Beware the Trunk Monkey!                               

by Don Baumgart

                NEVADA CITY - As I departed on an important foreign assignment, exposing evil doers wherever I can hire them, I left behind this warning: Beware the Trunk Monkey!

                Consider this possible scenario. This time instead of flight schools, a bunch of suspicious characters (if you can't do the time, don't look Middle Eastern) check into these "learn computers" schools advertised to the growing unemployed male population of afternoon tv watchers.

                The terrorists learn how to work computers and how to send spam.

                Next they acquire their weapon.

                The weapon is the "Trunk Monkey," a short video clip that starts with an enraged face shouting through a car window at a cowering driver: "You cut me off...!!!" The guy behind the wheel, shirt & tie, bald, sweating, pushes a button on the dash "RELEASE TRUNK MONKEY."

                The trunk pops open, a chimpanzee with a tire iron jumps out, whacks the road-rager. "Get back in the trunk," the driver says.

                End.

                This catchy little item gets e-mailed around at least as much these days as copies of Senator Byrd's rant against President Fratboy. One morning your server tells you there are 37 messages waiting to talk to you. What it doesn't tell you is that the first 28 are copies of "Trunk Monkey" sent to you by friends who thought you'd like it.

                Then the Terrorist Spam hits. The first day everybody has 251 messages waiting to download. Two-hundred fifty are the Trunk Monkey Virus. The last one is an urgent demand message from kidnappers.

                The federal government goes berserk and changes the alert color code to brown.

                The following day everyone has several thousand copies of the Terrorist Trunk Monkey Virus waiting for them. No van full of fertilizer and diesel fuel on the Golden Gate Bridge, no exploding shoes on airplanes. Spam. Long download spam.

                Trunk Monkey takes 15 minutes to download.

                Do the math. How many monkeys does it take to eat the internet?

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