And so the real jouney began when I typed
www.crips.com into my browser. Go ahead and click on it.
Just a weird tripped out page that says, "Am I a Crip or a Blood? I do not know. What makes us different? Is it the color of our clothes or the color of our skin?" And in the center is a green dot that links to
www.hackerscanyon.com/CanyonPoems/1.htm.
Before we leave this page, we can look at the source and see the keywords that have been assigned: Crips, Crip, Gangs, gang colors, gang style, Hackers Canyon, HackersCanyon, Senorita, senoritas, women, wild women, girls gone wild, dating, girl gangs, girl hackers, sex, porn, sexy, sexy girls, naked women, babes, Surenos, sureno, Mexican Mafia, 13, thirteen, la eme, gangs, gangsters, Hackers Canyon, HackersCanyon.com, HackersCanyon, Dirkster Productions, Dirkster, TramLaw, WalMart.com, WalMart, Wal Mart, Wal-Mart, gang colors, gang style, proactive alerting, closed-loop bi, portals, extranets, application integration, embedded intelligence, eme, la eme, laeme, Sureno, surenos, crips, crip, crips.com, bloods, bloods.com, Latin, Kings, Mexican Mafia, MexicanMafia, Folks, Folks, Nortenos, Norteno, ViceLord, Vicelords, HackersCanyon.com, and Gangster. A few oddities (Wal-Mart? embedded intelligence?), but mostly themed.
So let's move on to that first link:
www.hackerscanyon.com/CanyonPoems/1.htm
A page titled "Streets" with a graffiti style image and a poem about the streets by "DTL". The image is another link to another poem: hackerscanyon.com/CanyonPoems/WhatWouldIDieFor.html.
This has a terribly rendered image of a wizard hat and some other crap. Another poem about the "streets" from "DTL". And another linked image, this time to an image of the Silver Surfer (a popular nerd icon) on the page hackerscanyon.com/CanyonPoems/NoFateButWhatYouMake.html where have the same format of image and poem by DTL.
The next page is a suprise, because I assumed this was a long lost website, but at hackerscanyon.com/CanyonPoems/NoWizards.html we see an image from Lord of the Rings. Interesting. This "NoWizards" page is all about God and good vs. evil. By this time, i'm starting to get bored of this.
But on the next page, hackerscanyon.com/CanyonPoems/NoWastedMovesMakesTimeStandStill.html we get a name for DTL; Dirk T. Lemmons. And also a graphic that I have only ever seen on the JWZ.org website (scroll down). Is this another nerd clue?
The next page is finally outside of the "CanyonPoems" directory:
www.hackerscanyon.com/canyondr.htm and is a picture of the Grim Reaper. And then, one more click it's like we passed some sort of test. No more poems.
The page Me.html shows a dove flapping it's wings over what looks like a cross between a Jedi Knight and a film noir private investigator. And we are now given a choice: click on the weird image of the confused character (taking us to
www.hackerscanyon.com/Hackers_Canyon2.html, which is probably the best page on the internet) or push the red button (and jump to
www.imports.org/, where we have more text and links).
Imports.org gets real tripped out with a link to the God page,
www.imports.org/God.html where a giant eye pours molten hot lava onto the moon. Then it feels like we're about to be sold some new age solution with the bloody imp picture on NoFear. And finally, more options at TheTreasure, which is interestingly at dirkster.com (which has only one link back to hackerscanyon.com.
By this time the links seem both endless, repetitive, and boring.
Let's take a look at the WHOIS info on some of these websites:
And we also see the author is Dirkster Productions. A Whois shows the website is registered to:
Dirkster Productions
Rogers, Arkansas
Next we do a Whois on "hackerscanyon.com" and we get a little more info:
Dirkster Productions
Dirk Lemmons
Rogers, AR
Email:
dirk@dirkster.com
Email:
dirk@ateup.com
And of course it turns out the whole thing is just this one guy, Dirk Lemmons, with too many websites and a weird marketing ploy for his unpublished book. A 1999 article about on-line gangs in Salon explains that Drik "lives in rural Missouri, grew up in a middle- to upper-class neighborhood and spent time managing a real estate company in the slums of St. Louis." And another article describes Dirk as "a middle-age father of two in rural Cassville, Mo." who "spent the early part of his career in a depressed area of St. Louis, where he said he roamed the streets with 'a gun shoved down my waistband and a gun in my ankle.' He sold security equipment such as iron window bars".