CatBus said:
TV’s Frink said:
CatBus said:
CowboyNeal.
Googling that was of no help.
I aim to baffle.
It’s a Slashdot reference. A million idiots would race there to post a message on a new item that said “First post”. When Slashdot ran polls, they would usually have a nonsense answer in the poll called “CowboyNeal”, which would usually win.
A likely reference to Neal Cassady AKA Cowboy Neal AKA Dean Moriarity in Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” and Cody in “Visions of Cody”. Ginsberg was to call “N.C” the secret hero of his poem “Howl”.
While skippin’ through the lily fields,
I came across an empty space.
It trembled and exploded; left a bus stop in its place.
The bus came by and I got on; that’s when it all began.
There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to
never-never land.
"Cassady is revved up like they’ve never see him before, with his shirt off, a straw version of a cowboy hat on his head, bouncing up and down on the driver’s seat, shifting gears - doubledy-clutch, doubledy-clutch, blamming on the steering wheel and the gearshift box, rapping over the microphone rigged up by his seat like a manic tour guide, describing every car going by. -Tom Wolfe “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”
“Obviously the ‘purpose’ of the trip is carefully selected to symbolize the basic fact of purposelessness. Neal is, of course, the very soul of the voyage into pure, abstract meaningless motion. He is The Mover, compulsive, dedicated, ready to sacrifice family, friends, even his very car itself to the necessity of moving from one place to another.”
-William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg on Neal and his skeptical views of the man and voyage which spurred On The Road