ITEM: Appliance and car manufacturers are rushing to hook their products up to the ‘net so your refrigerator can automatically order milk to be delivered when you get low and you can run your bath water while sitting in rush hour traffic.

ITEM: The town of Halfway, Oregon has renamed itself Half.com.

ITEM: Ultra-orthodox Jews have been banned from using the Internet by rabbis.

ITEM: You can now get doctors to bid online for the honor of performing your next surgery.

     Obviously if Half.com can buy a town then online auctions are officially Big Business. Not since the words "yard", "sale", and "Do you really think someone will pay for this cracked Charles and Diana commemorative floss holder" were put together have so many people paid so much for so little. It’s gotten so you can put most anything out for bid, even surgery. Yes, in an epiphany which could only be caused by electromagnetic fields scrambling brain cells, www.medicineonline.com has started a website which lets you solicit bids for that cosmetic, foot, or corrective vision surgery you’ve been needing. I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly dying to be cut open by the lowest bidder—dying, of course, being the imperative word.

     It seems odd that that they’re worried about their followers’ will power. After all, anyone who can resist the smell of shrimp etouffeé should be able to resist a simple porn site. But new research shows that porn sites are closer than you think. Lada Adamic, a Stanford University graduate student, recently figured out that any two web sites are only four mouse clicks apart, making the old six-degrees-of-separation theory as outdated as that carton of chunky style milk hiding in the back of your refrigerator. You know, the one an Internet-connected refrigerator would have thrown out by now.

     The six-degrees-of-separation theory, for those of you who just broke out in a cold sweat because you think I’m talking about geometry, is commonly known as the Kevin Bacon Game. This is a parlor game where you find your way from Kevin Bacon to any other actor using a maximum of six connections, hopefully without having to stop and watch Tremors to do it. But that’s history. Thanks to the Internet the world is now much closer, which is why it only takes four clicks to get from one useless site to any other. Sure you need to know which links to click, but I’m sure after stumbling upon Danny’s Unlit Closet Cam a few dozen times you’ll get the hang of it.