i'm going to tell a story which i'm sure will sound familiar to many of you who have ended up here at the strag headquarters.

my friends and i have been emailing entertaining av files to each other for years, these include everything from outright porn and medical obscenities to sound files and animal antics. after a few years of this we started to acquire quite a collection of bizarre images and stories. at first it was just the humor and shock value which attracted me to them but as i got older i started to appreciate more and more the bizarre things that people get their bodies to do. everything from tattoos and extreme body modification to rock climbing and other extreme sports. i think it's amazing the wide variety of things that people can make their bodies do, endure having done to their bodies and get off on in general.

now, back to the point ...

i never really questioned that my friends and i did this, it was just something that was always going on in the background. however as i became professionally involved with computers and started visiting customer sites, and using other peoples computers (to fix them) i started to notice that it wasn't just me that did this, and even more strangely it wasn't just people like me that did this. all kinds of "ordinary" people were sending all kinds of obscene material to their friends, families and especially their work mates. from this i eventually deduced two things:

• somehow, email has made the sharing of objectionable and obscene material acceptable for people who in any other format would never admit they thought this stuff was funny, cool or sexy.

• you really can't judge a book by it's cover (and the corollary "you'll never know what kinda of girl she is, until you ask").

so i was talking about this to my friend frog. honestly i can't remember exactly how it happened anymore but together he and i decided that there needed to be a word to describe the material that people mail to each other. porn simply didn't cover it, there was all kinds of stuff being sent out which wasn't even close to porn (unless you're a real freak!). we needed a word to describe this cross section of the internet world where really the only common thread between it all is that it was all strange. so frog went away and did some thinking and came back with the word stragophy. as pornography is a mixture of the greek words pornos (erotic love) and graphos (to write) so is stragophy a mixture of the words strange and graphos.