The Best of Craigslist is a time vampire that will consume your life.

If you’re bored at work you might think it’s a good idea to check out The Best of Craigslist – a collection of the funniest, strangest, coolest, most disturbing posts from the world of Craigslist, as voted for by it’s members. This is a mistake.

For it is, in fact, the internet equivalent of the Sirens of old that lured sailors to their doom. It is like electronic heroin.

Friends, family, work, food…nothing matters anymore. Just the next click.

Craigslist - like many things on the internet - scrapes away the thin layer of decency to reveal the rancid, pus-filled reality of human depravity. And it makes for highly entertaining reading.

Personal ads, job offers, “missed connections”, casual encounters (code for no-strings-attached sex) Craigslist has it all. From the guy who just wants someone to join him in a hot tub full of marinara sauce (no sex, just nudity and marinara sauce), to the guy who is trying to get rid of 1,325 Pope Hats (3 of them have some dog bites and one of them is burnt to a crisp, but you can take that one or leave it).

You’ll be enthralled by titles like:

“You're the Hasidic Jew who tried to kill me. I'm the girl on the bike. - w4m”,

“You gave me a bj at the buckethead show tonight - m4w”

"I puked in your purse"

And, "Cute Stool Sample Nurse m4w"

One of the latest posts is a job opportunity for a budding amateur astronaut:

“Astronaut needed for experimental flight to Titan. I have been working on this project now for near 40 years and am afraid I'm no longer fit enough to go.

My secret space craft is the result of my professional experience and imagination while serving the U.S. military in advanced aeronautics as a scientist.

I’m sure a lot of these postings are wind-ups, but you can’t help but feel that maybe one or two of them are intended in all sincerity. And that’s what gives these stories an edge that makes them as addictive as a crystal meth.

And the next thing you know you’re on a dirty mattress in an abandoned apartment, rocking back and forth clutching a grubby laptop balanced on your knees, eating a rank 8 day old slice of pizza you found lying in a puddle of urine, muttering and clicking over and over.

You have been warned.

David's Farm Rocks Canada

I am fascinated by the story of Davidsfarm. A popular Youtube channel.

David Rock of London Canada is a self-confessed redneck who has become a Youtube star by making badly edited, shaky videos of himself and his redneck friends jumping cars and performing dangerous stunts with no safety equipment.

He is currently the most viewed Youtuber in Canada and one of the top viewed channels in the world. And since he’s a Youtube partner, he’s making money doing it. A lot of money. In fact, he claims to make more than 10 thousand dollars a month out of his Youtube channel.

The remarkable thing is that it happened almost by accident. The story goes that David started his channel as a means to find his children, who were apparently taken away from him many years ago. He surmised that if he could become well known enough in Canada through his videos, his children would hear of him and maybe put two-and-two together and come looking for him. So far that hasn’t happened. But in the process he has become something of an internet sensation.

Part of this might have been luck, but he obviously has an intuitive knowledge of the viral internet because he knew what videos people would want to watch. He knew that people wanted something original, something with a bit of a story and according to dave, something longer than 1 minute.

His first success was a video called the Redneck Rollercoaster. This is a contraption built out of an old car with a seat and a pair of moose antlers welded to the front. The video features this vehicle doing extremely unsafe “wheelies” much to the amusement of Dave and his buddies. That video alone has garnered millions of hits and it put davidsfarm on the Youtube map.

Since then he’s produced thousands of videos, done hundreds of stunts, races and countless other acts of random chaos. All of it posted up on Youtube and all of it making 3 or 4 cents per view for Dave. And that adds up.

The amazing thing is that this channel seems to have taken on a life of its own. What started out as a collection of crazy videos, now has the makings of a prime-time reality TV show. Drama came to Davidsfarm first when details of his shady past surfaced. Then, when a redneck friend broke his back jumping a mobile home at the farm. Now David Rock has a number of law suits against him, but this only serves to boost publicity in what seems to be a runaway train that may or may not come to a fiery end, like one of Dave’s videos.

The lesson is that, on the internet you don’t need to be anything in particular. Anyone with good content can attract viewers. And on the internet, that can translate into bucks.