Another rumor has it being short for King Body, a pseudonym he very briefly used on computer forums as an undergraduate at RPI in the late 1980's. [1] The word 'kibo' has a long history of use in Southern Ontario Scout camps as the word of the outhouse-toilets. The origin of the word and this use is unknown.

[edit] 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.

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:

>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 become 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 1:

"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.*

It is estimated that the statistical breakdown of HappyNet 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.

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 Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot. This led the Libertarian Party to complain that its candidate was not included, though a joke candidate was.

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. ^[2]