The Name’s the Thing

The Internet has finally arrived — barely — in Iraq, as Hussein’s regime is allowing Internet cafes and even home Internet access.

The catch, of course, is that everything routes through the Iraqi’s state ISP, where, presumably, it is closely monitored and filtered (and which is subject to convenient outages).

The fun part is the name of the state ISP: uruklink.net.

They say it’s named afer the ancient city of Uruk.

Uh-huh. Things don’t get much more ironic than that.

(Non-Tolkien types can be let in on the joke below.)

“Uruk” was the name that the Orcs called themselves in Tolkien’s mythos.

Okay, that’s about enough geeky irony for today.