Weekly Whack: The One Hundredth Weekly Whack
The One Hundredth Weekly Whack
June 15, 1997

Well this feeling seems familiar. It's Sunday, I'm sitting in front of my computer, and I'm trying to think of something to write for this week's Whack. I just kind of let my mind wander as I stare at the blinking cursor for awhile. After a few minutes my screen saver kicks in, and I become hypnotized by a floating gif of my head bouncing all around my computer screen. When I return to my senses, I gander through some of my old Word files to see if I have anything that is mildly funny that I wrote for a different purpose and see if I can possible recycle it as a Whack. After realizing that everything is all used up, I go back to my original task of trying to think of something to write the Whack on. Eventually I just write something about the past week, throw in some humor, and tag on an anti-climatic top ten list. From there I send it to Joe, and it ends up on Feff World, for all to see, about three days later. In a nutshell that is basically the formula I relied on for the past 99 weeks to write the Whack, and this week makes it the big 1-0-0. It may not seem perfect, but it works, and it has gotten me to where I am right now. And looking back at all the 99 Whacks that preceded this one, I think I should be very proud of where I am right now. But I'm not one to rest on my laurels, so the Whack must go on. Since I already revealed the secret on how I write the Whack each week, and I think I will use the remainder of this Whack to uncover some other mysteries around Feff World.

Right off the back we must start with the name Feff. How did I possibly come up with the name Feff? Well it all date back to the fall of 1994, during my junior year in high school. A big pastime of mine is attending high school football games with my dad. I've done it since I was young, and I still do it. Well we were at a game in the fall of 1994 featuring the state powerhouse Randolph High School hosting the perennial conference bottom-dweller East Orange. Also at the game with us were my good friend Chris McKenna (aka Sticky) and his father, who is currently my boss at the ShopRite deli that I work at and that I have mentioned on numerous occasions in the Whacks. Well my friend's father was looking at the program, and being not the most politically correct of souls, he was commenting on the names of the players from East Orange, which is fairly urbanized. Some names included Towan, Alkabir, Rashaad, etc... He gets to one name and says, "Hey check out this kids name." I look at where he is pointing and I see the name Feff Cacho. The whole rest of the game, which was a blowout, the four of us spent joking about the name Feff. After the game whenever my friend's father would see me again he would call me Feff Palermo, and the name just kind of stuck. In English class that year, whenever I had to write a sentence on the board incorporating new vocabulary words, I would always find a way to use the name Feff. That's where Joe was first exposed to the name, and the summer after our junior year, when I first got hooked up to the Internet, it was he who decided to use Feff as my handle for a MOO we were both in, and then as a basis for a web page that we started putting together that July after he moved away.

There is a little side story, however, involving the real "Feff." The June of Junior year I was chosen to attend a weekend workshop for the Rotary Club that was held at Drew University, where I now attend. My roommate for the weekend happened to be a football player from East Orange by the name of Alkabir Owens. I was telling him about the Randolph game, and I mentioned the name Feff Cacho. He was like, "Who?" I repeated the name, and he was like, "You must be talking about Jeff Cacho." Let me tell you, at that moment my face had to turn about three different shades of red. How do you recover from something like that? All in all I would say that I was a little disappointed realizing that there wasn't really a Feff out there, but at least I can have the distinction of being the only one.

Ok, next up is the Mudpuppy. Why is the Mudpuppy the official mascot of Feff World? Well that goes back even further, all the way to 1992, when I was in eighth grade. Eighth grade is when Joe and I first started becoming good friends, and we were in an expository writing class together taught by Herr Schray, who also was a German teacher. We were currently working on an assignment in which we had to pick an animal, describe it, and then the people in the class had to guess which animal it was. I went up to Herr Schray and told him that I was going to do my thing on the mudpuppy, and he said that I couldn't. I asked him why, and he said that someone else already picked it. I ask him who, and he said he couldn't tell because then I would know before he or she read it in class. Defeated, I ended up doing my report on the Portuguese man-o-war. When the time came where we all read our reports in front of the class, whenever it came time to try and guess the animal, either me or Joe would guess the mudpuppy, since we both wanted to know who did the mudpuppy. Well we did this unsuccessfully for well over twenty students, and after the last person in the class went, and it wasn't a mudpuppy, we realized that we were had. For some reason Herr Schray didn't want me to do my report on the mudpuppy, so he resorted to lying to prevent me from doing it. Thus everything else I wrote for him from that point on contained something involving a mudpuppy. The mudpuppy became a symbol for Joe and I, and it stuck with us over three years later when put Feff World together.

Finally there is Ed Vergano. Who is he? And why should he be worshipped? Well those are both very difficult questions. The question of who is Ed Vergano can be better stated, who isn't Ed Vergano. Everybody knows an Ed Vergano, and there is a little Ed Vergano in all of us. He is part man, he is part myth, but he is all Ed. Actually Ed is this guy who went to the same high school as Joe and I, although a grade behind us. He is a big, tall man, built like a lineman, but the only sport who chose to play in high school was bowling. Joe had a copy of the yearbook for the class ahead of us, since that was his last year at that school and he wanted something to remember it by, and there was this one picture that caught our eye. It was the team photo for the bowling team that year. There were all these little bowling twerps, and then Ed just towering above them all. Joe looked at the picture and commented, "Look it Ed in this picture, he stands out like he is some sort of god." From that point on, Ed Vergano was god. On the personal level, Ed and I seem to get along. I don't see him much, but I occasionally e-mail him, and he seems to appreciate my sense of humor, so you got to respect that. But I don't think Ed really likes Joe. They ran into each other at a Academic Bowl meet at Joe's new school, and Joe started bowing at him, and I think Ed kind of found him annoying. Joe just has to hope now that Ed is merciful, or he may damn him for eternity. But anyhoo, God starts college this fall, and the last I heard he was attending the University of Delaware. I also heard that once Ed attends there it will be accepted into the Ivy League and move up to the top spot as the best school in the nation.

Well I think it is time to put a hundred Whacks behind us and start getting ready for hundreds of more, so to conclude for this week, I am the only Feff; Ed is the only God; and Joe is the only person who would put in hours of thankless work in order for me to have my own forum on the Web.

Now for this week's very special feature, Feff's top ten favorite other suggestions for the name of Feff World:

10. Two Guys and a Mule
9. Doug's Ceity Porn Page
8. Feff Universe
7. I Can't Believe It's Not HTML
6. No Disintergrations
5. Yahoo!
4. The Unofficial Full House Homepage
3. Jeff World
2. The Official I Hate Steve Stanlick Homepage
1. The People's Republic of China