Thing is, whenever someone decides to use a medium either as a form of activism or to uphold a cause, you can count on a couple of hundred others turning up with their own issues that range from purely farcical to the downright bizarre.

On the one hand, Yahoo! has a thousand Web sites dedicated to ‘normal’ causes that include afrocentrism, age discrimination, climate change, human genome projects, minimum wages, multiculturalism, second hand smoke, and even shorter work weeks.

On the other, sites like the amazing ribbon-o-matic let you create your own protest ribbons for any cause you wish to get hoarse about. There’s a form to fill, and 32000 ribbons in over 115 categories to choose from. And yes, you can type all you want; the ribbon-o-matic will automatically adjust the size of the ribbon to fit.

Also about ribbons, but not as innocuous, is the RGB ribbon campaign set up by people who want to eradicate free speech on the Internet. They urge visitors to post the ribbon on their Web sites as visual cues denoting a refusal to model the ‘precious virtual world’ after our ‘ignorant’ physical one.

Yet another ribbon campaign professes an undying love of coffee mugs! The purple ribbon campaign is dedicated to the recognition and appreciation of mugs in our modern lives. Why? Because our mugs are ‘unseen heroes’ who ‘never talk back…and never betray you’.

Whatever.

Is ‘simple living’ a cause? Members of the Seeds of Simplicity program strongly believe it is. Taking that simplicity a step further, a bunch of guys have even thought up a Buy Nothing Day, to force us out of the ‘shop-till-you-drop’ imperative. It’s on November 23 though so, till then, shop on.

The ladies against women have a few issues of their own, tongues firmly in cheek. These ‘truly tasteful’ females have a number of demands that include the abolishment of the environment (‘takes up too much space, and is almost impossible to keep clean’), universal free childcare (‘no one should be paid to do what a real lady does in her home for free’) and even ‘procreation, not recreation’ (‘where did so many gals get the idea that sex is supposed to be fun? It's time to close your eyes and do your duty!’).

Do you know what a tort is? I didn’t. At least not until the society for tort prevention brought it to my attention. According to Webster's New World Dictionary, it’s a wrongful act for which civil action can be brought. It’s got a ‘sister society’ too, called The Society for Tort Promotion. And I thought I was confused…

There are loads of other special folk out there, with their own special societies. Try the traffic cone preservation society, cosmic ray deflection society or even the flat earth society -- that claims to be anything but a ‘crackpot’ group – for proof.

Two more that warrant attention are the society for the preservation of the other 25 letters of the alphabet and the anti-banana society.

While the former takes up cudgels against the sudden proliferation of the letter ‘e’ in our post-Internet age (e-circle, e-generation, e-leaders, e-funerals, e-dog, e-bank and e-vil), the latter wants to rid the world of bananas. It claims to be a new subdivision of the United Nations, designed to ‘purify’ the world of this popular fruit. “Sure, bananas LOOK and SOUND nice -- but they're not. The situation is getting out of hand. It's a problem just waiting to happen.” Yeah, right.

Let’s reserve our comments, shall we? There’s a banana somewhere waiting to be eaten.

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 -- The world of online activism