Senator mocked for Internet 'tube' speech
By Liz Ruskin
McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
July 18, 2006
WASHINGTON – Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, is enduring no end of ridicule in the blogosphere for his recent explanation, in a Commerce Committee debate, of how the Internet works.
“The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes,” he said during a June 28 committee session. “And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled. And if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”
At another point in his 11-minute discourse, he said he'd seen these delays firsthand: “I just the other day got – an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.”
Internet pundits greeted his explanations with a nonstop snigger fest, with extra helpings of derision, on sites such as boingboing, Daily Kos, Fark, MySpace and YouTube. The transcript of his remarks, and links to the recording itself, have been circulating like crazy. Blog viewers can find a tube T-shirt design, a PowerPoint cartoon and a Ted Stevens techno remix, which has Stevens repeating “a series of tubes!” and extended umm-ing and er-ing. By Friday, the techno remix was being celebrated in a video showing all manner of vacuum tubes, pneumatic tubes and other 1950s-style technology.
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Stevens' staff director on the Commerce Committee, Lisa Sutherland, said the bloggers were making fun of Stevens for a pretty minor mistake: saying “tubes” rather than “pipes.” The latter is common slang in the telecom industry, especially when discussing the Internet carrying capacity of phone lines or cable.
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