Fark Founder Celebrates 25 Years Of Riffing On Weird News

One of the internet’s oldest spots for weird links turns 25 this month, and it all started with a photo of a squirrel with giant nuts.

In October 1999, Fark.com began posting links to wacky stories along with user-submitted headlines that were invariably funnier than the originals.

Founder Drew Curtis said that for two years, before he started the site as it exists today, he used a photo of a squirrel with giant testicles as a placeholder.

Curtis said he used to use the word “fark” a lot as a euphemism for profanity in his daily life, but registered it as a domain name in 1997 after he heard the internet was running out of four-letter domain names.

“I had no idea of what to do with the site, so I put a photo of the squirrel with giant nuts,” Curtis told HuffPost. (The well-endowed rodent can still be seen on Fark’s FAQ page.)

Eventually, Curtis decided the website should be a place where he could post links to weird news stories he found, a knack he told Ace Magazine “was an actual talent in the days of print and early digital.”

With its links to news stories recaptioned with alternative headlines, Curtis turned Fark into what he hoped “would be a central place for all things Not News.”

A funny thing happened, he told Ace Magazine.

“Over the next 25 years though, Not News somehow absorbed the entire news cycle,” he said. “It was a happy accident. Well, for me anyhow, I don’t think it’s done the rest of us any favors.”

Fark’s popularity grew slowly at first, but Curtis said things really took off after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when a lot of websites were having trouble staying online.

“We didn’t crash and traffic doubled,” he told HuffPost.

The real-time experience did change how the site worked, though.

“Ri