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You can't fall in love with a website.

Now, the World Wide Web is fun in a frustrating kind of way. Every time I see the words "DNS entry not found," I throw back my head and roar with delight. But ever since I realized that the Web has a worm, that is, an indexing tool that scans the Web and collects URLs, I've been a little queasy. I feel like I should take the World Wide Web to the vet, or something. A worm in a web? In real life, that's kind of creepy. In cyberspace, it's cool.

Of course, I've given up on the idea of taking the World Wide Web in for shots and a checkup. Couldn't find a pet carrier big enough. Oh, I had a THREE-D model of a pet carrier, all right, textures bitmaps and polys were looking pretty good, but every time I put it in the car, I'd crash. So there you go, or don't go, as the case usually is.

Maybe the time has come to define the limits of this little virtual world. Let's stop kidding ourselves. There are some things you can do very well on the Internet-- swap insults, information, and strange sexual fantasies. Want to download a plug-in that you can never get to work? Done in a snap! Roam aimlessly through a wilderness of links? Hey, that's what the Web is all about.

But there are some things the Internet just cannot provide: hot coffee, a hot shower, an organ transplant, or rabies shot, for instance. You can't get an Indian burn, a wedgie, or a Hertz donut, unless it's virtual.

You can't catch the Measles, or an I Love Lucy rerun, not yet anyway. Can't catch a falling star and put it in your pocket save it for a rainy day, or open an umbrella which would be bad luck anyway, unless you log on outside in the rain, and how likely is that?

You can't have a mano a mano fight to the death with a supervillain bent on global domination, unless the supervillain is a cluster of polygons. You can't go really fast down the freeway the wrong way with your lights out.

You can't pick your nose, though you can pick your friend's nose, in certain chat rooms, if you have the right password. You can't shave. You can't pad around your wretched hovel scratching yourself and mumbling. There are no wretched hovels in cyberspace. Either a site is cool or it's not. Still you can't fall in love with a website. You can fall in love, maybe, if you're lucky, but take my advice, and never never fall in love with tech support. They'll only break your heart. I gotta go.