According to a recent Anti-Sociology Study conducted by Dr. Zoltan Øbelisk, Normal Humans have invaded The Internet, a place which has, until recently, been a sanctuary for non-conformists, hackers, social outcasts, phreaks, SubGenii, and all other flavors of Intelligentsia (a 19th century Russian term meaning, “a social class of people engaged in complex mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture).

“There is an astronomical increase in Normal Content on The Internet,” reports Dr. Øbelisk. “Photos of Normals posing with alcoholic beverages in restaurants, photos of Normals wearing bathing suits and smiling on the beach, photos of Normals smashing their faces together and sticking their tongues out.”

Professional Colleague, Dr. Whilton Popple, who boasts a Ph.D. in Social Metaphysics, noted that, “As of August 2009, thanks to Facebook, photos of infants now outnumber photos of female breasts on The Internet, which is… remarkable and disturbing.”

Twitter, an easy-to-use social networking tool, has been flooded with meaningless minute-to-minute messages chronicling the lives of The Normals, such as, “watching TV” and “so sleeeeeeeeeeeeepy!”

“The cost of this new breed of spam is immeasurable. Billions of dollars are spent on high-speed web servers in the Pacific Northwest and this is the best data you can create for them to store? No one cares if you just dropped off your rent check, are now on your way to the bank, and then picking up some pasta salad with cherry tomatoes, tinned tuna and a bit of mayo for tomorrow’s lunch,” hissed Popple.

Up until the late 1990’s, Internet Technology was primarily used to connect networks of computers for the purposes of processing and sharing important data.

“Yeah, we mostly used it to study science, but we had some fun, too. We had all read The Anarchist’s Cookbook by the time we were 12. I mean, come on,” says Dan Silverman, a high school chemistry teacher in Fairbury, Nebraska. “I remember… once a year we’d meet up for what we called a Con. All five Boards from our region banded together and put on PentaCon. We stayed up all night eating pretzels… writing disgusting poems and feeding the text into Dr. Sbaitso. I think this was 1991 or so. Back before The Normals took over.”

But the Normals didn’t stop with The Internet. They’ve desecrated other once-sacred annual cultural events that were previous only exciting to Mutants.

“It’s a big post-modern mess. First we had The Invasion of the Normals on the Internet, and now they’ve watched The Matrix, broken through the veil between the worlds, and they’re Invading our Cons,” added Silverman, reluctantly.

Theodore Lipton, a member of MENSA and late-night restaurant cook from Ash Fork, AZ reports: “In 1970 my friends and I saved up all summer and drove across the Mojave in my mom’s station wagon to the very first San Diego ComicCon. It was uncanny, no pun intended, to see 300 people that liked comic books. It changed my life. It became a yearly pilgrimage, until 2008, when I couldn’t even get a pass because of the glut of Normals and Slutty Goth Girls. In 2009 it sold out 11 months in advance. I barely got in for one day, but 140,000 Alpha-Betas were there in 2009. How does that make any sense?”

“The end of THAC0 is like Year Zero, the apocalypse for all of us. Once they switched it all over to D20 to accommodate people who can’t do math and read charts, it was over,” says Sally Thompson owner of a used book store in Boise, Idaho.

Never fear, Sally. A non-profit organization called The War On Fun will be launching a campaign to promote Normalopolis, a Sports Complex Dome twenty-times the size of the San Diego Sports Area, with a capacity of 250,000. Sponsored by Disney / Marvel, ComicCon will act as a Decoy Convention, attracting Jocks, Lawyers, Rich Kids With Nice Haircuts And Cars, and entire families of Pinks.

According to the War On Fun website, “The Normals will be lured into paying $425 for a 4 day fun pass (also valid at Disneyland, which will be connected via high-speed rail). From there, they can walk around, get drunk, and buy overpriced, fake Marvel comic books (specially printed with blank pages) without disturbing The Mutants and their Important Intellectual Activities.

Theodore Lipton is hopeful.

“There’s no safe place left for us. Let’s pray that giant Roach Motel gets built.”

• • •

This article by Dr. Zoltan was not accepted in accordance with The Onion’s Editorial Policy.

Lifestyle designer and time-management philosopher, Tim Ferriss, wasted a total of 3.82 seconds on Sunday evening, when he absent-mindedly glanced at a Calvin Klein billboard while on an errand.

“The Marina is ranked by my research team as THE most streamlined and efficient traffic-grid in North America. Its contra-rotating circuit patterns and direct lateral orbit synchronizations are second to none. See, what I do is rent an Electric Scooter online, pick it up at the end of my street, then ride it entirely downhill on Fillmore, turn it back in at the station at the bottom of hill, then take the bus back home. I don’t have to pay for the battery recharge,” said Ferriss. “But that’s where everything went wrong.”

The young, physically fit author says that on his way down the hill, he felt a sneeze coming on. He looked up at a 45 degree angle, pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth in order to pacify the sternutatal nerve, a technique he learned while traveling the countryside by unicycle in India. “That’s when I saw the damned billboard and got totally distracted for a few seconds.”

He then missed his bus back up the hill, which departs from the corner of Fillmore & Chestnut between 4 and 5 seconds after he deposits his rent check into his landlord’s mail slot. He was then required to jog back up the hill without the aid of his Nike iPod Interface. On the way, he purchased a small package of unsalted peanuts, which slightly raised the density of Immunoglobin E in his blood, causing him to jog at a 6% deficiency.

Ferriss claims the delay in his return home over-humidified his apartment, causing a drop in oxygen levels in his personal rain-forest which decreased his handwriting speed by 4% over several days. He also cited an inability to focus on his book-on-tape Vietnamese language studies, missed his Kenpo class, and forgot to take his hourly hypodermic B12 supplement several times. He spent the rest of the evening depressed, shopping on Craigslist for exercise equipment, then fell asleep on the futon.

An elaborate chapter on the holistic health benefits of ignoring roadside billboards is featured in Ferriss’ new book, “The Twelve-Minute Errand,” which teaches entrepreneurs to speed-read street signs in over 20 languages, allowing anyone to filter out unnecessary information while engaged in time-critical daily missions.

“Even the most efficient time-management guru can make a mistake, I guess,” said Ferriss, in a press release written by his team of Personal Assistants, who were themselves on vacation in Qatar while subcontracting their work to a firm in Utah. “This has taken me weeks to recover from. Don’t make the same mistake I did.”

As restitution, Pre-Orders of Ferriss’ “Philosophy of Impatience” eBook are being offered at a 17.4% discount off the $1997 price if they purchased their tickets through Twitter at 7:46pm PST on March 29, which were the exact moments when Tim was too distracted to process orders completely efficiently via Skype on his iPhone.

Readers of Tim’s personal blog were disappointed.

“Your advice has taught me how to drink fourteen gallons of Starbucks Coffee in only one afternoon without getting sick, how to use NLP to cut in line at the restroom, and techniques for social engineering at the post office. Through one of your blog posts I even learned how to craft a crude Indonesian bow & arrow out of ordinary office supplies. I can’t believe I even wasted 32.48 seconds posting this comment.”

The above article was preemptively rejected by The Onion. For more stories from Beneath The Imaginary City, visit www.drzoltan.com.

Will Maier participated in a Séance this past weekend, during which Freddie Mercury’s Ghost was summoned and interrogated. Special thanks to Paul Feldman for his Stage Mediumship Scriptwriting Skills (10.0).

Dr. Zoltan wrote this blog entry while blindfolded, kneeling in front of a man holding a mummy’s foot in one hand and a crystal wand in the other. The man checked his pocket watch, cleared his throat, and brushed the cracker crumbs from his robe. Visit http://www.drzoltan.com/blog to find out the conclusion to this astonishing, esoteric scene!