the name

The Book of Shenry, huh? What’s that all about? It’s not a book; it’s just an unfocused web log.

Well gather ye ‘round children and let me tell ye a tale. Here’s your history lesson:

Back in the day, I’m talking early-early 1990s, I was chilling in high school with all my computer geek buddies in a boring-ass Pascal programming class. Yeah, Pascal… though maybe it was a Unix class. Hell, it doesn’t matter. From what I’ve seen, a high school offering any programming or operating systems classes in 1990 was fairly rare. My school, George Washington, boasted the best high school computer labs (yes, more than one lab) in the state. I’m talking monochromatic monitors, dot-matrix printers, and dos shells. The labs even had direct connections to the enigmatic internet. The C.A.D. lab was decked out with some high-tech mainframes and shit. It was wicked-awesome.

Sorry, back to the Pascal class.

Anyway the class was fairly boring, but at least we had email to keep us entertained. We zapped messages back and forth, taunting the teacher behind his back. The class utilized the standard first initial with last name for its email convention. Being a gaggle of computer geeks we greedily latched on to these monikers when referring to each other. We would simply sound out the email address, which sometimes resulted in weird slurs of consonants. Good old dpeak was pronounced more like dha-peak. Poor rmitche had a truncated address (it should have been rmitchell but that was too many letters) that just didn’t mesh well with our English-speaking tongues. We gave up trying to pronounce the damn address and settled on calling him amish (no relation to the Mennonites, though). So there you have the origins of shenry, but you probably had most of that (minus the Pascal class) already figured out.

One day in class, dpeak and I were involved in a rapid-fire exchange of emails. I can’t remember what the hell we were arguing about, but I made up a bunch of bogus fact to support my position and zapped them over to dpeak. Dpeak, by no means a gullible man, requested the reference from whence I discovered these facts. My response went something like this:

“It was written in the Book of Shenry. Duh.”

And there you have it, the first reference to The Book of Shenry was made in 1990 (roughly, could’ve been 1991 or 1992), years before the actual Book was written.

Well, somehow this non-existent Book became a running joke that slowly took on a life of it’s own. It was used to fabricate many facts. According to emails citing The Book, the chaardvicken was progenitor of all thought and logic. The chaardvicken, per The Book, was a primordial creature that was part aardvark and park chicken. I never knew which parts came from which animals, but I hoped (and still do hope) that the legs and wings came from the chicken… mmm, drumsticks and buffalo wings ala chaardvicken. Throughout the semester, many humorous stories and creative slanders manifested from these emails. At the end of the year, for posterity’s sake, I took all the emails pertaining to The Book of Shenry and compiled them into a nice, neat binder.

As I reflected upon the completed binder, I realized that I had literary gold in my hand. I took all the half assed thoughts --like the chaadvicken-- and all the pucker assed characters --like Unrayth The Wise, Zagnut the Unholy, and Sphincter Boy-- and used them as fertilizer for a sub-epic adventurous farce. The writing and editing took the rest of my high school career and a solid year thereafter to complete.

So, yes, there really is a Book of Shenry out there. Actually, it’s not out anywhere since it has never been published. There are a discrete few bound copies in circulation, but those who helped fertilize the concept hold them. I like to call it a limited edition release, which will invariably inflate the price of this soon to be collector’s prize. Neko (who I need to call or email this week), dpeak (who I haven’t seen in 8 years), the Anti-Shenry (who bagged out of our coffee date last Sunday), Paht (who has fallen off the face of the earth), Fiona (who probably hates my guts right now), Mike (who just moved back to Denver last month), and I may or may not possess bound Books; thus, totaling seven possible copies in circulation.

I do have an electronic copy of the entire Book. Unfortunately it’s in WordPerfect v4.1 (plus or minus a 0.1) and the conversion from arcane WordPerfect to modern MS Word sucks ass. The text converts fine, but styles, formats, tabs, headers/footers, special characters, etc. turn to shit in the conversion. Such is life. I’m a lazy ass and I cannot justify the effort involved to reformat the entire document. In all honesty (and call this “rationalization for being lazy” if you want), The Book of Shenry was aimed at an audience the size of a typical high school classroom… a typical high school Fortran (or was it Pascal?) class. There is no mass appeal to The Book, as it’s just a bunch of inside jokes that revolve around a year’s worth of adolescent emails sent in the early 1990s.

There is the story of The Book of Shenry.

Damn it! Sit down class, this doesn’t mean that the history lesson is over.

So why title my blog The Book of Shenry? A little over a year ago I was introduced to the blogiverse by my buddy neko. She was living in San Diego at the time and our correspondences were limited to monthly phone calls. She offered up her web address and from then on I could track my friend’s life while sitting at work sipping my midmorning coffee. Neko inspired me to rev up my own web log. When I was forced to title my blog I reverted to The Book of Shenry. In hindsight, I chose that title because neko was an avid supporter in my efforts to create the o.g. Book and because the title rolls off my tongue like saliva rope and spit.

Class dismissed!
...and so it was written, shenry at 9/02/2003 02:46:00 PM.
...and so it was appended with .