Last week, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) dominated the news. Unable to look up random facts during Wikipedia's blackout, I found myself considering the purpose of the Internet.

For a sports nerd like me, the Internet is amazing because I am always less than 10 seconds away from finding out Chuck Knoblauch's career batting average (.289) or Tanyon Sturtze's career ERA (5.19). For the student in me, the Internet is an amazing research tool. I shudder at the thought of having to write research papers based solely on information from books.

That's all well and good, but I'm more interested in Internet content which serves no other purpose than to make me laugh for three or four seconds and doesn't require the use of about 98 percent of my brain. Thankfully, the World Wide Web has no shortage of such material.

SOPA protesters argued that the proposed law would inhibit the free exchange of ideas and all that jazz. Yeah, yeah, whatever. All I wanted to know was how it would impact the booming (stupid) YouTube video industry. Imagine what March 2011 would have been like if every parody of Rebecca Black's "Friday" had been removed for copyright infringements. The horror.

Trivial nonsense is arguably the Internet's greatest contribution to our society. A world without memes is not a world I want to live in.

My friends and I spent an inordinate amount of time over winter break watching idiotic YouTube videos, perhaps none more moronic than those produced by a man who goes by the name "shoenice22." The premise of his videos is simple: he eats or drinks a large quantity of something (usually not food) as quickly as he can. Some highlights include a dozen eggs (with the shells), a jar of Vaseline, a can of chewing tobacco and a stick of deodorant. He has also drank a quart of motor oil and a bottle of hairspray, among other things.

Surely a man who has ingested all these things is not long for this world, right? Wrong. Shoenice22 (real name: Chris Schewe) has more than 300 videos, which have been viewed a total of 5.8 million times. The high number of views is no surprise. Watching Schewe's videos is a lot like eating potato chips: you can't stop after just one. It's nearly impossible to watch him eat a can of Crisco shortening, and then see a link to him eating a container of Vick's Vapo-rub in the "related videos" section and not click the link. It's the epitome of the car wreck analogy. It's really terrifying to watch someone eat a tube of painter's caulk, but there's absolutely no way to look away. It's repulsive, but strangely compelling. 

Some people might see Schewe's videos as an indicator of the decline of the human race and a harbinger of the apocalypse. Indeed, the fact that Schewe finds himself compelled to do hundreds of these asinine challenges doesn't paint a positive picture of our species, and neither does the fact that I so thoroughly enjoy watching.

This is what the Internet has become: your one-stop shop for idiocy; and I wouldn't have it any other way.