The Global Weirdness Initiative

The best thing about the internet, I've always felt, is the sheer quantity of incredibly weird stuff on it. For instance, I was just checking out the Barrelhouse Blog, as I am wont to do from time to time, when I came across this post about a guy (it has to be a guy, right?) who posted an ad on Craigslist looking for a professional writer to write the "about me" section of his personal ad on a dating site. That's good stuff, right? What I'm wondering today is this: before Al Gore invented the internet, what happened to stuff like this? Did it just evaporate? What were the old outlets for weirdness?

And since this is a book blog, I have to ask: at what point does the economy get so bad that somebody with a book published by Knopf read that ad and think, "I hope no one else has seen this one yet."