The sports area was the baby of a bearded, forty-something editor named Eric Harris who had turned into a Nethead, and who like Schlukbier came with a nickname: “Zonker.” A child, seeing the beard and taking in the personality, had compared him to the Doonesbury character. That was a little unfair. Zonker of the comics is a goof-off, while Zonker of the Net is a workaholic whose messages might bear 4 A.M. time stamps. Harris is Webmaster—the man with the daily responsibility for the content of the Web area in general—but his true love was sports. He packed the server with game schedules. During the ’94 baseball strike the _N & O_ indulged fans with whimsy such as “Cybersox Take the World Series”—reportage of mythical games. “Need something to do while we wait for the owners and players to resolve their differences?” the Web area asked on another electronic page. “Well, the Baseball Server is doing its part. Download the above images, tack them onto the wall, and buy a set of darts. Then, every time you feel a twinge of baseball withdrawal, grab a dart, think a ‘warm’ thought about one of the participants, and let the fun begin.” And sure enough, Netfolks could print out pictures of the villains, each of whom had a superimposed picture of a dartboard and the wonderful caption: “The only losers are the fans.” The _N & O_ also shared with the Net a variety of other material, of which my favorite was North Carolina Discoveries. A lively feature writer named Julie Ann Powers sought out offbeat places. In Lake Norman, for example, she found that “houses and hangars ring the airstrip and each lot comes with a grass taxiway to the paved and lighted runway.” In Orient, a hamburger-and-hot-dog cook named Red Lee claimed that at twenty-five cents each, his offerings were the cheapest in the country. And in Tryon, the publishers of the _Daily Bulletin_ said that at 8 by 11 inches, their newspaper might be the smallest in the world. Powers drove from town to town in a Ford Explorer that she had nicknamed Barlowe after Arthur Barlowe—one of the first Europeans to behold the state of North Carolina. Barlowe was a gadgeteer’s heaven on wheels, full of audio and video equipment. People on the Web didn’t just enjoy gloriously descriptive stories from Powers: with Mosaic-style software they could _see_ a picture of her wearing a sun hat on a beach or gaze at sand dunes or waterfalls or whatever she happened to be writing about at the time. If they owned a sound card, they could _hear_, too. She walked around carrying a microphone so large that it resembled a folded-up umbrella.