My name is Michael Phillips, more commonly known as mjp. I'm called mjp by many people in real life as well, which is strange. I must be used to it though, because if you yell, "Hey Michael!" I probably won't turn around. If you yell, "Hey mjp!" I probably won't turn around either, but that's a different story.

I live 7 miles Northeast of downtown Los Angeles as the crow flies. Crows and flocks of wild parrots fly over the house several times a day. Both are extremely noisy. Los Angeles is in California, and California is in the United States of America. I am not a patriot or a nationalist. I wave no flag.

I used to run printing presses, now I don't. I used to travel the world playing punk rock, then Reggae music with a pack of wild Rastafarians, now I don't.

I have worked for web site hosting companies for over a decade. I was the founder of a strange bastard of an internet company called datapimp, which took up space on the web from 1999 (when datapimp was new, revolutionary and funny) to 2007 (when it was old, tired and unnecessary). See how fast the internet will discard you? It has probably discarded you already and you haven't even finished reading this. Poor bastard.

I am primarily a writer, though it seems that I write more code for web sites than poetry sometimes, which may or may not be a bad thing. I type and make art because I am compelled to, though I do not identify myself as an artist. You can see some art on the inkpoems site, and read some poems and stories if you are inclined to buy a book or two.

For eight years I ran smog.net as a multi-artist free for all - one of the first on the web. At it's peak, the site attracted one new visitor every minute. That may not sound like a lot, but trust me, for a site like smog, it was. Do the math, hippie!

In May of '04 I took the old smog.net off the grid and replaced it with this, which is all the product of my own messy psyche. If you don't like me or my psyche, you aren't going to like this site.

Now what?

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Why smog.net? When Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo spotted the brownish haze of Indian fires hanging above the hunting grounds of Southern California, he gave the name Bahia de los Fumos (Bay of the Smokes) to what was either the bay of Santa Monica or San Pedro. Four centuries later, on July 27, 1943, under the front-page headline: CITY HUNTING FOR SOURCE OF "GAS ATTACK," the Los Angeles Times reported the fourth assault of a "smoke nuisance." A year later, on September 18, a new word passed into the local lexicon when the paper, using an expression common in Pittsburgh, referred to the bronze pall as "smog (smoke and fog)."

In October of 1995, smog.net was born into an internet community of 19,638 web sites. It was cold and lonely here in those days. Where the hell were you? As of March of 2008, there are about 165 million active web sites (Get the current number here). Which begs the question, how the hell did you find me?