*start* 19327 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 25 Jan 88 14:26:32 PST (Monday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 2.N To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- A LESSON IN POLITICAL SCIENCE SOCIALISM - You have two cows. The government takes one to give to someone else. COMMUNISM - You have two cows. The government takes both and gives you the milk. FASCISM - You have two cows. The government takes both and sells you the milk. NAZISM - You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you. BUREAUCRACY - You have two cows. The government takes both, shoots one and pours the milk down the drain. CAPITALISM - You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. ---------------------------------------------------- An old woman was sitting in a park in Moscow reading a "Teach Yourself Hebrew" book. A policeman notices her and decides to start to give her a hard time. "What are you reading that for?" he shouts at her. She replies, "I am old, and I will die soon. I want to be prepared; so I am studying the language of heaven." The cop says, "Well, how do know that it's heaven that you are going to?" The old women answers, "Well, honestly I don't, but that's okay. I already speak Russian." ---------------------------------------------------- They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown... [attr. to Carl Sagan] ---------------------------------------------------- "Look," said the blind man to his deaf wife, as he picked up his hammer and saw. ---------------------------------------------------- My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore. ---------------------------------------------------- Isn't it odd that all the members of the Association for Computing Machinery are human? (I've been thinking of signing my home computer up.) ---------------------------------------------------- To err is human, to forgive divine To err is human, to purr feline. To err is human, two curs canine. To err is human, to do nothing, benign. To err is human, to quit, resign. To err is human, to howl about it, lupine. To err is human, to solve it, design. To err is human, to admit it, asinine. To err is human, to moo bovine. ---------------------------------------------------- "You can't fool all of the people all of the time, but you can make some good money on those you do." ---------------------------------------------------- In an interview with Timothy Leary in the 20th anniversity editon of the Rolling Stone Magazine: Q: As the former so-called LSD guru, what do you think of Nancy Reagan's advice on drugs - "Just say no"? A: Our kids should be better mannered than that! We should tell them, "Just say 'No, thank you.'"..... ---------------------------------------------------- What does a desert crab and Christmas have in common? They both have sandy claws(santa claus). ---------------------------------------------------- LOS ANGELES TIMES, December 9: A man walked into a branch of the Antelope Valley Bank and handed a teller a note demanding money. The man had one hand in his pocket, as if holding a gun, so the teller began handing over the contents of her cash drawer. When she had forked over $7,000 the robber said, "That's enough" and walked out the door. It's hard to find a bank robber who knows when he's had enough. ---------------------------------------------------- Chalk up a new triumph for modern packaging in 1987! I wanted to remove some Tie-Wraps from some equipment. The usual way to do this is with dikes (diagonal cutting pliers). I didn't have those, so I went to the stockroom and bought a pair. They came in the usual bubble pack, but with an extra twist: To keep them closed during packing, the cutting tips were bound together----with a tie wrap! So I bought another pair to cut that tie wrap, only to encounter the same problem, so I bought another pair to cut that one-----etc. etc. etc. etc. I can hardly wait for '88. ---------------------------------------------------- "There's only one thing about the 1988 Presidential race that worries me....someone has to win. " ---------------------------------------------------- From "The People's Medical Journal", December 1987 Volume 6 : Number 12. (Dr. Dean Edell's medical newsletter) Snoring and Calf Pain Here's an article from the New England Journal of Medicine that reminds us how simple some diagnoses can be. A 66 year old man went to his general practitioner, complaining of pain and tenderness in his right calf for 4 days durations. He said the pain was deep in the muscle and did not change with position or exercise. The doctor examined the man and couldn't find anything wrong, except that he was tender over this spot in his right calf. The patient has had a lot of problems with snoring. The doctor was unable to make a diagnosis. A couple of nights later this man was in bed and had just fallen asleep when he was awakened by a sharp pain in his right calf. The cause was a kick from his wife. He told her not to kick him there because that's where the leg hurts. She replied, "You were snoring again, and that's where I always kick you to stop it." Subsequently, his wife agreed to stop kicking his calf in spite of the fact that he continued to snore and the leg got better. No lab test in the world would have picked that one up. Bio-Medical Journal, 1985; 291:630-2. ---------------------------------------------------- "The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America in its search for offending pollens took samples of Los Angeles air. Right ouside its trendy Westside office, this. Analysis showed that 40 percent of the collected contaminants were from marijuana." ---------------------------------------------------- "I'm an excellent housekeeper. Every time I get a divorce, I keep the house." --ZSA ZSA GABOR ---------------------------------------------------- Reach for the Sky. The US Department of Agriculture has encountered an unanticipated difficulty in its project to develop robot fruit pickers. To contain costs, the robots were designed with monochrome scanners. Unfortunately, to the robots, an orange has the same size, shape, and brightness as a small cloud. Current robot pickers are often hung up literally reaching for the clouds. The USDA says it's back to the drawing board - this time using color. (From "Random Access", 21 November 1987) [Was this in Orange Count-y? By the way, a cotton-picking robot might still have trouble with white clouds. Fruit-of-the-zoom? PGN] ---------------------------------------------------- Sinners can repent, but stupid is forever. ---------------------------------------------------- I just heard via some TV reporter in Saigon that Vietnamese slang for Russian sailors translates to 'Americans without money'. ---------------------------------------------------- The following is copied with permission from Computer Update Magazine, a monthly publication of the Boston Computer Society, issue of November/December 1987. It is extracted from the "Off the Grapevine" column of rumors, editorials, and "true facts". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A New Twist" During the past few months, the BCS's Telecommunications Group has been trying to develop a viable alternative to the FCC's proposal to impose a tariff on computer data networks. The group's work has received so much national attention that the congressional committee that oversees the FCC has asked the BCS to testify before Congress. The BCS is concerned, however, because our nonprofit, tax-exempt status limits our ability to engage in activities that might be considered political lobbying. If the IRS feels that we have stepped outside our educational mission, it could threaten to revoke the Society's charitable status. Thus, when the director of the BCS's Telecommunications Group was told a few days ago that an agent from the IRS had phoned and was waiting on hold to speak with him, he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. "I'd like to speak with you about your work on the FCC proposal," the agent told our director. An ominous silence followed. "Yes," our director replied. "The IRS is the largest user of one of the leading data networks. If this proposal goes through, we're going to get hurt badly. We could really use the BCS's help." ---------------------------------------------------- Did you hear about the new household cleaner just on the market? It's called "Bachelor." Why? Because it works fast, and leaves no ring. ---------------------------------------------------- There are basic personality differences between engineers, research scientists, and theoretical mathemeticians. This can be illustrated by the way each reacts to the same situation. The situation is: waking up with one's bedroom curtains on fire. The engineer wakes up, sees that his curtains are on fire. He quickly jumps out of bed and gets a bucket of water, throws the water on the flaming curtains, and puts the fire out. Seeing that all is well, he then goes back to bed. The research scientist wakes up, sees that his curtains are on fire. He jumps out of bed, cuts a piece of the flaming curtain and carries it to the bathroom sink where he pours water on it. He sees that pouring water on the fire will put it out, so he goes and gets a bucket of water and throws it on the flaming curtains. The fire is now out, so he is satisfied and goes back to bed. The theoretical mathemetician wakes up, sees that his curtains are on fire. He jumps out of bed, cuts off a piece of the flaming curtain, and carries it to the bathroom sink where he pours water on it. He sees that the water put out the fire, and he is satisfied, so he goes back to bed. ---------------------------------------------------- A mathematician, scientist, and engineer are each asked: "Suppose we define a horse's tail to be a leg. How many legs does a horse have?" The mathematician answers "5"; the scientist "1"; and the engineer says "But you can't do that!" ---------------------------------------------------- a technician, an engineer and a scientist were given the folowing problem to solve : You are standing 20ft. away from a gorgeous female. You start walking towards her with a speed, inversely proportional (specific relation given) to the distance between you two. How long will it take you to reach her ? following answers reflect the differences in their approaches : the technician : forget the equations, I will catch her somehow, pretty soon. the scientist : after doing a lot of paper work, says - well theoretically speaking I can never get to her, because the distance will never be theoretically zero. the engineer : after doing a quick rough calculation, says - well I will reach her in about 6sec, for ALL PRACTICAL PURPOPSES. ---------------------------------------------------- Subject: Pet peeve According to the January issue of Smithsonian magazine, a Beatrice, Nebraska, man left his pet bulldog in the car for a few minutes at a gas station. When the man tried to get back in, he found that the dog, perhaps peeved over some slight, had locked all the doors. ---------------------------------------------------- From London Times via Car and Driver: Comrade Gorbachev is being driven from his dacha to Moscow and is in a hurry. He is getting irritated with the slowness of his driver. "Can't you go any faster?" he says angrily. "I have to obey the speed limits," says the driver. Finally Gorbachev orders the driver into the back and takes the wheel. Sure enough a patrol car soon pulls them over. The senior officer orders the junior to go write up the ticket. But the junior officer comes back and says he can't give them a ticket, the person in the car is too important. "Well, who is it?", the senior officer asks. "I didn't recognize him," says the junior officer, "but Comrade Gorbachev is his chauffeur." ---------------------------------------------------- Subject: The one which didn't get away (The following appeared recently in the Globe & Mail.) Forget about Dog Bites Man. Relegate Man Bites Dog to the back pages. Today we are dealing with Fish swallows dog, an item which reaches us by way of Moscow. The dog was swimming across the Pechora River to join its master when it vanished, leaving only a ripple. The dog's master, who was fishing at the time, hauled in his net and found it contained a giant pike. He looked closely at its mouth and said to himself (probably) "Thereby hangs a tail." Yes, it was Fido (or the Russian equivalent). The dog struggled out after the fish was cut open, and, according to Radio Moscow, hurled itself at the pike, "barking excitedly." It is often difficult for fishermen to tell stories about the one that got away. In this case, Radio Moscow notwithstanding, will it be any easier to tell about the one that didn't? ---------------------------------------------------- Los Angeles Times, January 15: Computer programmers Joseph and Jonathan Seiber of Inscribe Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, designed a software package that produced letter-perfect calligraphy. However, prospective buyers complained that it was too perfect, lacking the slight irregularities and tiny flaws that real calligraphy would have. So the Seibers went back to the drawing board, so to speak, and introduced those little human touches into their software. Now business is booming and everyone is happy. ---------------------------------------------------- [Credit goes to Donald E. Westlake, from "Bred Any Good Rooks Lately?"] A rare delicacy is sauteed Sloth a la Dortmunder. Using the middle toe of the great Australian three-toed sloth -- the only edible part of that large, furry, indolent creature -- the careful chef debones it, pounds it as with veal, and sautÂees it briefly over a hot flame with shallots, carrot circles, and just a touch of Tobasco. Prepared in this fashion, sloth is an excellent main course, not unlike alligator in texture and taste. Many people are under the false impression that sloth does not make a good meal, but this is because they've eaten it improperly prepared. It can only be sauteed, A LA DORTMUNDER, a fact ill-appreciated in culinary circles. TOO MANY COOKS BROIL THE SLOTH!!! ---------------------------------------------------- The December 1987 issue of Space World magazine had a letter describing the 38th meeting of the Congress of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) held in Brighton, England the week of October 11, 1987. There were 1,500 attendees and about 600 papers were presented. Here is an excerpt. "At least one Soviet speaker at the IAF was looking far beyond tomorrow. L. M. Shkadov, from the USSR Academy of Sciences, presented a paper in which he proposed to use a solar sail to move the entire Solar System around the galaxy. His calculations showed that the Solar System could be moved a distance of 30 parsecs (about 98 light years) in one revolution of the Galaxy (about 200 million years) using a reflector some 400,000-800,000 miles in diameter positioned so that the Sun's gravitational pull on the reflector would be just balanced by the force of the solar radiation on the reflector. The idea is to eventually move the Earth into the planetary system of a relatively young, solar-type star before our Sun begins the trauma of stellar senescence." ---------------------------------------------------- A man goes to the doctor for a checkup. After the checkup, the doctor tells the man he has bad news. "You only have six months to live." The man sits for a while thinking, and then says, "There's only one thing I can do, I'm going to become a communist." The doctor says, "You've been a patriotic American all your life, why are you going to become a communist now?" The man says, "Better one of them should die than one of us." ---------------------------------------------------- From a Rice Krispies Joke Machine: ============================================== Why do tigers live in the jungle? They hate city traffic. Where do polar bears vote? The North Poll. What did the limestone say to the geologist? Stop taking me for granite. What should you do if you can't see at night? Enroll in night school. Why did the golfer wear two pairs of shoes? In case he got a hole in one. What did one wall say to the other? I'll meet you at the corner. When is the moon the heaviest? When it is full. How do you keep a skunk from smelling? Hold his nose. What should you do every morning? Wake up. Why do spiders spin webs? Because they can't knit. What flowers are on your face? Two lips. What's yellow and always points north? A magnetic banana. What would you do if you smashed your toe? Call a toe truck. How do you make a vanilla shake? Take it to a scary movie. What's the difference between a bear and an ant? About 2,000 pounds. What's better than a talking dog? A spelling bee. What's the difference between a nickel and a dime? Five cents. What looks like a horse and flies? A flying horse. What kind of dog tells time? A watch dog. What do you give a seasick elephant? Lots of room. ---------------------------------------------------- A few years ago a refugee from Laos came to the US in one of the resettlement influxes. He had been an announcer in radio back in Laos, and he wanted to get into the same line of work here. The first thing he did was join AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Announcers). He tried to pursue a job, but of course, he had problems with the English language, being a new resident. In order to keep body and soul together while going to English classes, he took up barbering. Soon, he became a very good barber, giving haircuts, stylings, and shaves. He seemed to be an artist with the straight razor. In fact, the shop where he worked made him specialize in giving shaves. Thus, he became known as an AFTRA shave Laotian. ---------------------------------------------------- This nice, old Jewish man really wanted to win the lottery. So, one week, he goes to synagogue and he says (good Yiddish accent mandatory), "Oy, Lord of heaven and earth, imagine how much good I could do with ze money I vould vin if I von the lottery! Imagine how much charity I could give! Help me vin the lottery and I will spent ze money wisely!" He doesn't win the lottery. The next week, he goes to synagogue again and says, "Oh, lord of heaven and earth, you must not have heard me last veek! Imagine how many lives I could make easier with ze money from ze lottery! Help me vin ze lottery!" Once again, he doesn't win. The third week, he goes to synagogue again and prays in a similar vein. Suddenly, he hears a voice from the heavens: "Help me, help me!" He says, "Lord of heaven and earth, what can I do to help you?" "Buy a ticket!" *start* 20520 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 1 Feb 88 16:56:31 PST (Monday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 2.P To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- Last week at Carnegie Mellon... Someone walked off with a laser printer that was in our Computing Center. The center is open 24 hours, and he just took it right out under everyone's nose. How did they catch him? The User Consultant on duty got a phone call a couple of days later. The caller asked, "How do you hook up a laser printer?" While the one consultant stalled the caller, another one had the call traced. The police got a warrant for the guy's arrest, went to his apartment, and found the laser printer, an Apple ImageWriter stolen from our library, and a Mac SE stolen from our DoD-sponsored Software Engineering Institute. ---------------------------------------------------- Here is one I picked up from my girlfriend who was born in Odessa; Do you know that it is very easy for a Jew to join the KGB? Yes, he only needs three recommendations from Arabs. ---------------------------------------------------- Two lawyers are in a bank, when, suddenly, armed robbers burst in. While several of the robbers take the money from the tellers, others line the customers, including the lawyers, up against a wall, and proceed to take their wallets, watches, etc. While this is going on lawyer number one jams something in lawyer number two's hand. Without looking down, lawyer number two whispers, "What is this?", to which lawyer number one replies, "it's that $50 I owe you." ---------------------------------------------------- A collegue of mine has a sign in his office which says: "Good, fast, cheap: choose any two." This is a well known engineering principle (at least to engineers). But I have discovered that there is an anologous principle at work in the design...er, choice of political candidates: "Honest, smart, effective: choose at most one." ---------------------------------------------------- Where do monkeys pick up wild rumors? Over the apevine. There's a dog that loves to be scrubbed three times every day. The owners aren't sure of his breed, they think he's a shampoodle. A father gave his teen-age daughter an untrained pedigreed pup for her birthday. An hour later, when wandered through the house, he found her looking at a puddle in the center of the kitchen. "My pup," she murmured sadly, "runneth over." A horse breeder has his young colts bottle-fed after they're three days old. He heard that a foal and his mummy are soon parted. A crow perched himself on a telephone wire. He was going to make a long-distance caw. A musical reviewer admitted he always praised the first show of a new theatrical season. "Who am I to stone the first cast?" A hard-luck actor who appeared in one coloossal disaster after another finally got a break, a broken leg to be exaxt. Someone pointed out that it's the first time the poor fellow's been in the same cast for more than a week. A shy teenage boy finally worked up the nerve to give a gift to Madona, a young puppy. It hitched its waggin' to a star. A girl spent a couple hours on the phone talking to her two best friends, Maureen Jones, and Maureen Brown. When asked by her father why she had been on the phone so long, she responded "I heard a funny story today and I've been telling it to the Maureens." Three actors, Tom, Fred, and Cec, wanted to do the jousting scene from Don Quixote for a local TV show. "I'll play the title role," proposed Tom. "Fred can portray Sancho Panza, and Cecil B. De Mille." ---------------------------------------------------- Why did the guru refuse novicane when he went to his dentist ?? He wanted to transcend dental medication. ---------------------------------------------------- Where does a blackbird go for a drink? To a crow bar . . . ---------------------------------------------------- Seems that there was an auto race with just two entrants: An American car, and a Soviet car. The American won. The Soviet press announced the results this way: "The Soviet car came in second. The American car came in next to the last." ---------------------------------------------------- The following were taken from the Jan 11, 1988 US News & World Report: Economist John Kenneth Galbraith: The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. Ayatollah Khomeini: One must forgive one's enemies, but not before they have been hanged. Donald Petersen, chairman of Ford: Genius is lasting 5 minutes longer than the other side. ---------------------------------------------------- Knock, knock. This is Mrs. Warner-Cracker. Mrs. Polly Warner-Cracker. This is Mr. Buggy. Mr. Orson Buggy. This is Mr. Rainbows. Mr. Always Jason Rainbows. This is Miss Ruin. Miss Rhoda Ruin. This is Mr. Deggs. Mr. Hammond Deggs This is Mr. Pepper. Mr. Sultan Pepper. This is Mrs. Highwater. Mrs. Helen Highwater. This is Mr. Peace. Mr. Warren Peace. ---------------------------------------------------- Daffynitions Alimony: The fee a woman charges for name-dropping. Auction: A gyp off the old block. Beatury Contest: A lass roundup. Bigamist: An Italian fog. Denial: A rvier in Egypt. Dogma: A puppy's mother. Egotist: A man who's always me-deep in conversation. Hangover: The wrath of grapes. Incongruous: Where the laws are made. Lamb stew: Much ado about mutton. Molasses: Additional girls Polygon: A dead parrot. Sunbather: A fry in the ointment. Wolf: A character who knows all the ankles. ---------------------------------------------------- Catching his children with their hands in the new, still wet, walkway, the father spanked them. His wife asked, "Don't you love your children?" "In the abstract, yes, but not in the concrete." Two parent drops spent months teaching their son how to part of the ocean. After months of training, the father drop commented to the mother drop, "We've taught our son all he needs to know, he is now fit to be tide." After Snow White used a couple rolls of film taking pictures of the seven dwarfs, she mailed the roll to be developed. Later she was heard to sing, "Some day my prints will come." A boy spent years collecting postage stamps. The girl next door bought an album too and started her own collection. "Dad, she buys everything I've bought, and it's taken all the fun out of it for me. I'm quitting." Don't be silly son, remember 'Imitation is the sincerest form of philately.'" A young girl, Carmen Cohen, was called by her last name by her father, and her first name by her mother. By the time she was ten, didn't know if she was Carmen or Cohen. Against his wishes, a math teacher's classroom was remodeled. Ever since, he's been talking about the good old dais. His students planted a small orchard in his honor, the trees all have square roots. ---------------------------------------------------- A 2nd grade teacher read her class the story of the Nativity and later played Christmas carols. At the end of the session, she asled each child to draw their impressions of the Nativity scene. Most were reasonably accurate. except for the work of one boy who added a portly figure next to Mary. When asked just who this added person was. the youngster replied, "Round John Virgin, of course." THE SAME KID NEXT DREW HIS IMPRESSION OF THE "FLIGHT INTO EGYPT", COMPLETE WITH MARY, JOSEPH, BABY JESUS, AIRPLANE, AND "PONTIUS THE PILOT". ---------------------------------------------------- Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, in conjunction with research associate Dr. Ed Bluestone of the Surgeon General's office, has compiled for non-confidential distribution a list of activities which, while not definitely linked to death or established as causative factors in any specific form of physical or psysiological deterioration, have been determined through exhaustive reiteration to be detrimental to the human condition and specifically to the welfare of their perpetrator. While implementation of any of these activities is not specifically illegal as cited by state or federal jurisdictions, engagement in any of said activities could very probably be construed as a gross breach of common etiquette constraints and/or moral codes and analogs. Widespread or accelerated participation in any of the listed activities by an increasing or superannuated segment of the population would be frowned on by and erosive to all reasonable, respected, and stalwart facets of American society. THE SURGEON GENERAL WARNS: 1. Never raise your hand during a hijacking to indicate that you get a kosher meal. 2. Never ask a bald man if you can borrow his toupee to clean your windshield. 3. Never moon a werewolf. 5. Never squeeze a parakeet to death while screaming, "I want the name of your accomplice!" 6. Never threaten to punish your Dalmation with spot remover. 7. Never use a bulldog as a surrogate mother. 8. Never hire an attorney who can discuss specific episodes of The Flintstones. 15. Never trust an Oriental dentist who sells miniature ivory animals. 18. Never ask a dog with rabies if he would like you to floss his teeth. 19. Never believe your dog when he tells you that while you were out, your parents came over and drank water out of your toilet. 26. Never take a cockroach hostage and expect anyone to negotiate with you. 28. Never walk your dog around someone else's living room with a pooper scooper in your hand. 29. Never say to a lobster before you boil him, "Let me know if your bath is too hot." 31. Never tell an IRS auditor that if he doesn't leave you alone, you plan to cheat again next year. 35. Never tell Yasser Arafat that you think Newark should be the Palestinian homeland. ---------------------------------------------------- There was a man named Bill who was charged with guarding a special lever, because if that lever were ever moved, the world would end. One day, his best friend Nate told him,"You've been here for such a long time, why don't you let me guard the lever while you take a vacation, travel, and do some of the things you've always wanted." Bill thought that this was a good idea and thanked Nate and went off to see the world. It seems Bill had gone to Las Vegas and had hit the jackpot. So he was driving back in a big car with all his prizes and when he came over the last hill and started down toward the where the lever was, he suddenly lost the brakes to his car. He couldn't miss both the lever and Nate, so he had to make a split-second decision about whether to hit his best friend Nate or hitting the lever and ending the world. At the last second, he swerved and hit Nate. The Moral: Better Nate than lever! ---------------------------------------------------- Archaeology is the only profession where your future lies in ruins. ---------------------------------------------------- Communication: Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible. Now that world telephone and television transmission are a reality, the only communications problem left on earth is that between parents and teenagers. The advantage of modern means of communication is that they enable you to worry about things in all parts of the world. Silence gives consent, or a horrible feeling that nobody's listening. Extremists think "communication" means agreeing with them. The head of government of a certain East European country had in his office a telephone with an earpiece, but no mouthpiece. "What's that?" asked a visitor. "That's my private hotline to Moscow", was the reply. A not-very-bright shorthand typist (or maybe she wanted to teach her boss a lesson?) presented the following letter for signature: Dear Mr Tomlinson, Now let me see. What shall I tell the old fool? In reply to yours of the sixteenth we are surprised to learn that the car which you purchased from us is not giving perfect satisfaction. We had to sell it quickly before it fell to bits. As you know, we inspect all cars thoroughly before putting them up for sale. Your vehicle was in excellent condition when it left our showrooms. That's a nice dress. New, isn't it? It is possible that your driver is at fault. Five miles to the gallon is very poor milage for a car in such good condition as yours. Five gallons to the mile would be about right. I never noticed before you have a little dimple on your chin. Please bring it round at your convenience and our mechanic will make the necessary adjustments. Yours faithfully, Just sign it yourself. ---------------------------------------------------- Here is a good one if you can get the major parts -- it is rather expensive! 1) Get a car with a right-side stearing wheel -- a used mail jeep or from a country with left-side driving -- and an extra steering wheel (some drivers ed cars have this as well...) Make sure the right-sided steering wheel is small and unobviouos to an outside observer. 2) Get a large steering wheel from a junkyard or parts dealer. 3) Get a friend to drive the car while you pretend to drive with the extra wheel. When in an appropirate situation, put on a panicked (sp?) expression and start trying to "re-attach" the wheel to the dashboard or hand the wheel to another passenger (in full veiw of the nearby passengers/drivers of other cars)... It's a wonderful effect! (I've been involved with one of these as a passenger.) or Toss the wheel into the back seat or out the window (litterbug!) [Close your eyes and imagine what it would look like from another car which was just passing...] -- ---------------------------------------------------- Dear Maid, Please do not leave any more of those little bars of soap in my bathroom since I have brought my own bath-sized Dial. Please remove the six unopened little bars from the shelf under the medicine chest and an- other three in the shower soap dish. They are in my way. Thank you, S. Berman Dear Room 635, I am not your regular maid. She will be back tomorrow, Thursday, from her day off. I took the 3 hotel soaps out of the shower soap dish as you requested. The 6 bars on your shelf I took out of your way and put on top of your Kleenex dispenser in case you should change your mind. This leaves only the 3 bars I left today which my instructions from the manage- ment is to leave 3 soaps daily. I hope this is satisfactory. Kathy, Relief Maid Dear Maid -- I hope you are my regular maid, Apparently Kathy did not tell you about my note to her concerning the little bars of soap. When I got back to my room this evening I found you had added 3 little Camays to the shelf under my medicine cabinet. I am going to be here in the hotel for two weeks and have brought my own bath-size Dial so I won't need those 6 little Camays which are on the shelf. They are in my way when shaving, brushing teeth, etc. Please remove them. S. Berman Dear Mr. Berman, My day off was last Wed. so the relief maid left 3 hotel soaps which we are instructed by the management. I took the 6 soaps which were in your way on the shelf and put them in the soap dish where your Dial was. I put the Dial in the medicine cabinet for your convenience. I didn't remove the 3 complimentary soaps which are always placed inside the medicine cabinet for all new check-ins and which you did not object to when you checked in last Monday. Please let me know if I can of further assistance. Your regular maid, Dotty Dear Mr. Berman, The assistant manager, Mr. Kensedder, informed me this A.M. that you called him last evening and said you were unhappy with your maid service. I have assigned a new girl to your room. I hope you will accept my apologies for any past inconvenience. If you have any future complaints please contact me so I can give it my personal attention. Call extension 1108 between 8AM and 5PM. Thank you. Elaine Carmen, Housekeeper Dear Miss Carmen, It is impossible to contact you by phone since I leave the hotel for business at 745 AM and don't get back before 530 or 6PM. That's the reason I called Mr. Kensedder last night. You were already off duty. I only asked Mr. Kensedder if he could do anything about those little bars of soap. The new maid you assigned me must have thought I was a new check-in today, since she left another 3 bars of hotel soap in my medicine cabinet along with her regular delivery of 3 bars on the bath- room shelf. In just 5 days here I have accumulated 24 little bars of soap. Why are you doing this to me? S. Berman Dear Mr. Berman, Your maid, Kathy, has been instructed to stop delivering soap to your room and remove the extra soaps. If I can be of further assis- tance, please call extension 1108 between 8AM and 5PM. Thank you, Elaine Carmen, Housekeeper Dear Mr. Kensedder, My bath-size Dial is missing. Every bar of soap was taken from my room including my own bath-size Dial. I came in late last night and had to call the bellhop to bring me 4 little Cashmere Bouquets. S. Berman Dear Mr. Berman, I have informed our housekeeper, Elaine Carmen, of your soap problem. I cannot understand why there was no soap in your room since our maids are instructed to leave 3 bars of soap each time they service a room. The situation will be rectified immediately. Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience. Martin L. Kensedder, Assistant Manager Dear Mrs. Carmen, Who the hell left 54 little bars of Camay in my room? I came in last night and found 54 little bars of soap. I don't want 54 little bars of Camay. I want my one damn bar of bath-size Dial. Do you realize I have 54 bars of soap in here. All I want is my bath size Dial. Please give me back my bath-size Dial. S. Berman Dear Mr. Berman, You complained of too much soap in your room so I had them removed. Then you complained to Mr. Kensedder that all your soap was missing so I personally returned them. The 24 Camays which had been taken and the 3 Camays you are supposed to receive daily [sic]. I don't know anything about the 4 Cashmere Bouquets. Obviously your maid, Kathy, did not know I had returned your soaps so she also brought 24 Camays plus the 3 daily Camays. I don't know where you got the idea this hotel issues bath-size Dial. I was able to locate some bath-size Ivory which I left in your room. Elaine Carmen, Housekeeper Dear Mrs. Carmen, Just a short note to bring you up-to-date on my latest soap inventory. As of today I possess: On shelf under medicine cabinet - 18 Camay in 4 stacks of 4 and 1 stack of 2. On Kleenex dispenser - 11 Camay in 2 stacks of 4 and 1 stack of 3. On bedroom dresser - 1 stack of 3 Cashmere Bouquet, 1 stack of 4 hotel-size bath-size Ivory, and 8 Camay in 2 stacks of 4. Inside medicine cabinet - 14 Camay in 3 stacks of 4 and 1 stack of 2. In shower soap dish - 6 Camay, very moist. On northeast corner of tub - 1 Cashmere Bouquet, slightly used. On northwest corner of tub - 6 Camays in 2 stacks of 3. Please ask Kathy when she services my room to make sure the stacks are neatly piled and dusted. Also, please advise her that stacks of more than 4 have a tendency to tip. May I suggest that my bedroom window sill is not in use and will make an excellent spot for future soap deliveries. One more item, I have purchased another bar of bath-sized Dial which I am keeping in the hotel vault in order to avoid further misunderstandings. S. Berman *start* 16027 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 8 Feb 88 14:36:56 PST (Monday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 2.Q To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- Fred noticed his roommate had a black eye upon returning from a dance. "What happened?" "I was struck by the beauty of the place." A pushy romeo asked a gorgeous elevator operator, "Don't all these stops and starts get you pretty worn out?" "It isn't the stops and starts that get on my nerves, it's the jerks." An airplane pilot got engaged to two very pretty women at the same time. One was named Edith; the other named Kate. They met, discovered they had the same fiancee, and told him. "Get out of our lives you rascal. We'll teach you that you cann't have your Kate and Edith, too." A domineering man married a mere wisp of a girl. He came back from his honeymoon a chastened husband. He became aware of the will of the wisp. A young husband with an inferiorty complex insisted he was just a little pebble on the beach. The marriage counselor told him, "If you wish to save your marriage, you'd better be a little boulder." During a fight, a husband threw a bowl of Jello at his wife. She had him arrested for carrying a congealed weapon. In another fight, the wife decked him with a heavy glass pitcher. She's a women who conks to stupor. Upon reading a story about a man who throttled his mother-in-law, a man commented, "Sounds to me like a practical choker." Lawyer: Did you say the plaintiff was shot in the woods? Doctor: No, I said he was shot in the lumbar region. Real-estate man: Would you like to see a model home? Man: I sure would, when does she get off work? It's the theory of Jess Birnbaum, of Time magazine, that women with bad legs should stick to long shirts because they cover a multitude of shins. It's not the inital skirt length, it's the upcreep. A bachelor is a cagey guy and has a load of fun: He sizes all the cuties up and never Mrs. one. The bank sent our stement this morning. The sheet was a sight of great awe. It figures and mine might have balanced, But my wife was too quick on the draw. Penn's aunts made great pies at low prices. No one else in town could compete with the pie rates of Penn's aunts. During the American Revolution tried to rai a farm. He stumbled across a rock on the ground and fell, then an agressive Rhode Island Red hoped on top. The farmer came out at this moment and commented, "Check catch a Tory." A wife started serving chopped meat, monday hamburger, tuesday meat loaf, wednesday tartar steak, and thrusday meatballs. On Friday the morning asked her, "How now, ground cow?" A journalist, thrilled over his dinner, asked the chef for the recipe. The chef answered, "Sorry, we have the same policy as you journalists, we never reveal our sauce." J. Paul Getty was thinking about opening an Italian restaurant, the name, "Sp Getty." The snack bar next door to an atom smasher was called "The Fission Chips." On April Fools day, a mother put a fire cracker under the pancakes. She blew her stack. A new chef from India was fired a week after starting the job. He keep favoring curry. A couple of kids tried using pickles for a Ping-Pong game. They had the volley of the Dills. A banker fell over board. His friends couldn't find a life preserver. One asked, "Can you float alone?" The women at one college called a would be romeo a great natural athlete. He makes every broad jump. A filibuster, throughing your wait around. Molly invented a stainless-steel sink. It's called the Unbrownable Molly Sink. A reverend wanted to call another reverend. He told the operator, this is a parson to parson call. A farmer with lots of chickens posted the following sign. "Free Chickens. Our Coop Runneth Over." A friend got some vinegar in his ear, now he suffers from pickled hearing. Two brothers, Mort and Bill, like to sail. Mort is the expert. Bill is not the rigger Mort is. Inheritance taxes are getting so out of line, that the deceased family often doesn't have a legacy to stand on. The judge fined the offender fifty dollars and told him if he was caught again, he would be thrown in jail. Fine today, cooler tomorrow. A rock store was closed by the police, they were taking too much for granite. A man who keep stealing mopids was an obvious cycle-path. A man pleaded innocent of any wrong doing when caught by the police during a raid at the house of a mobster. His excuse, "I was making a bolt for the door." A farm in the country side had seven turkeys, it was known as the house of seven gobbles. A man was reading The Canterbury Tales at breakfast one saturday morning. His wife asked "What have you got there?" "Just my cup and Chaucer." A women was in love with fourteen soldiers, it platoonic. Max told his friend he didn't want to go for a hike in the hills. "I'm an anti-climb Max." Known as a tough, nasty umpire, the man in a foul mood upon walking into his home asked his son to come sit on his lap, "Not now dad, GI Joe is still on." The son never sits on a Brutish Umpire. A new wagon designed for LA rush hour traffic is called the Stationary wagon. An Uncle died, left several hundred clocks to a niece, she's busy winding up the estate. A Texan down on the range is suing for a divorce. He found his dear and an interloper playing. Two cheerleaders ended up married, they met by chants. Two cans of paint got married, later the bride whispered, "Darling, I think I'm pigment." Two boy silkworms pursued a luscious girl silkworm. They ended up in a tie. A doctor told the boy, "This injection won't hurt a bit." That's an MD promise. Advice to ice skaters: You can't always tell a brook by its cover. A guru hops around often, he's known as the Kan Guru. A hermit was arrested after driving a hundred miles an hour, the charge was recluse driving. What do they call a man who builds twenty boats a month? Sir Launchalot. The clerks of a store went on strike. Things were fine until the owner found out one of the picketers had had smallpox. The owner called the union, "This time you've gone to far. My picket has been pocked." A swami stopped in at the butcher shop and asked for butcher for a pound of liver, but the dishonest butcher weighed down upon the swami's liver. A prospector marched into an assayer's office and planted two huge nuggests on the counter. "Well, don't just stand there, assay something!" Indian Chief Shortcake died, so Squaw bury Shortcake. An Indian family with sixteen kids was just one big Hopi family. A fortune-teller started laughing seconds after looking into his crystal ball. The client hit him. "Why did you do that" "My mother always told me to strike a happy medium." An American family sent some poor cousins in East Germany a package of food. Weeks later when they heard it still had not arrived, cabled the cousins with "Cheer up, the wurst is yet to come." ---------------------------------------------------- Borrowed and modified from Arkady Shevchenko's autobiography. A man walks into Red Square on day screaming "Gorbachov's an idiot! Gorbachov's an idiot." Well, the KGB chased him around for awhile until they finally caught him. They immediately took him to court where the judge decided on his sentence. The poor fellow was given exactly 10 years and seven days in jail. Two days for disturbing the peace, five days for insulting the leader, and ten years for revealing a state secret!!! An inspector was making the rounds of the communal farms in his district, and he approached a potato farmer. "How was the potato harvest this season, comrade?" he demanded. "Excellent, excellent," exclaimed the farmer, "our potatoes could be piled high enough to reach the toe of God!" A bit taken aback, the inspector said, "But comrade, this is the Soviet Union; there is no God." Replied the farmer, "That's no problem, because there aren't any potatoes, either." "In News, there is no truth; and in Truth there is no news." I guess it makes more sense in russian.. Pravda is truth, and Isvestia is news. The two big Soviet papers: Pravda and Isvestia. Seems the Department of Information Services (Ministry of Propaganda) was out in the field, taking 'the Rewolution" to the people: explaining the fundamentals of Socialism to the populace to bolster popularity. A member of the Department was out talking to a farmer in Siberia... Official: So you see, comrade, dat it iz de way Marx explained: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." You understand? Farmer: (confused) Nyet... O: OK. Iz like dis: Say a comrade has two cows. Ve take one cow from him and give it to comrade that has no cow. Dat is de Rewolution. You see? F: (Happily) Da, Da! Iz good! O: And if a comrade has two tractors, ve take one of his tractors and give to man who has no tractors. Da? F: (Very excited) Da! Da! Is WERY good! O: And if a comrade has two cheekens, ve give one cheeken to man who has no cheekens. Da? F: Nyet! Iz not good! O: Vy iz not good? F: (Despondently) I have two cheekens... A badger is quietly walking through Red Square. He sees two rabbits, running just as fast as they can, come from one street. Badger: "Wait! Why are you running!?" Rabbit 1: "The KGB is arresting all the camels!" Badger: "But you're rabbits!" Rabbit 2: "Yeah, but try telling the KGB that!" ---------------------------------------------------- Diplomacy is the ability to tell someone to "Go to hell" in such a way that he looks forward to the trip. ---------------------------------------------------- Knock, knock. Who's there? Acid. Acid who? Acid down and be quiet. Ammmonia. Ammonia who? Ammonia bird in a gilded cage. Barbara. Barbara who? Barbara black sheep, have you any wool...? Barry. Barry who? Barry me not on the lone prairie. Cereal. Cereal who? Cereal pleasure to meet you. Dennis. Dennis who? Dennis, anyone? Dwaine. Dwaine who? Quick, dwain the bathtub, I'm dwowning! Egypt. Egypt who? Egypt me and I want my mummy back! The invisble man. Well, tell him I can't see him. Irish stew. Irish stew who? Irish stew in the name of the law. You're a lady. You're a lady who? I didn't know you could yodel. Q. Why did the moron throw the butter out the window? A. Because he wanted to see a butterfly. Q. Why did the little moron throw margarine out of the window? A. He wanted to see an imitation butterfly. Q. Why did the little moron throw his clock out of the window? A. He wanted to see time fly. Q. Why did the little moron drive his truck off a cliff? A. He wanted to test his air brakes. Q. What did the little moron do when he learned that he was going to die? A. He went into the living room. Q. Why did the little moron drive his car into a tree? A. He wanted to hear its bark. Q. The little moron and his friend were climbing up a cliff. His friend fell off. Why didn't the little moron fall off as well? A. Because he was a little mor(e) on. It was three o'clock in the morning when the moron's phone rang, so he trudged from his seventh-floor bedroom all the way down to the ground-floor drawing-room to answer it. "Hello?", said the moron. "Hello" said the voice at the other end. "Is that one-one-one-one-one-one?" "No", said the moron. "This is eleven-eleven-eleven." "Oh," said the voice at the other end, "I must have the wrong number. I'm terribly sorry for disturbing you." "Oh, that's all right", said the moron. "I had to get up anyway to answer this blasted phone!" Q. Why did the very little moron drown in the kitchen sink? A. He was trying to learn tap dancing. Q. How can you tell when a little moron has been using your terminal? A. There's white-out all over the screen. The little moron was strolling downtown one day when he spotted a man walking in the opposite direction who was being followed by twenty penguins. The man had a worried look on his face, which is perfectly normal because everyone knows how dangerous a bunch of penguins can be if cornered. "What are you doing?" asked the little moron. "I'm supposed to take these penguins to the zoo, but if I do, I'll miss my appointment. Would it be possible for you to take them there for me?" the man asked. "No problem", replied the little moron. About three hours later, the man was on the way out of his meeting when he saw the little moron going the other way, away from the zoo, and behind him followed the twenty penguins. The man ran over to meet him. "What do you think you're doing?" asked the man. "Well, I took the penguins to the zoo like you wanted, but they got tired, so now I'm taking them to a movie!" ---------------------------------------------------- Why did the turtle cross the road??? To get to the Shell station!!! ---------------------------------------------------- A newspaper headline: "Escaped Leopard Believed Spotted!" ---------------------------------------------------- Los Angeles Times, February 8: At 3,998 meters, the Fletschhorn just fails to make the exclusive club of a string of peaks known as the "4,000ers," such as the 4,478-meter Matterhorn. A surprising number of mountain climbers decide against climbing the Fletschhorn because it is a couple of meters short of of 4,000. This represents a loss of revenue for local merchants, who have decided to spend $72,000 to add some rocks to the top of the Fletschhorn to take it up to 4,000 meters. ---------------------------------------------------- Daffynitions Meter maid: Windshield viper ? ---------------------------------------------------- Subject: Swiftiers "No negroes allowed!" Jim crowed. "You can do it!" Pep talked. "She sure is feisty!" Tom bouyed. "This is a feline smilee." Tom catted. "This is a *wild* feline smilee." Bob catted. "He is tall, dark and handsome." Dee scribed. "I want to have your children!" Dee sired. "I'm reporting that graffitti." Dee filed. "I'm going to lure them out." said Dee coyly. "I'll vote for him." Dee sided. "To pee or not to pee?" the Miss quoted. "Of course I'll cooperate." Al lied. "I heard a rumor about you." Al edged. "This is how we program." Flo charted "Follow me." the Miss led. (okok, so "Cool and the Gang" thought it up first) "This is a soft bed." Matt rested. "This isn't digital." Anna logged. ---------------------------------------------------- You might have noticed the news story yesterday from Leesburg, Va, (where the Xerox training center is and from where I am writing), about a baby being born from a frozen embryo: Would this kid always wear a sweater, like even in the shower? Would he look at things in a particular way, such as, when asked about the paint for a wall, say, 'I think we need something warmer.' Would he, when buying a new car, first ask about the heater? Shy away from refrigerators? Be active in the movement to eliminate freon from the environment? Make others raise their eyebrows when,, later in life at cocktail parties, he would get concerned as ice cubes melted? Would they never let their tongues touch metal, for fear it would stick? Would cryogenic storage after death be like a return to the womb? *start* 20002 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 18 Feb 88 14:56:49 PST (Thursday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 2.R To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- The following are various stories of stupid robbers: A few years back, some poor fool decided to rob a bank on a Friday afternoon. Stupid fellow that one. If he had looked across the street, he would have realized that this bank was next to FBI headquarters, and it was payday. Virtually every person in the bank was an agent! Needless to say, this hapless fool got a quick lesson in law enforcement technique... My cousin used to work for, er, qantel, and there were some boxes of garbage sitting on the loading dock. You bet someone stole them, after all, they were labled printer boxes and such!! This reminds me of the stories which appeared in the press a few years ago during a garbage strike in N.Y. Apparently, the cabbies started wrapping up their garbage and putting it in the back of their cab. It was always gone by the end of their shift. In College Park, GA, a suburb of Atlanta, an armed man entered a La Quinta hotel lobby with the intention of robbing the place. He pulled out his gun and demanded money from the hotel clerk. The funny thing is that the robber never noticed that there was a FULLY-UNIFORMED police officer standing less than 15 feet away in the lobby. Not only that, but the hotel security camera filmed the entire episode, including the arrest. The local television stations showed the tape on the evening news. The stupidest tricks I've heard of, though, are always bank robbers. Like the guy who was caught walking back to the bank with a can of gas after his car ran out of gas while he was in robbing the bank. They managed to enter the place without setting off the alarm, but they were unable to crack the safe by drilling holes in it or trying to hear the tumblers fall. So they decided to blow the thing open. After a loud explosion the safe was still locked tight, but the alarm had been set off. When they got to the getaway car it wouldn't start. So they each ran off in a different direction as the sirens approached. The police had no problem identifying and apprehending them, though. One of them had left his wallet on the front seat of the getaway car. The other day, a South Carolina football player didn't want to be caught with the goods, so he swallowed six rocks of crack. He died a few hours later. A mugger in NY city (about 1965) tried to mug (or rape) two women walking through Central Park. It turned out they were roller derby queens, and they walked on him with spike heels. I heard that he died later, but I'm not sure. Two muggers in Albany NY (about 1970) tried to mug someone coming out of a grocery store. He was walking his pit bull, using a funny black belt for a leash. Does anybody remember a few years back when two guys tried to hijack a New York City subway train to Miami? How about the bank robber in Champiagn IL. who robbed the bank one day and return to the same bank the next day to deposit the money into his account and even went to the same teller. Well the teller keep him busy while someone called the police. -------------------------------------------------- Do you think that illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?? If you were dyslexic AND cross-eyed, could you see ok?? ---------------------------------------------------- "Oh, you're going to Hong Kong! You must try one of those new restaurants that are on boats in the harbor!" "No thanks, I never eat junk food." --British radio ---------------------------------------------------- Why did the orange lose his job at the orange juice factory? -- He couldn't consentrate! ---------------------------------------------------- Los Angeles Times, February 10: New York City gave a developer permission to construct a 31-story apartment building on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It was later determined that the building violates city zoning regulations, even though a faulty city zoning map led to the error. So the developer must remove the top 12 stories from the building, at an estimated cost of ten million dollars. ---------------------------------------------------- Seen on a T-shirt out at the lunch truck: I FEEL MORE LIKE I DO TODAY THAN I DID YESTERDAY ---------------------------------------------------- Item from Computer, February 1988: ATARI offers newtworking with Moses PromiseLAN Atari has announced a local area network called Moses PromiseLAN, which reputedly connects up to 17 PCs in a star configuration using telephone wire. According to the company, the software meets Netbios standards. Moses PromiseLAN connects . . . . . ---------------------------------------------------- "We trained hard, but it seemed every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation" From Petronii Arbitri Satyricon AD 66. Attributed to Gaius Petronus Gaius Petronus, a Roman General, later committed suicide! ---------------------------------------------------- In case you haven't been reading the newspapers- the high school for the performing arts at which the movie 'FAME' was filmed has burned down in New York City. I hear they're going to do a new movie..... 'FLAME' ---------------------------------------------------- DAILY NEWS, February 16: San Francisco is said to be the only city in the nation to have ordinances guaranteeing sunshine to the masses. In June of 1984 voters passed Proposition K, prohibiting new buildings from casting shadows on any city park. In 1986 the city adopted a downtown plan mandating that no new buildings could cast a shadow between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. on any of 19 streets in the downtown shopping area. To comply with the city's shadow laws, Tom Swift, executive vice president of a major high-rise development firm, had to limit a new 25-story office building to a mere 15 stories. According to Swift, "The original building would have been much more dramatic." ---------------------------------------------------- A couple of TAC pilots were flying F-102's in escort with a B-36 bomber and were chinning with the pilot of the bomber to pass the time. Talk fell to the subject of the relative merits of their respective aircraft with the fighter pilots holding that their planes made for more interes- ting flying because of the manueverability, acceleration and the like. The B-36 pilot replied "Yeh? Well this old girl can do a few tricks you guys can't even touch." Naturally, he was challenged to demonstrate. "Watch," he tells them. After several minutes the bomber pilot returns to the air and says, "There! How was that?" Not having seen anything, the fighter pilots say, "What are talking about?" Reply, "Well, I went for a little stroll, got a cup of coffee and went downstairs for a chat with the navigator." ---------------------------------------------------------------- "Are you going to see him Samoa?" "Don't be Sicily, he's a Spain in the neck." "I don't mean to Russia, but Venic she leaving?" "Well, she said she wasn't going to Rumania here another day." "I don't Bolivia." "Denmark my words, you'll regret it." "What did you do last summer?" "I worked in Des Moines." "Coal or Iron?" "Swell town you got here. Lots of big men born here?" "No, only babies." "May I see you pretty soon?" "Don't you think I'm pretty now?" "How should long girls be courted?" "The same as the short ones." To a persistent Casanova: "If you don't leave now, I'll call the whole firedepartment to put you out." The American sister states: Mary Land, Ida Ho, Louisa Anna, & Minne Sota. Did you realize that bank robbers are all going to Canada now? That's the only place they have Toronto. The local banker really likes the Swiss slogan: every little bit Alphs. Television is a wonderful communication device, you can get London & Tokyo on it. And there's the window, with it open you can get Chile at night. A couple went to see the mystery and horror movies. They loved each shudder. A son asked his father for a hundred dollars. The father said no. "Oh, come on dad, be a good support." He loved her, but won't die for her. He has an undying love for her. A man, dejected over a repulsed suit thought about hanging himself in frontof her house, then remembered she didn't want him haning around. He was a suitor for her hand, but he didn't, suit her. An anniversary was coming up, he started to reminisce about the last ten years. She just wanted to talk about her presents. A set of pen pals over the years developed a romance which ended when they exchanged pictures, a photo finish. He wanted a willing housekeeper for a wife. He's looking for one ready maid. He didn't know how to get ahold of a lady, she's pretty ticklish. She's a May bride, she may or may not get married. He used to have her picture over the fireplace, then he proposed, and she gave him the negative. He's rather good looking, in a way. Away off. He fell in lover with her when she ignored him. It was love at first slight. "How did you find your steak?" "I found it under the potato." The doctor won't be back for a long while, he's out on an eternity case. A magician started young learning magic tricks. His first was to saw a woman in half. He has several half sisters. A physician won't drink in a shipyard, for he is a dry doc. He thought the operation would be fun, he was told he would be in stitches. A young women at the hospital was given a private room, she was too cute for wards. She was expecting some lion's tails, he had sent a telegram from Africa, "Captured two lions, sending details by mail." A sea gull landed on a channel marker, buoy meets gull. A myth is a young female moth. He didn't want any red cross seals at Christmas time, he didn't know what to feed them. He doesn't have a monkey wrench. But his father has a cattle rench, and his brother has a sheep rench. The local zoo had a new born baby bear, so the newspaper sent over a cub reporter. His hands were in the alphabet soup, he was groping for words. In Romeo and Juliet, as Mercutio dies, he says "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man." Tomas R. Marshall, Vice-President to Wilson, dedicated one of his books: "To President Woodrow Wilson from his only Vice." ---------------------------------------------------- BEFORE THE BIG BANG: NEWS FROM THE HUBBLE LARGE SPACE TELESCOPE The Astronomer was red-eyed, pale, his face was gray with stubble; he was 13 on a sliding scale of 1 to 10 in trouble. "Is Physics just a fairy tale?" he asked, and then began to wail, "Why DID we seek the holy grail? Why did we launch the Hubble? The launch was good (relax, exhale) the data systems did not fail we peered beyond the cosmic veil, the anti-cosmic double to back before the quarks prevail. We digitized each dark detail but it was all to no avail, it burst our pretty bubble." "WHAT did you see?" I asked "Before Beginning Big Bang lights?" (I reviews and interviews. I edits and I writes.) "Before the start of Time, before the Universe's Birth, What DID the Hubble show, ten billion years before the Earth?" He told me. Now I writes no more. I drinks a bit. I edits. "Right before the Beginning," he said, "is when THEY roll the credits!" (C) Jonathon V. Post (Previously published in "Rhysling Anthology, 1987" and "Star*line, Nov/Dec 1986") ---------------------------------------------------- YOUR CO-WORKER COULD BE A SPACE ALIEN, SAY EXPERTS ... here's how you can tell (by Michael Cassels of the "National Inquirer") Many Americans work side by side with space aliens who look human - but you can spot these visitors byy looking for certain tip-offs, say experts. They listed 10 signs to watch for: 1. Odd or mismatched clothes. "Often space aliens don't fully understand the different styles, so they wear combinations that are in bad taste, such as checked pants with a striped shirt or a tuxedo jacket with blue jeans or sneakers," noted Brad Steiger, a renowned UFO investigator and author. 2. Strange diet or unusual eating habits. Space aliens might eat French fires with a spoon or gobble down large amounts of pills, the experts say. 3. Bizarre sense of humor. Space aliens whho don't understand earthly humor may laugh during a serious company training film or tell jokes that no one understands, said Steiger. 4. Takes frequent sick days. A space alien might need extra time off to "rejuvenate its energy," said Dr. Thomas Easton, a theoretical biologist and futurist. 5. Keeps a written or tape recorded diary. "Aliens are constantly gathering information." said Steiger. 6. Misuses everday items. "A space alien may use correction fluid to paint its nails," said Steiger. 7. Constant questioning about customs of co-workers. Space aliens who are trying to learn about earth culture might ask questions that seem stupid, Easton said. "For example, a co-worker may ask why so many Americans picnic on the Fourth of July," noted Steiger. 8. Secretive about personal life-style and home. "An alien won't discuss domestic details or talk about what it does at night or on weekends," said Steiger. 9. Frequently talks to himself. "An alien may not be used to speaking as we do,so an alien may practice speaking," Steiger noted. 10. Displays a change of mood or physical reaction when near certain high-tech hardware. "An alien may experience a mood change when a microwave oven is turned on," said Steiger. The experts pointed out that a co-worker would have to display most if not all of these traits before you can positively identify him as a space alien. ---------------------------------------------------- The following are taken from "The Washington Wits" edited by Bill Adler, 1967 Robert Kennedy's 1964 Senatorial campaign planners told him that their intention was to present him to the television viewers as a sincere, generous person. "You going to use a double?" asked Kennedy. (p 5) Thumbing through a promotional pamphlet prepared for his 1964 Senatorial campaign, Robert Kennedy came across a photograph of himself shaking hands with a well-known labor leader. "There must be a better photo that this," said Kennedy to the advertising men in charge of his campaign. "What's wrong with this one?" asked one adman. "That fellow's in jail," said Kennedy. (p 10-11) Attorney General Robert Kennedy arrived late at a Business Council Meeting in the Capitol, and with a straight face he attributed the delay to "a suit filed by the Dupont Company to require the Justice Department to divest itself of the Antitrust Division." (p 28) The driver of a car carrying Hubert Humphrey to an appointment for which he was late attempted to regain lost time by speeding. Nervously, the Vice-President cautioned him to slow down: "I'd rather be the Hubert Humphrey who came late than the late Hubert Humphrey." (p 48) A group of students once asked Humphrey how a supposed "liberal" could oppose a bill to allow the coloring of oleomargarine. Explained the Senator with a grin, "I counted up the dairy farmers in Minnesota and the oleo manufacturers. There were more dairy farmer." (p 50) Humphrey is responsible for dubbing the Communist scheme for world domination "Operation Nibble." (p 51) Vice-President Hubert Humphrey's loquacity is legendary, and Barry Goldwater notes that "Hubert has been clocked at 275 words a minute with gusts up to 340." On the campaign trail during 1964, Republican nominee Barry Goldwater stated, "The immediate task before us is to cut the Federal Government down to size ... we must take Lyndon's credit card away from him." (p 88) A favorite 1964 campaign stunt of Barry Goldwater's was to poke a finger through a pair of lensless blackrimmed glasses, saying, "These glasses are just like [Lyndon Johnson's] programs. They look good but they don't work." (p 88) When, in 1964, New Hampshire Republican Senator Norris Cotton announced his support of Bary Goldwater in his state's primary election, he was questioned as to whether this indicated a change of his hitherto "liberal" political views. "Well," explained Cotton, "it's like the New Hampshire farmer. He was driving along in his car one day with his wife beside him when his wife said, 'Why don't we sit closer together? Before we were married, we always sat closer together.' The old farmer replied, "I ain't moved.' "I ain't moved," added Cotton. "I found the trend of Government has moved farther to the left." (102) Concerning the war in Vietnam, Senator George Aiken of Vermount noted in January, 1966, "I'm not very keen for doves or hawks. I think we need more owls." (p 116) Somewhat alarmed at the continued growth of the number of employees on the Department of Agriculture payroll in 1962, Michigan Republican Robert Griffin proposed an amendment to the farm bill so that "the total number of employees in the Department of Agriculture at no time exceeds the number of farmers in America." (p118) >What's even funnier is that the amendment FAILED. Republican Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota reports that the citizens of East Berlin, who have their eyes fixed upon the prosperous Western sector as a symbol of freedom, have managed to retain their optimism and a good sense of humor. He tells the story of a young East Berliner who had been told that his "mother" was the East German "Republic" and his "father" the Communist party. Asked by Brezhnev what his ambition was for the future, he replied, "I would like to be an orphan." (p118) In reviewing the book, there are lots of humor, most stories are ok without being great. ---------------------------------------------------- How many Republican presidential candidates does it take to change a lightbulb? Dole: When I was a poor boy growing up in Kansas we didn't have lightbulbs. Now I have the housekeeper do it. Dupont: Light bulbs need to be changed? Gosh. I guess the servants have always taken care of that.... With a Dupont administration the power of the free market will be unleashed to produce light-bulbs that never need changing! Robertson: Oh, Lord, with thy divine illumination, heal this light-bulb! Kemp: It's morning in America! Why should we worry about light-bulbs? Let those doom-crying Democrats worry about light-bulbs! [stumbles over chair in the dark.] Haig: One. Snap to it, soldier! Bush: I resent that question, Dan. I've answered it before, and I think the media are keeping this thing alive. I think the American people are TIRED of light-bulb jokes! *start* 23895 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 3 Mar 88 18:29:34 PST (Thursday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 2.S To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- A rock band's drummer thought he would make a good policman, he was use to pounding a beat. A man was taken to the polic station and asked to confess, they showed him his fingerprints, and those found at the crime. "But they're whorls apart!" A mafia hitman was taking a poor guy for a ride, a slay ride. While in jail a man worked on his alibiography. The officers busted a picture over a man's head. He was framed. A gasoline carrier is like a polic car, it's a petrol wagon. A dishonest man and a harp struck by lighting are both a blasted lyre. Was he conceited? He's eight feet tall and plays the flute, he's clearly high-flutin'. His wife was a brunnette, he had married a blonde, but then she dyed. The guy's average income was around midnight. The engaged couple had met in a revolving door and started going around together. "What was Mrs Jone's maiden name?" "Why, her maiden aim was to get married." A driver with a truck load a hogs was looking for a porking place. His engine was smoking, but it that was ok, it was old enough. He agreed with the sign, "Fine for parking." A taxi driver is a man who drives away customers. You have to watch out for rattlesnakes, they'll strike, they've form a union. In a farm town the whole nieghborhood was stirred up, spring ploughing. A husband was working in the backyard while his wife lay in bed with a very bad cold. "How's the wife?" "Not so good." "Sorry, is that her coughin?" "Oh, no. This here's a chicken coop." When the pigs back into the electric fence, there is a short circus. A old man who was hard of hearing went into the art museum looking for a forty foot mule. Everyone knows the four seasons are pepper, salt, vinegar, and oil. Everyone knows the moon is really made of silver, it's quarters and halves. A job description, how true? "The principal activities of this senior clerk is to take care of some of the cuties of the commisioner." The politicians three R's, this is Ours, that is Ours, everything is Ours. He owns ten gaoline stations and not one had a roof, no overhead. Cleopatra lived and loved on denial. A wife to her husband, "How come you got insulate?" He's a nice kid, but he can lilac anything. He really liked going to the denist, it was a drilling time. He thought he was twins, his mom had a picture of him as two. He wanted a pet, asked for an octopus, he thought it would be an eight-sided cat. The dog was chasing it's tail, he was trying to make both ends meet. She enjoyed the song in sunday school, it was about a cross eyed bear named Glady. The song was "Gladly the cross I'd bear." At first the dog was named Ben, then it had puppies, now it's Ben Hur. He thought Good Friday was a holiday for the guy who worked with Robinson Crusoe. ---------------------------------------------------- Dr. Jones fell in the well and died without a moan. He should have tended to the sick, and let the well alone. Ruth rode in my new cycle car in the seat in back of me; I took a bump at fifty-five and rode on Ruthlessly. He who courts and goes away, may court again another day; But he who weds and courts girls still, may go to court against his will. ---------------------------------------------------- Daffynitions: Fad: In one era and out the other. Gossip: A prattlesnake. Wolf: A big dame hunter. Weasel: It blows at noon. ---------------------------------------------------- Calgary, Alberta Feb 17 1988 AP; A disturbance interrupted the second hockey game between Poland and Czeckoslavakia today. When the Czech team skated onto the ice in their new Michael Jackson look team uniforms, the New Polish team (the tallest hockey team ever put into a uniform, averaging slightly more than 3 meters tall) refused to take to the ice. When the referee asked why they would not play the odd looking Czech team the Polish coach Stanislaus Yarchevski said, "We wouldn't touch a BAD Czech with a 10 foot Pole". ---------------------------------------------------- Nothing really happened during Rev. Swaggart's encounter with the prostitute--all he did was ask her for money. ---------------------------------------------------- Q: What are the four enemies of Soviet Agriculture? A: Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall. Q: How do you stop a runaway horse? A: Bet on him. Q: How many animals did Moses take onto the ark with him? A: None. \fBNoah\fP had the ark. Q: What do you call tax-exempt TV Evangalists? A: Windfall Prophets. Q: If somebody gives you fifty female pigs and fifty male deer, what do you have? A: One hundred sows and bucks. ---------------------------------------------------- Cat 1: I tell you I saw a mouse go into that hole. Cat 2: You better not feline to me. ---------------------------------------------------- Top 5 most incredibly mind-bogglingly stupid questions 5. If 0/N=0, N/N=1 and N/0 is undefined, then what is 0/0? 4. Do fish get thirsty? 3. How do you write zero in Roman numerals? 2. Do vampires get AIDS? 1. Did Adam and Eve have belly-buttons? ---------------------------------------------------- Here are some of my favorite jokes from the HBO special Jackie Mason On Broadway. Keep in mind that Jackie is a former rabbi. His father and two brothers are also rabbis. "I've got a friend who is half-Jewish and half-Italian. If he can't buy it wholesale, he steals it!" "I've got another friend who is half-Polish and half-Jewish. He's a janitor, but he owns the building!" "I've got another friend who is half-German and half-Polish. He hates Jews but can't remember why!" Did you hear about the accountant who became am embezzler? He ran away with the accounts payable! It is easy to tell the difference between Jews and Gentiles. After the show, all the gentiles are saying "Have a drink? Want a drink? Let's have a drink!" while all the Jews are saying "Have you eaten yet? Let's have coffee and cake!" When most people return from Europe, they tell tales of all the sites they saw, the shopping, the entertainment, etc. Jews, on the other hand, return and say "I had this slice of cake in Austria, let me tell you, I don't know how they make it! It was great!" ---------------------------------------------------- Subject: Oh, you're just going to shoot your wife??? This morning's Mercury carried an article about the visit of the Royal Stand-ins, Andrew and Fergie, to L.A.'s British Fest. A man was arrested nearby for carrying a rifle. It was subsequently determined that the event was independent of the royal visit, that the man was toting his gun around because of a domestic spat. So he was immediately released, and given back his gun. ---------------------------------------------------- Tweedledee: Do you know how to save a drowning lawyer? Tweedledum: No... Tweedledee: Good. ---------------------------------------------------- More stupid robber stories Heard on the radio this morning about a guy who walked into a bank and presented a teller with a note that read "I have a gun. Give me all your money. Bang." The teller gave him the money and he walked out of the bank. He was caught only a short while later. Why? He had written the note on the back of his parole card. The fellow robbed something like a supermarket of about $5000 (value approximate and probably wrong, since it is from fuzzy memory). The local newspaper ran the story, but with the amount given as $7000. The thief called the newspaper to complain about the inaccuracy and to suggest that maybe the store manager ripped off the extra $2000 and was unjustly blaming the thief. The people at the newspaper kept him busy on the phone giving his version of the story while the police traced the call to a phone booth and arrived to arrest him while he was still talking to the newspaper! Here's another one about an unlucky purse snatcher. In the middle of last year, I heard a story about a purse snatcher (in England, I believe) who snatched a woman's purse. Much to his surprise and dismay, he found an arm attached to it after he'd grabbed it. It seems that the woman had a prosthetic arm, and he picked the right (or wrong) arm. Apparently, the guy babbled for quite a while, and the woman called the police, and they picked him up, still babbling. This happened to somebody on jury duty 10-15 years ago. The people who weren't on a case had been excused to go to lunch. Well, when it was time to be back in the room waiting to be called on there were two people missing. Well the bailiff in charge was getting a little annoyed when he got a call from the police who are located in the courthouse. The police said are you missing two of your jurors, so-and-so and so-and-so2? The bailiff said yes. Then the police said, well we have them in jail up here. They were arrested for shoplifting. I heard on the radio this morning about a man who had a small amount of cocaine in his suitcase when he was coming through customs. For some reason, he knew that the customs officials were going to search his bag. So he grabbed someone elses bag off the carousel and went through customs. When the officials opened up the suitcase, they found several pounds of marijuana in it. ---------------------------------------------------- The original post up here about the theft of the apple laserwriter plus from the computer center here at Carnegie Mellon was, shall we say, somewhat inaccurate. I just happen to be the roomate of the guy who trapped the thief. This is his story (ds6w+@andrew.cmu.edu). By the way, everything you are about to read is TRUE. I was there when it all came down........ Random Info : Baker Hall - One of the BIG academic buildings here. The cluster has 20 sun 3/50's, 20 each Mac and IBM PC's. The laserwriter (called cedar - all andrew printers are named after trees :-)) was stolen from the UCC across campus from Baker. BTW, the UCC cluster doesn't even have macintosh's. You'll understand why this is important later on. Academic Computing - the people who run the clusters and hire the PCons (ie Don) ---------------------------- (voiceover the dragnet theme): On Jan 16, at approximately 2:00 am, a $4,000 laserwriter printer was stolen from the main computing cluster of CMU. As the printer was not alarmed and unwatched, the suspect simply walked in and carried it off. Witnesses described the suspect as a black male, 6'2", very heavily built and "mean looking". This is the story of how that printer was recovered. My name is Don Snow. I'm a computer hacker. (Dragnet theme: dum, ta-dum, dum) By Jan 16, 2:00, the word was out on all the bulletin boards. I was at my usually scheduled post in the Baker Hall computer cluster. I worked until 6:00. My replacement was late, so I had to wait until they rotated somebody over to relive me. At approximately 5:30, I received a strange phone call: me: Baker hall, what can I do for you? voice: are you in front of the printer right now? me: no. voice: can you get to the printer while still on the phone and still be in front of a mac? me: no, there is no mac next to this printer voice:ok, thanks, (whispered to people on the other side) just be quiet and call security, I'll handle this. [disconnected] Obviously, something was up. (dum, ta-dum, dum) At 5:50, received visit from campus security. Officer explained meaning of phone call. Suspect had called the main computing center, claiming to be the consultant in Baker Hall, asking how to hook up an apple laserwriter printer to a macintosh. The call to me confirmed the fact that he was not the consultant, because it was impossible to be on the phone and in front of a mac and in front of the printer in Baker Hall as the suspect claimed. (dum, ta - dum, dum daaaaa) The word went out to all clusters who had laserwriters to be on the lookout for a phone caller asking about laserwriters. At 6:20, I received another call: me: baker hall, how can I help you? voice: yeah, I'm the consultant over at the main computer center, and I need to restart the laserwriter for the macintosh. I'm getting this strange error message. Can you help me? me: sure, let me get the manual. I then put my hand over the receiver and whispered "security" to my friend sitting next to me, who immediately got up and ran out of the cluster. I then began to stall the person on the other line. me: now, what is the error message? voice: unauthorized password failure. me: sounds bad. let me look it up. (5 minute pause of holding the receiver) me: no there's nothing here...oh, I see why. This is the dinky users manual and not the reference manual. hold on. (5 minute pause) me: ok, I got the right one, here we go. I'm looking at the index now. me: hold on, I have to help a user. (5 minute pause) me: ok, I think I know what the problem is. You probably have the print options configured wrong. voice: no, I have all the options under print right me: do you have the reduced bit map set? voice: that is not on the menu me: its on a secondary menu (I then begin to have him toggle all the print options. Security arrives and begins phone trace) (later, after toggling about 5 print options) voice: what do you mean, try setting the font substitution? that should have nothing to do with the password. me: (I begin to spew out technical garbage) Actually, it might. the problem might be that the fonts you are using are not standard, and thus, the mac is giving the printer a non-standard password which the laserwriter doesn't understand. voice: but I'm using "times" font! that has to be standard! me: (calmly) yes, but the version of "times" from the MacDraw document may an old version and therefore be outdated and thus in a non-standard form than that of the laserwriter, which is thus expecting the standard print toggle from the mac. Toggling the font substitution would tell the mac to send the codes to the printer triggering the printer to be ready to receive non standard fonts, and thus allow a smooth transfer of your document from mac to printer. try it. voice: OH, i see now. let me do it. no, it still isn't working. me: er, hold on, I have to help another user. (5 minute pause) [disconnected] Total elapsed time of stall: 40 minutes. Phone trace: successful. On Jan 18, suspect was arrested in possession of printer, along with $20,000 more stolen computer hardware. Suspect made full confession. Case closed (dum, ta - dum, dum daaaa, da da da dum!) Inscription on gold plaque from Academic Computing: "Presented to Donald Snow in recognition of his invaluable assistance in the recovery of the LaserWriter stolen from the UCC cluster on January 16, 1988. Don's impersonation of a helpful user consultant held the thief on the phone long enough for a successful phone trace." ---------------------------------------------------- Nay, lad! *Deciding's* not your ploy, For that's a risky game. It's *making a decision* That's your surest road to fame. Decide means to take action, And actions rock the boat, And if you act and don't succeed, Small chance you'll stay afloat. But... making a decision, Ah! that's the way to swing. It keeps the masses happy And doesn't change a thing. So get yourself a task force Well skilled in all the arts And call them all together And watch them flip their charts. For Jack says no and Jim says yes And Billy says perhaps And Chester asks good questions ... When he isn't taking naps. And Bertram, chomping his cigar, Is chock full of statistics, While Waldemar, who puffs a pipe, Is famed for his heuristics. "The figures prove --" "The model says --" "The forecast bears me out." "The complex simplex program Shows I'm right without a doubt." Let's tiptoe out and close the door And let them stew a while. No fear that they'll do something rash, for *doing's* not their style. Reality's an untamed beast That's difficult to master, But models are quite docile And give you answer faster. So diddle with a model To glorify your name, Then get yourself a task force And learn to play the game. ---------------------------------------------------- It was finals week at the college. The students had filed into the auditorium, and picked up their blue-books for the test. This particular class had been in aviaian biology and identification. The professor was known to give very difficult finals, and weighed them heavily in the grade. Looking down to the table in the front of the room, the students saw several stands with stuffed and mounted birds. They could see that they were birds, as the feet were visible below the burlap sacks that had been placed over them. And beside each was a small sign with a number. The bell rang, the professor allowed a moment for the noise to die down, and them addressed the class. "Todays final will count, as you know for a large percentage of the grade. But the directions for the test are simple. You are to identify each of the birds on the table before you. Write the number, and the latin and common name of the creature associated with it, on your paper. When you have completed the identifications, you may leave. Begin.", and with that he sat down. One of the students, a few rows back from the front gestured for the profs attention, and asked a question, "Uh, professor, are you going to remove the sacks so we can see the birds?". "No... If you've been following the lectures through the term, you should be able to identify each of them by its feet alone. You should have realized the areas that I was stressing, in class and in the reading assignments." The student, becoming a little alarmed, "You mean, you expect us to be able to know one of these from the others just by its feet. That's unreasonable." "I'm sorry you're dismayed by this test. Perhaps if you'll begin it'll go better than you expect, and then the others can begin also." "No, this is absurd. I'm not going to take this test. This is outrageous. I'm leaving." And the student begins to gather up his pencils, and day-pack. "If you're leaving, tell me your name, so I can mark you off in my The irate student, holding up his feet so the prof can see them, replies, "YOU FIGURE IT OUT!" ---------------------------------------------------- Cromwell and Rasputin by as submitted to Dr. Richard King The following essay was an actual submission by a stu- dent, who was given the assignment: ``Write a term paper comparing and contrasting two revolutionary figures of your choice. The figures are to be selected from different periods of European history.'' Unlike most papers of student bloopers, which are col- laborative efforts, this one is the work of the exception- ally fruitful pen of a single student. Read it and enjoy! The English and the Russian revolutions had a leader that stood out to have an effect on the revolution. For the Russian it was Rasputin. He was born in the reign of the Tsar-Emperor Alexander the Second, absolute ruler of over a hundred million people consisting of fifty some nationali- ties and speaking nearly two-hundred-different languages or dialects. This empire stretched from the Prussian border to beyond the Pacific Ocean. Rasputin was an Autocrat who ruled by himself. He was free to appoint and dismiss minis- ters as he pleased. Then theirs Oliver Cromwell, a man who stood for the commission of the unthinkable act, the execu- tion of the king, should have pushed the Commonwealth and its leaders into further international isolation. These were some of the issues that Oliver Cromwell drived for in the English Revolution. Cromwell was dominant political figure from 1649 to 1658. He had lead the attack on the king and had many followers and support. These twoffigures, Rasputin and Oliver Cromwell, ha had great emphasis on the outcome of their revolutions (Russian and English). Lets look at some similarities and differences on how they ruled their reign of power. Cromwell was a careful figure who ruled intil his death in 1658. He lead an organization of parliament forces of centralized army called the new model army. Cromwell was an independent so he was frightened of parliament changing religion. Cromwell had faith in his reign, he believed that Parliament couldn't win the civil war if they didn't try someting different. Rasputin was also a careful and powerful leader. When Nicholas went to the front to take personal command of the army, his wife Alexandra took over government affairs and relied on Rasputin almost completely. So Rasputin also con- trolled an army and became a successful leader. Although he was killed by the people, it was because of the sake of the - 2 - people in Russia. They felt that he was discrediting Nicho- las II. Rasputin was such a key role in ruling the army, Alexandra went into shock because of the death of Rasputin. Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599. He immediately took interest in public affairs. After he had become an under- graduate at Cambridge, his father fied which brought him back home to take care of his mother and the family. He also took over his fathers business which was the management of land. Later he had experienced a change of religion to the Puritan side. He was respected so much by his neigh- bours from his management of land, that they choose him to represent Huntington in the Parliament which described itself by the Petition of Right. Cromwell, however, was known to have interest in religion before politics. He had never really been able to hankle constitutional questions, and was opposite as a whole to them. Rasputin, however, was also a very religious man. He went to early mass at six o'clock in the morning at Afonskoe Podvorie. He was so admirred, that on the way back from mass there would be a crowd of followers behind him, who accompanied him into the dining room for breakfast. Among these guests were petitioners who arrived around eight o'clock. Rasputin was always called upon by Tsarskoe Selo at ten o'clock, even thought he was usually sleeping by this time. A secret came out that Rasputin was prepared to carry out various transactions, arrange reals of military ser- vices, get sentences of imprisonment released, or dispose of the granting of concessions. While known that Rasputin was open for bribes, also took into consideration the help of petitioners who came to him with nothing. These two leaders, and their different personalities make them both uneque. These two leaders had great effect on the outcome of their revolutions. Even though their techneques were not exactly alike they had similarities in their personal behavior and their beliefs. These two fig- ures reigned at two different times and are also two dif- ferent people in most respects. *start* 19587 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 10 Mar 88 13:26:42 PST (Thursday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 2.T To: Cate3 The new baby is like royalty, he's the prince of wails. He heard she was stuck up and asked how much they got. Ill-bred children are always displaying their pest manners. He had never seen the Catskill Mountains, but had seen them kill mice. When the father found he had quintuplets, he could hardly believe his own census. He thought he should have been a song writer, with his squeaky shoe, he had music in his sole. The pants were very sad, they were depressed. Her body was recovered, she bought a new suit of clothes. If a women changed her sex, what would her religion bed? She would be a he-then. How do you get to heaven? Turn to the right, and keep straight ahead. The soda jerk thought he was a doctor, he was clearly a fizzician. He was going to start a bakery if he could raise the dough. The clock maker works over time every day and never gets extra pay. The manicurist makes money hand over fist. The doughnut retailer is really in the holesale business. A barber is a clip-joint operator. Most everyone like pleasant-faced people, but the auctioneer is always pleased to see a man who is for bidding. He was kicked out of the army, he took a furlong, went too fur, and stayed too long. In filling out a job application, he put as his school, Vietnam, Clash of 1973. They weighed anchor, and it hadn't gained an ounce. The judge increased his fine by $10. He thought that was extra fine. Because of one paragraph the bank took off of his property, it was clause and effects. The robber wanted to go upstairs, he wanted to be tried in a higher court. When asked if he had missed school latly, the boy said `Not a bit.` The form ruler Russia and his wife were called Tsar and Tsarina, so clearly their children were called Tsardines. Students may like nitrates, they're cheaper than day rates. Wethir, the worst spell of weather we've ad around here in years. New with a K in front is a Canoe. He thought the formula for water was H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O, H-to-O. He had a lot of trouble in geometry, he thought the thing opposite the right angle in a right-angled triangle was a hippopotamus. A sign for a superintendent of schools was "Bored of Education" His father made suitcases in Iraq, he was a bag-dad. He thought a fjord was a Norwegian automobile. He built a bed ten feet by twenty feet, it was a lot of bunk. He knew a lot about railroads, but it had taken a lot of training. Little rivers which run into the Nile, Juveniles. Did you hear about the two peanuts walking down the road when one of them was assaulted? ---------------------------------------------------- One Saturday, a farmer was preparing to head off to the Farmer's Market to sell off his produce. On his truck, one of his wheels was a bit loose, but he figured it would get him to the market, at least. He loaded up the truck, and drove on his way. He reached a particularly nasty curve in the highway. Just as he starts to make the turn, the wheel fell off, and the truck veered off the road into a ditch. His crop spilled all over the side of the road. Ten minutes later, a state trooper arrives at the scene. As he exits his cruiser, ready to help clean up the mess, he sees the farmer sitting at the side of the road, his head in his hands, and singing to himself: "You picked a fine time to leave me Loose Wheel." (to the tune of Kenny Rogers) ---------------------------------------------------- > This reminds me of the guy who stole the entire cobblestone street in > Philadelphia in the middle of the day. Sounds like a case of highway robbery to me! ---------------------------------------------------- Eyedentify: To recognize by sight. Luniversity: A college for crazy people Onederful: What he or she is when he or she is the one and only Sewercide: Doing away with oneself by jumping into a manhole. Tremendous: A giant redwood tree ---------------------------------------------------- A major, with wonderful force, Called out in Hyde Park for a horse. All the flowers looked round, But no horse could be found; So he just rhododendron, of course. The Sultan was peeved with his harem, And cooked up a scheme for to scare'em. He caught a big mouse Which he loosed in the house. (Such confusion is called harem-scarem). By the sewer I lived, By the sewer I died; They said it was murder, But it was sewercide. ---------------------------------------------------- "Say, Pooh, why aren't YOU busy?" I said. "Because it's a nice day," said Pooh. "Yes, but---" "Why ruin it?" he said. ---------------------------------------------------- Dole (to Bush): Stop lying about my record Bush (to Dole): Stop telling the truth about my record! Al Gore's political slogan: Vote for Gore he knows no whore! Did you hear about a movie starring Swaggart, Baker and Hart? It's called "Children of a looser God"! ---------------------------------------------------- Excerpt from Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities (1986) by Diane F. Halpern: Piaget and Inhelder [(1956) The Child's Conception of Space] believed that the knowledge that water level remains horizontal would be attained at an average of 12 years. It seems that girls know this principle at a later age than boys. In fact, it has been estimated that 50% of college women don't know the principle that water level remains horizontal. This is a surprising result that has been replicated several times. It is difficult to understand why this should be such a formidable task for college women. (See Harris, 1978, [Sex Differences in Spatial Ability, anthologized in Kinsbourne, M. (ed.), Asymmetrical Functions of the Brain] for a review of research in this area.) . . . . The principle that water remains horizontal when a glass is tipped seems particularly difficult for girls to comprehend, and the large sex differences found on the [Piaget & Inhelder] Water Level Test cannot be explained by psychosocial factors. Thomas, Jamison, and Hammel (1973) [Science, 181, 173 - 174] reported very little success in teaching this principle to girls. . . . . In [the Water Level Test] subjects are required to draw in the water level in a picture of a tipped glass. The usual finding is that far fewer females draw a horizonatal line to represent the water level than males. Females tend to draw their line parallel to the direction in which the glass is tipped. This is a robust result that has been replicated many times with samples ranging from elementary school-age children to college students. This task really requires two component skills: (1) Subjects must know that water will always remain horizontal even when its container is tipped; and (2) Subjects must be able to draw an approximately horizontal line. It is difficult to understand how either of these two skills could depend on sex related environment differences. It does not seem likely that males have more or better experience with a tipped glass of water. In fact, one could argue that females, the primary cooks and dishwashers in many homes, might have more related experience with tipped glasses of water and other liquids than males. Nor does it seem likely that females are less able to express this knowledge with an approximately horizontal line. The ability to draw an approximately horizontal line is a "low level skill." Even if boys play with spatial toys like tinker toys and Lincoln logs more often than girls and are encouraged to pursue spatial professions like architecture and engineering, it does not seem intuitively obvious that these experiences are needed in order to be able to approximate a horizontal line. There is, of course, no simple or direct biological explanation for these results either. I do not think that there is a genetic code for performance on the Water Level Test. ---------------------------------------------------- > How did Bill Waterson pick the names "Calvin" & "Hobbes"? > > [Imaginary scene of Watterson and college] > > Didn't Hobbes (the philosopher) discuss the brutish nature of man? > Sounds like man could be described as a tiger. > Doesn't Calvin (the character) often ask questions about predestination? > Sounds like a certain religion I've heard of. Congratulations, you win the $64,000 prize! There was an interview with Bill Watterson in the L.A. Times a few months back, which I am using as my basis here. In it, watterson explains that he got the name "Calvin" and "Hobbes" because of their philosophical and religious views (which apparently contradict and conflict with each other). Not being a student of this, I can't go into details, but I do remember Watterson saying "it's a subtle inside joke". While we're on the subject of C&H (whoopee!), you might be interested in how the strip developed: Idea #1: "Spaceman Spiff", the misadventures and yuks of a cosmic superhero. Turned down by syndicates. Idea #2: (Dunno the name), the misadventures and yuks of a suburban family. The father, the mother, the kid, and his stuffed tiger. Turned down by syndicates, but Watterson was suggested "try focusing on the kid". Idea #3: "Calvin & Hobbes". Terrific art, whack-headed stories, reality shifts at the drop of a hat, and some of the most original jokes around. Instant success, and a very good candidate as the successor to "Peanuts" (YEAH!) ---------------------------------------------------- My fiance's boss had his car stolen a couple of weeks ago. They found the thief several days later, and about an hour away, driving the car around. The car had no damage, nothing was taken out of it (there was a bunch of tools, etc. in the back), it was still the same color, and still had the same license plates! If the guy was smart enough to steal the car without damaging it at all, you'd think he'd at least think of changing the plates... ---------------------------------------------------- Some years ago (not too many) when I was a freshman in college I made the mistake of taking an elementary Chemistry class because I thought it would be easy (it was, relatively speaking.) Unfortunately, it was also unbearably boring. Fortunately it was made bearable by a sophmore that I was sitting next to who was equally board and told me how she dealt with it. She made list of things to do when bored. So I immediately started compiling my own list. In the following years friends of mine have read the list and told me that some of them are really funny. (They also told me that some of them are really stupid) But since I can't tell the difference I'll post them all. Disclaimers: Spelling Errors are intentional to keep the reader alert. Honeywell has never told me their official opinions so I don't know if these reflect them or not. None of these offend me but if your easily offended maybe you should just hit 'N' now to be safe. I believe that there was a book published with a similar title, if I'm infringing on any copywrite laws, tough. Here goes part one (I'm not done typing part two.) Things to do when Bored -Wax the ceiling. -Loosen the lug nuts on your dad's new car. -Drop your cat from a high place, to see if it really does land on all four feet. -Repeat above until failure. -Rearrange political campaign signs. -Sharpen your teeth. -Play Houdini with one of your siblings. -Braid your dogs hair. -Clean and polish your belly button. -Water your dog...see if he grows. -Wash a tree. -Genuflect to Larwence Welk. -Knight yourself and some close friends. -Found the Jim Jones' School of Modern Bartending. -Flirt with an evergreen. -Scare Steven King. -Give your cat a mohawk. -Purr. -Mow your carpet. -Rake your carpet (to clean up the clippings.) -Whine -Play Pat Boone records backwards. -Re-elect Richard Nixon. -Dress like your favorite Heavy Metal group...surprise your grandmother. -Listen to a painting. -Play with matches. -Buff your cat. -Raise professional racing ferrets. -Paint your home...day-glo orange. -Dial-a-Prayer and argue. -Read Homer in the original Greek. -Learn Greek. -Change your mind. -Change it back. -Watch the sun...see if it moves. -Mail Jerry Falwell a Hustler magazine. -Recite romantic poetry...to your toaster. -Paint your windows. -Flash your goldfish. -Paint. -Smile. -Paint a smile. -Shoot at a fire hydrant. -Apologize to it. -See if you really can build a small nuclear device in your basement. -Rotate your garden...daily. -Plant a shoe. -Write letters to all the political officials that are representing you and tell them what a good job they are doing...on April 1st. -Sweat. -Give a Rorschach (Ink-blot) Test to your gerbil. -Take apart all your major kitchen appliances. -Mix and match the parts. -Turn your TV picture tube upside down. -Take your sofa for a walk. -Write a letter to Plato. -Mail it. -Start. -Stop. -Dial 911...breath heavily. -Go to a funeral...tell jokes. -Put lighted EXIT signs on all your closets. -Carry a tune. -Drop it to see if it breaks. -Starch your shoes. -Contemplate a cockroach. -Get a dog to chase your car. -Let him catch it. -Form a political party. -Throw a political party. -Climb a sidewalk. -Ride a loaf of bread. -Annoy yourself. -Get angry with yourself. -Stop speaking to yourself. -Kiss and make-up. -Stand on your head. -Stand on someone else's head. -Learn everything there is to know about the Holy Roman Empire. -Read a Harlequine Romance Novel...but only if you're REALLY bored. -Build a pyramid. -Paint your teeth. -Wear a salad. -Speak with a forked tongue. -MAKE a drive in window at your local bank. -Walk on water...but DON'T get caught. -Shave a shrub. -Have a proton fight. -Watch a car rust. -Quiver. -Confess to a crime that you didn't commit. -Learn to type...with your toes. -Buy the Brooklyn Bridge. -Mail it to a friend. -Be in the wrong place at the right time. -Be someone special. -Plot the overthrow of your local School Board. -Request covert assistance from the CIA. -Factor your social security number. -Take the fifth. -Take the sixth. -Read the 1962 Des Moines White Pages. -Join the Foreign Legion. -Learn to write Sanskrit. -Learn to read Sanskrit. -Exist...existentially of course. -Search for buried treasure...in Nebraska. -Hot wax the bottoms of your brother's dress shoes. -Print counterfeit Confederate money. -Kick a cabbage. -Take a picture. -Put it back. -Go back to square one. -Sand a mushroom. -Find the heat capacity of your chemistry professor. -Play solitare...for cash. -Abuse your patio furniture. -Run for Pope. -If you don't win, run for God. -If you still don't win, run for Mayor of Toledo. -Write a book about a previous life. -Count to a million...fast. -Have your cat bronzed. -Make a quilt out of used cocktail napkins. -Revert. -Sleep on a bed of nails. -Don't toss and turn. -Think shallow thoughts. -Run around in squares. -Boil ice cream. -Sterilize your stereo, with Jack Daniels. -Carve your girl/boyfriends initials...in a marshmallow. -Converse...with a flatworm. -Speak in acronyms. -Drive the speed limit...in your garage. -Make a schematic drawing...of a rock. -Be a rabid Boxcar Willi fan. -Sing the National Anthem...during your calculus final. -Pay off the national debt...with a bad check. -Calmly have a nervous breakdown. -Give your goldfish a perm. -Fly a brick. -Play tag...on the nearest interstate. -Excorsize a ghost. -Exersize a ghost. -Go to a cemetary and verbally abuse dead people. -Paint stripes on a lake. -Ski Kansas. -Wear a bowler...hat, stupid. -Test thin ice...with a pogo stick. -Apply for a Unicorn Hunting License. -Defend your neighborhood from roving Mongol hordes. -Do a good job. -Crawl. -Be a side affect. -Ride a bicycle...up Mt. McKinley. -Play hockey with your little cousin...as the puck. -Duck. -Redecorate your garage. -Develope a complex. -Join the Army...be someone simple. -Try harder. -Hit the deck. -Cut the deck. -Make a deal with the Devil...keep your fingers crossed. -Put legwarmers on all your furniture. -Be number six. -Sit. -Stay. -Roll over. -Play dead. -Scheme. -Sprinkle your family room. -Cause a power failure. -Pour instant concrete in your brothers waterbed. -Give a lecture tour on the historical signifigance of cream cheese. -Wrigle. -Be cherubic. -Debate politics with a fern. -If you lose stop watering it. -Donate your brother's body to science. -Join Hell's Angels by mail. -Wonder. -Give your cat a suntan...in the microwave. -Be a square root. -Park your car...with a friend. -Park your car...with a group of friends. -Ask stupid questions. -Spew. -Surf Ohio. -Go bowling...for small game. -Have your first statement of bankruptcy framed. -Hang it on the wall in your office. -Staple. -Solve the population problem. i.e. x + 2y - 16x = population; solve for x. -Contribute to the population problem. -Interview a cloud. -Play tiddly-winks...go for blood. -Go to a drive-in movie in a tank. -Go to a non-drive-in movie in a tank and drive in anyway. -Crumble. -Crumple. -Translate Shakespear into English. -Skydive...to church. -Send the president an alarm clock...wind it up first. -Do aerobics...in your head. -Play card with your swimming pool. -Found a cockroach stable and stud farm. -Send your goldfish to obedience school. -Pinstripe your driveway. -Play "Kick the fire-hydrant." -Harness chipmunk power -Free the opressed toaster-ovens of America. -Free the obsessed toaster-ovens of America. -Mug a stop sign. -Change your name...daily. -Go for a walk...in the attic. -Challenge the neighbor kid to duel. -Find a witch. -Burn her. -Regress. -Find out how many ways there really are to skin a cat. -Go bow hunting...for Toyotas. -Kidnap Cabbage Patch Kids. -Boldly go where no man has gone before. -Jump back. -Play to lose. -Scalp a VW. -Be a threat to the American way of life. -Be a threat to the Northwest Tibetan way of life. -Re-establish the Roman Empire...in Toronto. -Have your car painted plaid. -Found the TLO (Toledo Liberation Organization.) -Play nuclear chicken with a small third world nation. -Race turnips. -Give your grandmother a raise...and another week paid vacation. -Sharpen your sleeping skills. -Put out a fire. -If you can't find one make one. -Ionize your new chemistry professor (remember you took the heat capacity of the first one) -Make a lifesized replica of the Statue of Liberty...out of grape jello. -Tree a goldfish. -Get a college education. -Bury your fathers Nissan. -Tell your him the dog did it. -Catch a falling star. -Throw it back. -Place your cat in hyper-space. -Again tell your dad the dog did it. -Corner the market on Agnew in '76 buttons. -Find out where all these cylinders graduated from. -Install handicapped access to the {your favorite pathetic baseball team here}'s dugout. -Kickstart your TV. -Kickstop your TV. -Perfect the internal cumbustion telephone. -Prove once and for all that a cow can jump over the moon. -Complain to God that Jupiter has more moons than we do. -Make a list of things to do when bored. *start* 16731 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 25 Mar 88 12:04:33 PST (Friday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 2.U To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- Climbing a mountain in silence helps to give ascent. The more waist, the less speed. One man's Mede is another man's Persian. A fool and her money are soon courted. The egg in the hotel, about to be cooked, was picked up by a priest on his way to a monastery, out of the frying pan into the friar. There is no time like the pleasant. It was reported that England was uffereing from a plague of aunts. The busy lawyer wanted an alert young woman to act as deceptionist. The two bits of protoplasm could remember when they were cell-mates. Beautiful legs are sometimes without equal, but bow-legs are always without parallel. He thought all women were biased. "Buy us this." and "Buy us that." He didn't like cycling with friends, he wanted to clyclone along. Greta Barbo dreamed one night that she sprinkled boxes of grass seed in her hair. She awoke moaning, "I vant to be a lawn." He was going to sell his armor for twenty two cents an ounce, it was first class mail. The man told the ghost to go away, "You don't have a haunting license." Why did they hang the picture? They culdn't find the artist. He had untold wealth, it wasn't reported to the IRS. Did you hear about the Arab baker who every morning at 6:00 would bow to the yeast? ---------------------------------------------------- The lecturer on physiology addressed the student nurses. "We will take up the heart, kidneys, lung, and liver in that order." "Oh dear, another organ recital," whispered on nurse to the other. A paper ran an item staing that "The departing Mr. Smithers was a member of the defective bureau of the police force." The chief of police made a strong protest, whereupon the paper published an apology as follows: "Our announcement should have read "The detective branch of the police farce." ---------------------------------------------------- MAY THE NET FORCE BE WITH YOU ---------------------------------------------------- Did you know that 'gullible' is not in Webster's Dictionary? ---------------------------------------------------- There used to be a saying: "The sun never sets on the British empire, because God doesn't trust an Englishman in the dark." ---------------------------------------------------- Once a group of friends and I, including a guy named Brian Pot (pronounced Po) went out to eat. As there was a long waiting line, Brian signed the guest register and we went to wait at the bar. I spilled my drink when the PA system announced that the table was ready for the Pot Party. Now how could they know what I was toting in my purse? ---------------------------------------------------- *---------------------------* | Hard work may not kill me | | But why take that chance? | *---------------------------* ---------------------------------------------------- The Poles have a saying about how communist governments rewrite history: "Only the future is certain; the past is always changing" ---------------------------------------------------- From the Toronto Star, March 10: A would-be bandit failed because he had written a holdup up note on another bank's withdrawal slip. When Leonard Goodin decided to rob a Toronto-Dominion bank branch last Sept. 4, he wrote his holdup note demanding money on a withdrawal slip from the Royal Bank of Canada, court heard yesterday. The teller looked at the note and told Goodin, "You have the wrong bank. This is a Toronto-Dominion, not a Royal." She returned his note but Goodin pushed it back at her along with a brown paper bag in which the money was to be placed. The woman again reminded him he was in the wrong bank and returned the note. "The accused stared at the victim, shook his head and left the bank," court was told. An hour later Goodin successfully robbed another bank - even though it wasn't a Royal branch. ---------------------------------------------------- A few months ago in upstate New York, a man decided to rob a local bank. He walked into the bank holding a brown paper bag. He looked around for a moment, and must have decided he was in the wrong bank, because he then left, walked across the street, and robbed a DIFFERENT one! He took a bystander hostage, where she was forced to drove the thief to his house, and drop him off! He then let her go. She promptly called the police, and they went and arrested the man at his house. ---------------------------------------------------- CAR PHONE USER HELPS IN ARREST Fresno (AP) A motorist used his car telephone to alert the California Highway Patrol that a truck driver was weaving back and forth on Highway 99 south of Fresno and seemed to be drunk. So, officers stopped the truck driver Tuesday night but found that he hadn't been drinking, Patrolman Jim Taylor said. Then, they checked the motorist who had telephoned them and stopped behind the truck when the Patrol pulled it over. The motorist failed a sobriety test and was arrested for investigation of drunken driving, Taylor said. "The truck was probably going straight, and he was the one weaving," Taylor added. True story out of a local newspaper. This guy was apparently really loaded! ---------------------------------------------------- Re: the "college age girl" "in affluent area of Santa Monica" who "couldn't come up with the significance of the figure 1492." Everyone has his own favorite statistic about the failures of American education. One awfully good one (William Buckley's favorite, as it happens) is that 60% of the college seniors in Texas cannot name the country to the south. ---------------------------------------------------- Speaking of Outside Magazine stories, there is an article in the current issue that talks about some of the stupid things that people do to the buffalo in Yellowstone National Park. Here are a couple examples (from memory, for I don't have the article handy) - remember that a buffalo can outrun a thoroughbred racehorse in a quartermile race: o a man decided to throw rocks at a buffalo, just to see what it would do. It charged him. o a man wanted to have his picture taken with a buffalo, except the buffalo was laying down. Thinking that this wouldn't make a very interesting photo, he started kicking the buffalo to make it stand up. The buffalo did stand up, and then it hooked him. He was evacuated to a hospital. After two months he finally died. o a man wanted to take a picture of his two year old daughter with a buffalo, so he set her on top of the animal. You can imagine what happened next. ---------------------------------------------------- A certain old cat had made his home in the alley behind Gabe's bar for some time, subsisting on scraps and occasional handouts from the bartender. One evening, emboldened by hunger, the feline attempted to follow Gabe through the back door. Regrettably, only the his body had made it through when Gabe slammed the door, severing the cat's tail at its base. This proved too much for the old creature, who looked sadly at Gabe and expired on the spot. Gabe put the carcass back out in the alley and went back to business. The mandatory closing time arrived and Gabe was in the process of locking up after the last customers had gone. Approaching the back door he was startled to see an apparition of the old cat mournfully holding its severed tail out, silently pleading for Gabe to put the tail back on its corpse so that it could go on to the kitty afterworld complete. Gabe shook his head sadly and said to the ghost: "I can't. You know the law: I can't retail spirits after 2:00 AM." ---------------------------------------------------- Pat and mike were walking down the street when their old friendly-sort-of-nemesis approached them. He thought he'd have a good laugh at their expense because they, reputedly, weren't too bright. He said: "Hey Pat! Hey Mike! Did you hear the news?" "The news?" asked Mike. "What is it?" asked Pat. "It's incredible, I read in the papers this morning that the devil died!!!" Said the old nemesis. "Is that so?" asked Mike. "The truth is it?" asked Pat, and they bogh dug into their pockets and each gave the man a coin. Thinking this teribly strange, "What on earth is this for?" asked the man. Pat began to explain: "In the old country, when someone dies," and Mike finished: "We all contribute a little something to help the surviving children." ---------------------------------------------------- About five years ago the battery in my beat-up VW beetle had died because I left the lights on overnight . I was in a hurry to get to work on time so I ran into the house to get my wife to give me a hand to start the car. I told her to get into our second car, a prehistoric oversized gas guzzler, and use it to push my car fast enough to start it. I pointed out to her that because the VW had an automatic transmission, it needed to be pushed at least 30 MPH for it to start. She said fine, hoped into her car and drove off. I sat there fuming wondering what can she be doing. A minute passed by and when I saw her in the rearview mirror coming at me at about 40 MPH, I realized that I should have been a bit clearer with my directions. ---------------------------------------------------- OK, my turn. This happened to friends of my parent's friends (triple indirection) but is true to the best of my knowledge. So, the story of Art and Lil. Art needed to do some repair work on his roof which had a fairly steep pitch. He was having a tough time bracing himself until he got a great idea: if he could secure a rope to something in front of the house, throw the rope over the roof to the other side and secure himself to it -- why yes, that would work well. And so it did. But, in such situations, details are all important and Art missed a big one. Had he not secured the rope to the car, or if he had bothered to tell his wife, the story would have had a different ending. But, Lil did get into the car, not noticing the rope stretched over the house, and proceeded to run her errand. Art was dragged up one side of the roof, down the other, fell the ten feet to the driveway and was pulled about a hundred feet down the street until his wife happened to notice. Although he didnt die (which was probably preferable to explaining this story for the rest of his life), Art did spent several weeks in intensive care. ---------------------------------------------------- Bulwer-Lytton Contest Entries: The jungle drums throbbed wildly in the distance, warning him away with a brief but dire message: "The broccoli casserole is burnt!" -- Pat Walker, Garden Grove, Ca. "I assume," said Brian, staring unhappily at the reserve chute's broken rip cord, its free end flailing at his white knuckles and his body plummeting to earth, "that they also lied about having a bus at the landing site." -- Bob Mooers, Bellingham, Wa. "Calling all bunnies!" shouted Randy the Happy Wizard as he shook his carrot out the window of his jolly house in Old Mr. Oak on the edge of the Peppermint Stick Garden. -- Bill Bignin, San Mateo, Ca. "The toilet's stopped up again!" screeched Esmerelda Fnark in a voice that had failed to endear her to over fifteen men in the past three years. -- Michael K. Young, Randalstown, Md. There was only one time in my life when I was happy to find a hair in my milk. -- Anita Locke, Kensington, Md. A conscience is a loathsome thing, God wot, so it wasn't more than an hour later that I was wishing I hadn't slit Martin's throat. -- Marjorie Murch Stanley, Youngstown, Ohio Nydia found one of the drawbacks of being a werewolf was coming into heat during a full moon and giving birth to decituplets. -- R. W. O'Bryan, Perrysburg, Ohio ---------------------------------------------------- A man was driving around the countryside in his new sports car, moving at speeds that bordered on unsafe. When checking his rear-view mirror, he noticed that a small object, followed by a trail of dust, was closing fast. His curiousity piqued, he slowed a bit to get a better look. As the object came into view, it was clearly a chicken. While the man watched in amazement, the bird whizzed by him. He checked his speed as this happened: could it really pass him when he was doing 35? There was no way a chicken was going to make a joke of his $18,000 machine. He slammed down the gas pedal and went screaming toward the offending fowl. He grinned with satisfaction as he passed it, but a few seconds later, he spotted it running even with him, staying in view. He studied the bird and noticed that it had three legs! This was really strange. Suddenly, the chicken zipped ahead of his car, took a sharp left turn and disappeared behind a haystack. The man had to check this out. He spun his wheel and barely made the turn. As he came around the other side of the haystack, he had to stand on his brakes to avoid the farmer, who stood complacently chewing a toothpick and looking blankly at the car that nearly flattened him. The chicken stood nearby, not even breathing heavily. The man got out of his car. "This your chicken?", he asked. "Yup." "How is it possible that it has three legs?" "Me and my wife, we raise 'em that way," the farmer droned. The man looked puzzled. "Why?" "Well," came the reply, "you sit down to dinner with your wife and a guest. You like a drumstick?" "Sure, but..." "And your wife, she likes a drumstick?" "Yeah, so?" "Your guest might like one too, you reckon?" Now it was clear. "Oh, I see!" He smiled. He couldn't wait to spring this on his friends. "What does it taste like?" "Dunno," said the farmer, "never caught one." ---------------------------------------------------- Heard a wonderful news report on the radio today: Seems that there are some folks, somewhere in the U.S., who are passing bank checks which are chemically treated so that several hours after they've been passed they self destruct. (No, I'm not talking about the U.S. government, they don't erode their money, just its underlying value, and they do it much more slowly so as to not get everybody too pissed off at them all at once.) Anyway, back to the self-destructing checks: The radio news report ended by quoting a local law-enforcer as saying that it is difficult to nail somebody for passing bad checks when the whole problem is that the checks in question basically don't exist any more! ---------------------------------------------------- MESSAGE FROM THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON TO THE BRITISH FOREIGN OFFICE IN LONDON -- written from Central Spain, August 1812 Gentlemen, Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by H.M. ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters. We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty's Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence. Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion's petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as the the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall. This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty's Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both: 1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or perchance. 2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain. Your most obedient servant Wellington *start* 00430 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 29 Mar 88 17:53:58 PST (Tuesday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 2.V To: cate3 At this point in my collection I had a subset of the Tom Swifties Mark Israel has built up. He has asked that I not include this in my collection. If you would like to get the latest version of his Tom Swifty file, send him a message at: misrael@csi.uottawa.ca *start* 19343 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 18 Apr 88 18:04:07 PDT (Monday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 3.1 To: Cate3 This is a true story Last night several people were in a computer lab playing games, somebody who was visiting Crown College during the college's 20th birthday came in and watched Jamais (sp?) play multi-trek. Upon seeing the words "energy", "warp", "antimatter", and so on, he asked what sort of physics experiment Jamais was doing by computer control. Famous last words: "Oh no, I think I put in to much antimatter." ---------------------------------------------------- A little girl in a school in USSR was asked to use "communist" in a sentence. She said "My cat just had a litter of kittens and they are all communists". A month later the same little girl was asked to use the word "capitalist" in a sentence. She said: "My cat had a litter of kittens and now they are capitalists". The teacher was shocked and ask what had happened to the kittens. The little girl responded: "Well the have opened their eyes now!" ---------------------------------------------------- (from the Spring 88 Benchmark ("A Quarterly Update from Xerox Corporation")) Paper Documents Created Daily by U.S. Companies 2.7 billion sheets of file folder contents 600 million pages of computer printouts 234 million photocopies 76 million letters 21 million general paper documents It also quotes Paul Strassmann, "a former Xerox executive", as predicting that by 1992 the U.S. will produce 24,600 pages of paper per "information worker" per year. ---------------------------------------------------- If King Tut had studied civil engineering, would he have been a Pharoh Faucet Major? ---------------------------------------------------- Two atheists were shipwrecked on a deserted Island. The situation was getting grim with the hot tropical sun beating down on them and no fresh water. The First Atheist says "Mabye we ought to Pray.... " First Atheist (loudly): "I" Second Atheist : "I" First Atheist: "Seventeen" Second Atheist: "Seventeen" The atheist had overheard a bingo game ......... ---------------------------------------------------- DON'T STEAL .................... THE GOVERNMENT HATES COMPETITION ! ---------------------------------------------------- A group of local homeless folks have announced their intention to join next year's traditional parade of mimes and other performers on New Year's Day in Philadelphia. They're billing it as "The mummers and the paupers." ---------------------------------------------------- "Everyone's a little weird now, it's normal." ---------------------------------------------------- Has anyone noticed that the new movie, APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH, is being released *today*, APRIL 15th? ---------------------------------------------------- ... stolen from Gary Larson's "The Far Side" ... Pilot to Copilot: " ... Say ... What's a mountain goat doing way up here in a cloud bank? " ---------------------------------------------------- Forgot one of my favorite laws. In Sacramento it's illeagal to kick the heads of snakes that stick their heads up through the sidewalk. ---------------------------------------------------- Just last month in my town ... A local gas station attendant overhead a stolen car police report on his scanner when working the late shift. He jotted down the car's plate number. Later that night he called the police and reported that he was robbed at gunpoint by a thug, "but I got the plate number..." It turned out that the guy was "robbed" after the stolen car was recovered and the thief was already in jail. ---------------------------------------------------- The following article is taken from the New Hampshire Business Review under the category of lawyers. This was one of Richard Lederer's columns on Looking at Language. Original date unknown. --------------------------------- Disorder in the Court: a Collection of 'Transquips' by Richard Lederer Most language is spoken language, and most words, once they are uttered, vanish forever into the air. But such is not the case with language spoken during courtroom trials, for there exists an army of courtroom reporters whose job it is to take down and preserve every statement made during the proceedings. Mary Louise Gilman, the venerable editor of the National Shorthand Reporter has collected many of the more hilarious courtroom bloopers in two books - Humor in the Court (1977) and More Humor in the Court, published a few months ago. From Mrs. Gilman's two volumes, here are some of my favorite transquips, all recorded by America's keepers of the word: Q. What is your brother-in-law's name? A. Borofkin. Q. What's his first name? A. I can't remember. Q. He's been your brother-in-law for years, and you can't remember his first name? A. No. I tell you I'm too excited. (Rising from the witness chair and pointing to Mr. Borofkin.) Nathan, for God's sake, tell them your first name! Q. Did you ever stay all night with this man in New York? A. I refuse to answer that question. Q. Did you ever stay all night with this man in Chicago? A. I refuse to answer that question. Q. Did you ever stay all night with this man in Miami? A. No. Q. Now, Mrs. Johnson, how was your first marriage terminated? A. By death. Q. And by whose death was it terminated? Q. Doctor, did you say he was shot in the woods? A. No, I said he was shot in the lumbar region. Q. What is your name? A. Ernestine McDowell. Q. And what is your marital status? A. Fair. Q. Are you married? A. No, I'm divorced. Q. And what did your husband do before you divorced him? A. A lot of things I didn't know about. Q. And who is this person you are speaking of? A. My ex-widow said it. Q. How did you happen to go to Dr. Cherney? A. Well, a gal down the road had had several of her children by Dr. Cherney, and said he was really good. Q. Do you know how far pregnant you are right now? A. I will be three months November 8th. Q. Apparently then, the date of conception was August 8th? A. Yes. Q. What were you and your husband doing at that time? Q. Mrs. Smith, do you believe that you are emotionally unstable? A. I should be. Q. How many times have you committed suicide? A. Four times. Q. Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people? A. All my autopsies have been performed on dead people. Q. Were you acquainted with the defendant? A. Yes, sir. Q. Before or after he died? Q. Officer, what led you to believe the defendant was under the influence? A. Because he was argumentary and he couldn't pronunciate his words. Q. What happened then? A. He told me, he says, "I have to kill you because you can identify me." Q. Did he kill you? A. No. Q. Mrs. Jones, is your appearance this morning pursuant to a deposition notice which I sent to your attorney? A. No. This is how I dress when I go to work. THE COURT: Now, as we begin, I must ask you to banish all present information and prejudice from your minds, if you have any. Q. Did he pick the dog up by the ears? A. No. Q. What was he doing with the dog's ears? A. Picking them up in the air. Q. Where was the dog at this time? A. Attached to the ears. Q. When he went, had you gone and had she, if she wanted to and were able, for the time being excluding all the restraints on her not to go, gone also, would he have brought you, meaning you and she, with him to the station? MR. BROOKS: Objection. That question should be taken out and shot. Before we recess, let's listen to one last exchange involving a child: Q. And lastly, Gary, all your responses must be oral. O.K.? What school do you go to? A. Oral. Q. How old are you? A. Oral. ---------------------------------------------------- A long time ago, I was small (I am now 6'2"). A long time ago, my father, when he was alive, used to play tricks on those of us who were more unsuspecting than he. That was me, my brother Jim, and my brother Doug. The day came when Dad was told by Mom to make lunch for Jim and Doug. This is their story. It is true. Day 1: Dad makes sandwiches. Dad cuts them in half by slicing a circle out of the middle of the sandwich such that half the area is inside the sandwich and half is outside. Doug and James laugh. Day 2: Dad makes sandwiches. Dad goes into the cellar and wraps stips of tough metal around the sandwiches and solders them shut. Doug and James have to pick their sandwiches piece by piece through the bars. Doug and James do not laugh as hard. Day 3: Dad makes sandwiches. Into James' lunch he puts a pack of Wrigley's gum. Dad has taken out one stick and replaced it with a cardboard replica, on which he has gone so far as to dust powder and place little Wrigley's gum tire tracks. Late in the afternoon Dad and Doug and James are playing basketball. James offers Dad his last stick of gum, which Dad takes and places in his mouth. Needless to say, Murphy's Law dictated that the last piece would be the famous replica. Doug and James laugh hard. Day 4: Mom makes sandwiches. End of story. When Doug and James were somewhat younger, They came up with a plan to stay up later than usual. They set every clock in the house back an hour. They even borrowed Dad's watch on some pretense and changed that. They were so afraid they would be discovered that they played very quietly until bedtime. My father came to them at bedtime and said, "You boys have been so good tonight that I'm going to let you stay up an extra hour." Anyone who has ever been small can appreciate the horror my brothers felt... I heartily urge any father who feels up to it to go out there and outwit your children. It is good for them. ---------------------------------------------------- Isn't it rich Isn't it rare One with their feet on the ground One in midair Send in the clowns There ought to be clowns Isn't it rich Isn't it queer Losing my timing this late In my career Send in the clowns There ought to be clowns Just when I stopped opening doors Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours Making my entrance again with my usual flair Sure of my lines, no one is there Don't you love farce, My fault I fear Who said that you'd want what I want Sorry my dear But where are the clowns There ought to be clowns Well, maybe next year. ---------------------------------------------------- According to The Bathroom Trivia Book, by Jack Kreismer: It's against the law in Portland, Oregon for a wedding ceremony to be performed at a skating rink. It's illegal for frogs to croak after 11 PM in Memphis, Tennessee. No one is permitted to carry an ice cream cone in their pocket in Lexington, Kentucky. It's against the law to sing off key in North Carolina. In Wilbur, Washington it's illegal to ride an ugly horse. It's unlawful to tickle a woman's chin with a feather duster in Portland, Maine. In Baldwin Park, California nobody is allowed to ride a bicycle in a swimming pool. A Texas law says that when two trains meet at a railroad crossing, both must come to a stop. Then neither train may continue until the other one is out of sight. ---------------------------------------------------- Soldier standing in front of a large sign . In the background is a huge gorge stretching from east to west. Behind the sign is a bridge that goes to the other side. The sign reads - PAY HERE AFTER CROSSING ---------------------------------------------------- The Monday Afternoon Club, an organization of wealthy city women, met and decided that this month's outing was to be at a dairy farm. Most of them had lived in the city all their lives, and had never seen such a thing. The day came, and the ladies filed into the rented bus which whisked them off to their destination. On the way, they watched out the windows as the city squalor turned into lovely, unpolluted countryside. After they arrived, they were greeted by the farmer who invited them to look him up should they have any questions. Myrtle, after looking about and being amazed by what she saw, stepped into a building and viewed something she thought was quite remarkable. She saw the farmer walk by and hailed him--he sauntered in. "Sir," she inquired, "Why doesn't this cow have any horns?" The farmer cocked his head for a moment, then began in a patient tone: "Well, ma'am, cattle can do a powerful lot of damage with horns. Sometimes we keep 'em trimmed down with a hacksaw. Other times we can fix up the young 'uns by puttin' a couple drops of acid where their horns would grow in, and that stops 'em cold. Still, there are some breeds of cattle that never grow horns. But the reason this cow don't have no horns, ma'am, is 'cause it's a horse." ---------------------------------------------------- Los Angeles Times, April 9: Robert T. Baker, adjunct curator of paleontology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, found the skull of a previously unknown pygmy tyrannosaur while rummaging about in the museum's basement. The new genus has been named Nanotyrannus, or "pygmy tyrant." "The best place to look for new kinds of dinosaurs is . . . in basements," Baker said. "There are never enough scientists to study specimens as soon as they come out of the crate. This came out of the crate in 1942. But no one did a detailed study." Los Angeles Times, April 12: The U.S. Patent Office has granted a patent for a genetically altered mouse. This is the first time a patent has been issued for a genetic change in a higher life form. The mouse was not available for comment. ---------------------------------------------------- NEW "SMOKE" THEORY OF ELECTRONICS ================================= While going over old course files in electronic devices, I came across a sheet of paper, and as I read it, the realization of a basic truth came over me. So simple! So obvious, yet I had failed to see it. Lab Kitburnt, the legendary circuits TA, the creator of the field now known as fried electronics, had discovered how ICs work. He says that smoke is the thing that makes an IC work because every time you let the smoke out of it, it stops working. He claims to have verified this with thorough testing. I was flabbergasted! Of course! Smoke makes all things electrical work. Remember the last time smoke escaped from your 6.002 lab kit. Didn't it quit working? I sat and smiled like an idiot as more of the truth dawned. It's the wires that carry the smoke from the smoke supply to the lab kit. So if the wires were to spring a leak, nothing would work properly because there wouldn't be enough smoke reaching the lab kit. If there is a large smoke leak, the smoke supply would go crazy trying to generate all that smoke and would itself spring a leak. But how could this be? Yes...of course! Smoke comes from a fire, and more smoke means a larger fire. Kindling the fire too much would melt the seals, allowing some smoke, and maybe even flames, to escape. If the fire gets too hot (you bet you can feel it!), the smoke supply's fuel cuts off, extinguishing the fire and stopping the smoke. High wattage transistors require more smoke to operate properly, and that's why the wires going to them are larger. All that smoke also tends to make them hotter, so they require a heatsink. And yes, when a power electronic circuit springs a leak, it lets out much more smoke than a logic circuit. But wait.. How does this fit in with all the device physics we have been learning all along? What about all the electrons and such? Could semiconductor theory be all wrong? Hmmm... I might be at the edge of a breakthrough... Wow!!! To be able to prove Shockley wrong! On the other hand, maybe I'm in trouble here. There may be a big loophole... Wait... I'm getting it... Yes! Of course! How obvious! Electrons are black. ---------------------------------------------------- Did you hear how our country Canada was named? ... well ... there are two stories as to how this came about. The first story holds that the first to arrive, upon meeting the natives would ask "what is the name of this place?" to which the natives would respond "canada? ... canada?", which means "what's that you say?" In the other story the settlers decide to put all the letters of the alphabet into a hat and draw them out one by one until a new name had been found ... This is how it is said to have went: "C" eh? .... "N" eh? ... "D" eh? ... -- "Thank God we don't get all the government we pay for!" -- In a similar vein, when Captain Cook was visiting Australia, he asked his Maori (sp?) guides what those animals that hopped around were called. The guide answered, "Kangaroo", which is Maori for "I don't know". ---------------------------------------------------- And now, things you'll never see in the Enquirer: 1) Baby Born Normal 2) Man and Wife Happily Married 3) House Not Haunted 4) Scientists Understand/Not Baffled 5) Elvis is Dead* 6) UfO's Gone 7) Family Pet Helpless in Fire/Auto Accident 8) New Miracle Diet to Gain Weight 9) New Horoscope Reveals Nothing 10) Celebrity Still Single/Married Ah, what would the tabloids do without Elvis? ---------------------------------------------------- [ Reprinted shamelessly without permission from ¬English Well Speeched Here¬ by Nino Lo Bello ] A Sign posted in Germany's Black Forest reads: IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN ON OUR BLACK FOREST CAMPING SITE THAT PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT SEX, FOR INSTANCE, MEN AND WOMEN, LIVE TOGETHER IN ONE TENT UNLESS THEY ARE MARRIED WITH EACH OTHER FOR THAT PURPOSE. Hmm. What other sexes are there? And, gee, who ¬DOESN'T¬ marry for the purpose of living together in a tent! ;-) ---------------------------------------------------- A blind bunny and a blind snake met in the woods. After realizing that they were both blind, they both admitted that, because of their disability, they each didn't know what kind of animal they were, so they suggested that they help each other find out. The snake crawled around the bunny and said 'Oh, I feel with my nose that you have long floppy ears and hmmm, strong thumper rear feet, and soft fur and a twitchy nose.....I think you are a bunny!' 'The bunny said Oh! I think I am, thank you! Now let me examine you....hmmm you have cold clammy, scaley skin and you slink around close to the ground and you're icky to touch and you have a forked tongue....you must be a lawyer!' *start* 21899 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 4 May 88 17:12:21 PDT (Wednesday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 3.2 To: Cate3 Welcome to South Carolina, Set your watch back 20 years. ---------------------------------------------------- (west) berlin is the only city in the world where every direction you go is east. ---------------------------------------------------- On the day a suit against him was to be settled in court, a prominent congress man was called away on urgent bussiness. He told his attorney to notify him as soon as a judgement was handed down. Later that day, he received a cable that read, "JUSTICE HAS PREVAILED." The politician immediately wired back, "APPEAL AT ONCE." ---------------------------------------------------- Q: Why is it so windy at Candlestick Park? (Home of the San Francisco Giants) A: Because of all the Giant Fans!!!!!!! ---------------------------------------------------- Subject: Followership Through Mediocrity? (Background: Xerox currently has a program called leadership through Quality) From the list of President's Awards "...used his extensive knowledge of materials and xerographic physics to [...] His idea for redesigning the developer to comfortably meet rather than exceed customer requirements..." ---------------------------------------------------- Favorite Bathroom Sign: "Question authority" beneath it "why ?" ---------------------------------------------------- Joke 1. Man in Restaurant: "Waiter, waiter! Bring me a crocodile sandwich, and make it snappy!". Joke 2. Man in shop: "I'd like to buy a wasp, please" Salesperson: "A wasp? We don't sell wasps!" Man: "Well, why have you got one in the window, then?" Joke 3. An idiot was out for a run in the country with his hoop and stick. He goes into a pub for a drink, leaving his hoop and stick outside. When he comes out, it's gone. He goes back inside, weeping, and when the landlord enquires whats wrong, he says his hoop and stick are gone. The landlord says "Well, so what?", to which the idiot replies "How am I going to get home now?" ---------------------------------------------------- I had gotten lost in cryptic and ambiguous regulations, and in total desperation called the Internal Revenue service for some explanations. I got hold of someone thoroughly familiar with the subject of my questions. He gave me complete and helpful answers. I like to give positive reinforcement when I run across people like that, so I made it a point to say "Thank you! You've been really informative and helpful." To which the IRS agent said "I'm sorry". ---------------------------------------------------- What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector ? The taxidermist takes only your skin. Mark Twain ---------------------------------------------------- The American ambassador visited the Romanian president. In the waiting room he talked with two of the ministers for five minutes. When he entered he said to the Romanian president, "I really don't want to bother you but I talked with two of your ministers, and my gold watch was disappeared." So the president answered, "OK. I'll take care of it," left the room and came back two minutes later with the watch. The ambassador said, "Thank you very much," said the ambassador. "I hope that I didn't cause any crisis between you and them." "That's OK," said the president. "They did not notice." ---------------------------------------------------- In 1986, Silo, a discount appliance chain, ran a TV commerical for a stereo it claimed cost only "299 bananas." Sure enough, dozens of customers in Seattle and El Paso took the TV spots literally and brought in 11,000 bananas. Silo honored its pledge, accepted the fruit as payment, and lost $10,465 on the stereos. --------------- Copyright 1988 by Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo. From the forthcoming book, The Misfortune 500, to be published by Pocket Books. ---------------------------------------------------- YOU KNOW IT'S GOING TO BE A " Terrible day at the office" WHEN: You find your boss, two higher levels of management, and a security guard waiting for you when you get in. You find your boss, two higher levels of management, and the group VP have all moved to another division while you were on vacation. You find your office door has disappeared since last night. You find a completely empty parking lot when you get to work at 9:00 AM. The morning business page reads, "Xerox taken over by General Electric." You start to walk out the door of your house and find police barricades at each end of your street and a SWAT team pointing at your roof. People start calling at four AM asking for directions to your house that you wish to sell for $15,000. ---------------------------------------------------- Okay, all this talk about BMW's and pranks on BMW owners has led to Car Pranks, designed to frustrate or confound everyone but you. Some of these require victims with a sense of humor. Not all these are original, but they are my favorites: 1) Wave at someone you don't know. They usually assume a dumbfounded facial expression and wonder, "Who was that? Do I know them?" I get some great reactions out of this. 2) When you're driving alone, pretend to be talking to someone next to you. Any one passing you will look to see who the short person was that you're talking too. They'll look again when they see no one. 3) Break into your own car. Need I explain? 4) In a crowded parking lot, wave your keys around and pretend to be heading to your car. People looking for a parking spot will follow you all over the place. 5) Also in a parking lot, when someone pulls into the parking spot facing you, you slowly ease out, making them think they're not moving. 7) Between one intersection and another, gesculate wildly and point at someone's tires. At the next intersection, when they unroll their windows to hear what you're saying, you explain, "Nice tires." 9) When there's three guys in a car (# in front or 3 in back) and you're not in the middle, duck as a car drives by. It looks like the other two guys are huddled up together. 10) Ever notice that even the slightest flash of brake-lights produces great produces great reactions from tailgaters? I also like to come out of a roller-coaster ride with my head slumped forward on my chest, my eyes closed and my arms hanging loosely at my sides, but that has nothing to do with cars. ---------------------------------------------------- It seems that William Tell, aside from being involved in such exploits as escaping across Lake Lucerne, and being able to shoot an apple off his kid's head with an arrow, was also one MEAN bowler. In fact, he was so good that on occasion he was contracted out to secretly take the place of certain other bowlers in the leagues when large bets were on. The economic situation being what it was, Mr. Tell didn't mind a little money on the side. It turns out that there was one particular Swiss nobleman who was an unusually poor bowler, and this gentleman made use of Mr. Tell's services in league matches quite often. Finally, Tell more or less took this man's place in the league (no one being the wiser), and both men became quite wealthy as a result. Much later, in the 1930's, Ernest Hemingway was doing some literary research in Bern when he more or less accidentally came across the diaries of this nobleman, which included a detailed account of the hitherto undiscovered arrangement between himself and Mr. Tell. So fascinated was Hemingway with this man who had had such an effect on Tell's life, that he immediately began working on a book about the nobleman. The book became a literary classic, selling millions of copies. The title, of course, was "For Whom the Tell Bowls" ---------------------------------------------------- As couple sat in living room, watching TV, the phone rang. The husband picked it up, listened for a moment and then screamed,"Damn it! How should I know? call weather bureau" and hung up. "What was that all about?" wife asked. "Aw, some idiot wanted to know whether coast was clear." ---------------------------------------------------- If anybody is interested in a good airline story that is true, I have one that I heard about on the news two years ago. It seems there was a guy who was flying from Germany to Oakland California. His plane was being refueled in San Francisco and he was just waiting to get his transferring flight. Well, he waited until he heard this over the loudspeaker. {Said with an Aussie accent} "Now boarding flight ### for AKLAND" Well, the poor man couldn't understand what the lady had said, but he assumed that this was his flight. He gave his boarding pass to the gentleman at the gate, but the man didn't really look at it carefully. About half an hour later the man looked out the plane window and realized that he was flying over the ocean. He thought this was odd, so he called the stewardess over and inquired about it. The stewardess promptly took to laughing for at least a good number of minutes before telling the man that his flight was actually going to Auckland New Zealand. The man was rather perturbed, but the airline promised to get him home. After landing in New Zealand, they had to reroute him throught the Phillipines and later through Hawaii to get back to California. Now that's a HELL of a trip to undertake when you start out from Germany!!! ---------------------------------------------------- Subject: Product assurance testing Re: Urban legends David Paulsen (seven@nuchat) While taking an introductory COBOL course about eight years ago I got to be good friends with the instructor, who had been around computers since the late 50's. He told me a story he swore to be true. Seems the hardware types had spent a number of hours installing a new 'washing-machine' 5-platter disk drive on the big Honeywell, and were just about to invoke diagnostics. Somebody hit the final key and they all sat back to wait for the machine's verdict... all of a sudden, the most GAWD AWFUL sound, kind of a ripping, screeching, freezing-bearing sound came from the new drive. Everybody turned around, in time to see the plastic-oid cover rip free from the top of the box, and the platter, spinning out of control, lift itself up out of the drive and float ABOVE the spindle before listing to port and finally diving for the floor, where it landed like a frisbee, still spinning. Stunned silence. "Well, I guess that's a 'fail'" one tech remarked. Apparently, the spindle had snapped just as the drive got up to speed. ---------------------------------------------------- All who watched the movie "Roxanne" will recall the scene in a bar where Steve Martin's character humiliates a wise-guy who has made a rude remark about his nose. The guy is asked if he can't come up with some wittier remark than he made, and he sarcastically asks if Martin can come up with something better. Martin says he can in fact produce twenty "Something Betters". Did anyone notice that in fact he reels off TWENTY FIVE? They are: 1. Obvious: "Excuse me, is that your nose, or did a bus park on your face?" 2. Meteorological: "Everybody take cover, she's going to blow!" 3. Fashionable: "You know, you could de-emphasize your nose if you wore something larger, like Wyoming." 4. Personal: "Well, here we are, just the three of us." 5. Punctual: "All right Dellman, your nose was on time, but you were fifteen minutes late." 6. Envious: "Ooh, I wish I were you, to be able to smell your own ear." 7. Naughty: "Pardon me sir, some of the ladies have asked if you wouldn't mind putting that thing away." 8. Philosophical: "You know, it's not the size of a nose that's important, it's what's in it what matters." 9. Humorous: "Laugh and the world laughs with you; sneeze and it's goodbye Seattle." 10. Commercial: "Hi, I'm Earl Scheib, and I can paint that nose for Thirty-Nine Ninety-Five." 11. Polite: "Ah, would you mind not bobbing your head? The, ah, orchestra keeps changing tempo." 12. Melodic: (Everybody) "He's got the whole world.. in his nose." 13. Sympathetic: "Ooh, what happened, did your parents lose a bet with God?" 14. Complimentary: "You must love the little birdies to give them this to perch on." 15. Scientific: "Say, does that thing there influence the tides?" 16. Obscure: "Hoo, I'd hate to see the grindstone." 17. Enquiry: "When you stop and smell the flowers, are they afraid?" 18. French: "Sir, ze pigs have refused to find any more truffles until you leave." 19. Pornographic: "Finally, a man can satisfy two women at once." 20. Religious: "The Lord giveth, and he just kept on giving, didn't he?" 21. Disgusting: "Say, who mows your nose hair?" 22. Paranoid: "Keep that guy away from my cocaine." 23. Romantic: "It must be wonderful to wake up in the morning and smell the coffee ... in Brazil." 24. Appreciative: "Ooh how original, most people have their teeth capped." 25. Dirty: "Your name wouldn't be ... Dick, would it?" ---------------------------------------------------- "An Elementary Look at Campaigns and Elections" (Every year, teacher Mike Wilson of Ballwin, Missouri has his elementary-school students study the presidential election process in America. From the resulting essays and exam papers, Wilson has culled some gems of youthful insight and wisdom, not to mention skepticism worth of a politics-weary adult. As the 1984 presidential election grows near, we offer some of Wilson's treasures.) Did you ever think what I used to think about candidates running neck-and-neck? Well it is not true. Universal suffrage means that even the illegible get to vote. Calling a person a runner-up is the polite way of saying you lost. The difference between a king and a president is that a king is the son of his father but a president is not. What I learned about elections is that we aren't really getting to elect the president. It is some people in a college who get to. I have not decided what to do about it yet but I am not going to just sit around. It is possible to get the majority of electoral votes without getting the majority of popular votes. Anyone who can ever understand how this works gets to be president. Some of our presidents never did much else and are famous only because they became president. The more I think about trying to run for president the less I think of it. The president has the power to appoint and disappoint the members of his cabinet. Much has been said about balancing the budget. It has been found that the budget is more talkable than balanceable. The campaign is when the candidate tells what he stand for and the election is when the votes tell if they can stand for his being elected. Actually, elections are different from politics. Elections come and go while politics are with us all the time. The winning candidate is elected and inoculated. In January, the president makes his Inaugural Address after he has been sworn at. Once he is elected, sometimes the president has to work 24 hours a day until he finds out what he is supposed to do. The nominees are usually called candidates or campaigners although I have heard them called other things. One of the strictest rules is all dark horses running for president must be people. Popular votes tell who is the most popular. Electoral votes tell who is the most elected. Heredity is a bad thing in politics because it gets us kings instead of presidents. A caucus is something people vote in. Sort of a small booth. An overwhelming favorite is a candidate that often comes over to the convention and whelms the delegates. The jobs of delegates is to resent their states. Noncommittal is to be able to talk and talk without saying anything. When the radio mentions a landslide, cross your fingers and hope it is talking about an election. A dark horse is a candidate that the delegates don't know enough about to dislike yet. Political science is to try to figure out what makes candidates act that way. A split ticket is when you don't like any of them on the ticket so you tear it up. When they talk about the most promising presidential candidate, they mean the one who can think of the most things to promise. Elephants and donkeys never fought until politics came along. Political strategy is when you don't let people know you have run out of ideas and keep shouting anyway. A candidate should always renounce his words carefully. We are learning how to make our election results known quicker and quicker. It is our campaigns we are having trouble getting any shorter. One of the mainest rules of campaigning is you are not allowed to go on a whistle-stop tour without a train. Politician is the bawling out name for a candidate you don't like. Speaking of defeat, candidates are told never to. Campaigns give us a great deal of happiness by their finally ending. [ Reported collection source, Ford Times ] ---------------------------------------------------- At the risk of starting another net storm with Yet Another Stupid Robber Joke (YASRJ) messages, a friend recently showed me a clipping from a newspaper which I though I'd pass along to all the netlanders who enjoy seeing and collecting bits of stupidity. After all isn't this what rec.humor (no crossposing here) is supposed to be CLUTTERED UP with anyway? That was a rhetorical question - so don't bother answering. ADIEU ADIEU ADIEU ...without further ADIEU... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ About Banking... RULES FOR BANK ROBBERS According to the FBI, most modern-day bank robberies are "unsophisticated and unprofessional crimes," comitted by young male repeat offenders who apparently don't know the first thing about their business. This information was included in an interesting, amusing article titles "How Not to Rob a Bank," by Tim Clark, which appeared in the 1987 edition of The Old Farmers Almanac. Clark reported that in spite of the widespread use of surveillance cameras, 76 percent of bank robbers use no disquise, 86 percent never study the bank before robbing it, and 95 percent make no long-range plans for concealing the loot. Thus, he offered this advice to would-be bank robbers, along with examples of what can happen if the rules aren't followed: 1. Pick the right bank. Clark advises that you don't follow the lead of the fellow in Anaheim, Cal., who tried to hold up a bank that was no longer in business and had no money. On the other hand, you don't want to be too familiar with the bank. A California robber ran into his mother while making his getaway. She turned him in. 2. Approach the right teller. Granted, Clark says, this is harder to plan. One teller in Springfield, Mass., followed the holdup man out of the bank and down the street until she saw him go into a restaurant. She hailed a passing police car, and the police picked him up. Another teller was given a holdup note by a robber, and her father, who was next in line, wrestled the man to the ground and sat on him until authorities arrived. 3. Don't sign your demand note. Demand notes have been written on the back of a subpoena issued in the name of a bank robber in Pittsburgh, on an envelope bearing the name and address of another in Detriot, and in East Hartford, Conn., on the back of a withdrawal slip giving the robber's signature and account number. 4. Beware of dangerous vegetables. A man in White Plains, N.Y., tried to hold up a bank with a zucchini. The police captured him at his house, where he showed them his "weapon." 5. Avoid being fussy. A robber in Panorama City, Cal., gave a teller a note saying, "I have a gun. Give me all your twenties in this envelope." The teller said, "All I've got is two twenties." The robber took them and left. 6. Don't advertise. A holdup man thought that if he smeared mercury ointment on his face, it would make him invisible to the cameras. Actually, it accentuated his features, giving authorities a much clearer picture. Bank robbers in Minnesota and California tried to create a diversion by throwing stolen money out of the windows of their cars. They succeeded only in drawing attention to themselves. 7. Take right turns only. Avoid the sad fate of the thieves in Florida who took a wrong turn and ended up on the Homestead Air Force Base. They drove up to a military police guardhouse and, thinking it was a toolbooth, offered the security men money. 8. Provide your own transportation. It is not clever to borrow the teller's car, which she carefully described to police. This resulted in the most quickly solved bank robbery in the history of Pittsfield, Mass. 9. Don't be too sensitive. In these days of exploding dye packs, stuffing the cash into your pants can lead to embarrassing staings, Clark points out, not to mention severe burns in sensitive places--as bandits in San Diego and Boston painfully discovered. 10. Consider another line of work. One newvous Newport, R.I., robber, while trying to stuff his ill-gotten gains into his shirt pocket, shot himself in the head and died instantly. Then there was the case of the hopeful criminal in Swansea, Mass., who, when the teller told him she had no money, fainted. He was still unconscious when the police arrived. In view of such ineptitude, it is not surprising that in 1978 and 1979, for example, federal and state officers made arrests in 69 percent of the bank holdups reported. *start* 16933 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 4 May 88 17:21:39 PDT (Wednesday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 3.3 To: Cate3 WALT DISNEY IS NOT DEAD! He's in suspended animation. ---------------------------------------------------- Bumper snickers I Watch Heavenly Bodies Supernovae are a Blast Interstellar Matter is a Gas Black Holes are Out of Sight Gravity Gets Me Down My Other Car is a STARSHIP ---------------------------------------------------- Seen on a sign on the back of an 18-wheeler on the freeway today: "This truck is operated by a professional. His driving kills are on display. If you have comments, please call (800) XXX-XXXX." The (unintentional or otherwise!) omission of the "s" before "kills" sure changes the meaning! ---------------------------------------------------- More dumb laws (I don't have a source for these; someone told me about them recently): All residents of Kentucky are required by law to take a bath at least once per year. It is illegal to shoot a rabbit from a moving trolleycar in New York City. ---------------------------------------------------- A man walks into the psychiatrists office with a pancake on his head, fried eggs on each shoulder, and a strip of bacon over each ear. The shrink, humoring him, asks, "What seems to be the problem?" The guy answers, "Doc, I'm worried about my brother." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A man who thinks he's George Washington has been seeing a psychiatrist. He finishes up one session by telling him, "Tomorrow, we'll cross the Delaware and suprise them when they least expect it." As soon as he's gone, the psychiatrist picks up the phone and says, "King George, this is Benedict Arnold. I have the plans." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A man who thought he was John-The-Baptist was disturbing the neighborhood, so for public safety, he was committed. He was put in a room with another crazy and immediately began his routine, "I am John The Baptist! Jesus Christ has sent me!" The other guy looks at him and declares, "I did *not*!" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sign on a psychologists office: Schitzophrenics pay double. We're a happy schitzophrenic! A man walks into a psychiatrists office and tells him, "I have an identity problem.....So do I." ---------------------------------------------------- If you think the 80286 is brain damaged, you ought to check out the Colorado State Legislature ---------------------------------------------------- someone said: As a final note, I find it interesting that apparently the only way to make fun of a democrat is to take something writen about a republican and mindlessly change the names. I say: Nonsense - you don't have to make fun of Democrats - they do it for you every time they open their mouths. ---------------------------------------------------- I got this from an electronic fortune cookie: "Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're ok, you're it." ---------------------------------------------------- Q: What do the Chinese cooks listen to while making dinner? A: Wok music on a Wokman. Q: What is their favorite song? A: "Wok Like an Egyptian" Q: What is their favorite spiritual? A: "Wok of Ages" Q: What is their favorite music when you see your lover cooking outside on a bad day with another person? A: "I saw you...(and HIM!)...Wokking in the rain..." Q: Have you heard about the new cookbook? A: It's called "101 Ways to Wok Your Dog." "You can tell by the way I use my wok, I'm a Chinese cook, no time to talk" ---------------------------------------------------- * See the happy moron, * * He doesn't give a damn. * * I wish I were a moron, * * My God!, Perhaps I am! * ---------------------------------------------------- I also work as a consultant for students. My favorite question is when a user comes in with a very blank look and says, "How do I use these things?" "Well, " I say, "what do you want to use them for?" "I dunno.........." You have pull it out of what they want to do!! You ask "do you want to use a word processor?" or "do you want to program?" or...... Another good move is when you tell them to do something like "just type copy space a:filename B:" They come back a little while later and say that didn't work. You go look at their screen and they typed "copy A:filename b:" and you have to explain "NO not filename, the name of the file you want to copy!" ---------------------------------------------------- My favorites include the operator trying desparately to get the mainframe back up. Trouble line rings every 30 seconds with stupid students asking why the computer doesn't answer. Finally: Student: "Is the computer down?" Operator: "NO! It knows it's you, and it doesn't like YOU!" ---------------------------------------------------- A lady (very well-off) comes in with about $800.00 worth of software with she promptly deposits on the counter. She then exclaims, 'None of these work.' Needless to say, I felt obligated to check this out. I grabbed the top thing on the pile and walked over to the IBM pc, only to have her exclaim, 'I don't have that computer, I have that computer...' After checking the boxes I realized she had bought software for virtually every computer we sold, paying no heed to such petty details as 'machine type'. Working as a technician's assistant at our local IBM/Apple dealer, I was one day greeted by a kindly gentleman who had in his possession, a rather disturbed looking pc. 'Disturbed' is probably too nice a term, as 'completely thrashed' would be more suitable. He plopped it down saying, 'It doesn't work. Can you fix it by tommorrow, as I have a deadline to meet'. After removing the cover, I was treated to see some of the most obscure items I have ever seen lying on a motherboard. These included a matchbox car, a VERY rotten banana peel, about 12 pennies, and an empty coke cup, complete with sticky, caramel-scented gook all over the board. We didn't get it fixed by the next day, but we gave him a loaner. And it was a nice commission for me. ---------------------------------------------------- When I worked for a company that had a contract with 3M, 3M had asked me to write them a memo describing why we were having problems with diskette failures. I said in the memo that the disks were failing due to head crashes. "If the customers would just clean their heads periodically, we wouldn't have these problems," I said in the memo. One customer responded with "What kind of shampoo do you recommend?" ---------------------------------------------------- An end-user hotline received a call about a bad software disk. They asked the customer to make a copy of the disk and mail it in to the hotline. A few days later, they received a letter with a mimeographed copy of the disk. Since it was a double-sided disk, both sides of the disk had been xeroxed. ======= A software installation (for S/36, I believe), instructed the operator to insert each disk in order into the floppy drive, and hit so that the software could get copied in. The customer hotline received a call from one customer complaining that disks 1-4 had gone in fine, but that they just couldn't get disk #5 to fit. Wonder how long the disk drive held out after that. Friend of mine worked for an Egghead's in Southern California. Lady walks in one day with a box of 5 1/2 inch disks (well, the box was 5 1/2, anyway...). Says "I bought these disks and they seem to be defective." "So", says my friend, "what type of computer do you have?" "An Apple," says she. So fine, says my friend, and takes her over to a IIe... "Oh no," she said, "I own one of those!" And points to a Mac. (at this point my friend, as you do, saw where this was going, and refused to believe it.) "Well," says my friend "these are 5 1/2 inch disks, they won't won't fit in one of those..." "Oh, I made them fit." Says the woman. Needless to say (but I'm going to anyway...), she had taken a pair of scissors..... ---------------------------------------------------- When I was doing software support for a bunch of 11/70's........ Computer Operator as she is lifting an RP06 disk pack from the drive: "Gee, how much does one of these weigh?" Me: "It depends on how much data is on the disk...." The operator believed it. ---------------------------------------------------- In article <557@picuxa.UUCP> tgr@picuxa.UUCP (Dr. Emilio Lizardo) writes about user calls to computer vendor hotlines. I'd like to share a couple that have happened to my sister who is now a manager at IBM. (I guess all IBM'ers have to deal with naive users at sometime or the other.) I'll abbreviate my sister's name with "S", and the customer with "C". Think you can handle that? S: Hello, IBM hotline, can I help you. C: Uhhh, yes. I just bought a system/36. It just arrived with the diskettes that I ordered. A hundred of them. Wow, them disks are expensive: [something like 5 or 10 ] bucks a pop. S: Yeah, I suppose. C: Well, I just wanted to let you know that we'll be ready for your installation next Monday as planned. Oh yes, and I prepared all the diskettes for your service person. S: Uh...thanks. What do you mean by prepared the diskettes? C: Oh. I peeled them all out of the covers and put the diskettes in one pile and the covers in another... S: (Silent pause). Uh yes. Thanks, by the way, could I have the name of your marketing rep? I need to discuss something with them... ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ [This one is familiar!] S: Hello, IBM hotline, may I help you? C: Yes. I'm sys-genning my system. S: Go ahead. C: Well, I'm on page [whatever] and the instructions say to "insert diskette" number 8. I'm having problems inserting the diskette. S: Please describe what's happened thus far... C: Uh, well I managed to get the other seven in successfully, but I don't think you left enough room for the eighth... ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ [Last one] S: Hello, IBM hotline, may I help you? C: This is-- S: Oh, HI mom! How are you doing? Where are you? C: [Softly] I'm at work. In the computer room. S: What's up? C: I'm bringing up the system and something's wrong... S: OK. Explain. C: Well, the instructions say to insert the diskette in the drive. I was about to insert it in the drive, and then it disappeared. S: Huh? C: I thought I tried to put it in but I must have dropped it. How do I get a new copy? S: Wait, ma. Go back and check to see that the diskette is NOT in the drive. It's very thin and you should look carefully, cause it's probably there. [Pause] C: Yes, it's there. Golly, it is thin. And to think that for five minutes I was reaching in all over the computer, on my hands and knees feeling underneath the computer 'cause I thought I dropped it... S: Excuse me ma, I have another call on the other line. I'll call you back. [Hangs up phone.] AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHOHOHOHOHOHOHO. HEY, JUDY, GUESS WHO CALLED AND WHAT HAPPENED THIS TIME! ---------------------------------------------------- I had a similar experience while working as a student operator at Michigan Tech. One particularly trying afternoon, the computer was merrily crashing for a number of reasons. After about four such spectacles, we broadcast that the computer would be down for the remainder of the afternoon. There was a resigned groan from the users and they began to file out of the Center, except for one comely young wench with wide blue eyes who wandered up to the counter and queried: "What's wrong with the computer?" Too tired and irritated to give her a straight answer, I looked her straight in the eye and replied: "Broken muffler belt." A look of deep concern wafted into her expression as she asked: "Oh, that's bad. Can you call Midas?" ---------------------------------------------------- more stupid user tricks: 1) all our terminals are connected to a port-selector. After about 30 sec., the port times out and the terminal says' "DISCONNECTED". All you have to do is press return to get system's attention. It's really great to see the truly brain-dead look at the message and say, "Oh, it's broken." and move to the next terminal. And discover that all the inactive terminals have the same message. One time we told them, "Yeah, all the terminals in this room are down for repairs, you'll have to go to another lab." And off they go to search for a "working" terminal... 2) the system uses the prompt, "TERM" to ask the user what type of terminal he's using. It never fails to have one or two new users type in "spring" (or fall or winter depending on what quarter it is). ---------------------------------------------------- Paranoia? This book may not be reproduced in any manner or the pages or artwork applied to any materials listed but not limited to the following: - Cut, trimmed or sized to alter the existing trim size of the pages. - Laminated, transferred or applied to any substance, form or surface. - Carved, molded or formed in any manner in any material. - Lifted or removed chemically or by any other means, or transferred to produce slides or transparencies - Used as promotional aids, premiums, or advertising or for non-profit or educational purposes. - Engraved, embossed, etched or copied by any means onto any surfaces whether metallic, foil, transparent or translucent. - Matted or framed with the intenet to create other products for sale or re-sale or profit in any manner whatsoever, without express written consent from ... No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holders, except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine [this was on a CALENDAR!] ---------------------------------------------------- I work for University Computing Services answering questions about any and all aspects of computing here, and as a result I run into some truly astonishing mental densities... A few excerpts from the Helpdesk: Caller: "What's the name for when you're entering data into the computer?" HD: "Data Entry." Caller: "Thank you!" ---- Someone else, using a terminal with a PRINT SCREEN key but no printer attached, wanted to know where (which VaxCluster system printer) the printouts went when he pushed PRINT SCREEN... ---- Overheard in a student computer lab: Client (raising hand and waving frantically): "The computer says 'Enter your name and press RETURN.' What do I do??" Lab Assistant: "Enter your name and press RETURN." Client (as if a revelation has struck): "Oh!" ---- Another friend of mine in a similar situation reports having a student in the lab one day, who had to abort out of the SET PASSWORD sequence because he couldn't think of a six-letter word. ---------------------------------------------------- Q: Why did God create WASP's? A: Someone has to buy retail! Q: What do WASP's think Zimbabwe Rhodesia is? A: A wide receiver for the Houston Oilers. Q: How can you tell if a WASP is sexually excited? A: The stiff upper lip. Q: What's a WASP's idea of open-mindedness? A: Dating a Canadian. Q: What does a little WASP girl want to be when she grows up? A: "The very best person I possibly can." Q: What's a WASP's idea of social security? A: An ancestor on the Mayflower. Q: Why did the WASP cross the street? A: To get to the middle of the road. Q: What happens when four WASP's find themselves in the same room? A: A dinner party. Q: What do WASP's think of the Mideast situation? A: Well, Newport is all right, but EVERYbody goes to the Cape. Q: How does a WASP propose marriage? A: "How would you like to be buried with my people?" Q: What's a WASP's idea of affirmative action? A: Hiring South American jockeys. Q: What's a WASP's definition of conspicuous consumption? A: A Sunfish with a spinnaker. Q. How can you tell when a WASP is dead? A. He lets go of his wallet Q. What do you call a WASP virgin? A. You can't. Her number's unlisted Q. What's a WASP's favourite song? A. "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" Q. What does a professional WASP call her boss? A. Daddy Q: How many wasps does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Three. Two to mix the martinis and one to call the electrician. Q: Why do WASPs play golf? A: So they can dress like pimps. *start* 18285 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 2 Jun 88 17:33:32 PDT (Thursday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 3.4 To: Cate3 From Herb Caen's column ... A single lane bridge in Marin County has a sign which reads: Unsafe to cross bridge when water covers this sign. ---------------------------------------------------- This is the conversation that will take place many years from now when the crew of Starship Enterprise returns to earth and discovers your newly acquired ti computer. "Can you operate it, Spock?" "Well, Jim, this computer was designed and constructed 300 million years ago by a totally alien race of methane-breathing, squidlike beings who built it using technologies unknown to us and used it for purposes we cannot conceive of and then mysteriously vanished leaving no shred of documentation as to its operation. It may take a few moments." ---------------------------------------------------- This is mostly a human interest story, but in the loads of junk mail I receive daily one inparticular caught my attention. I received an application for a Star Trek Visa! On the card is the title "Star Trek - The Enterprise Card" along with a very nice picture of Enterprise from TNG and the typical holographic dove and Visa symbol in the corner. The interest rate is an absurd 21.9% with a yearly fee to boot. But the way this thing is sold in the brouchure is haliarious. To quote a few: "Easy to apply..easy to qualify. Stand-by for lift-off..to welcome you to STAR TREK VISA!" "Use you card where ever you go...across town or across the galaxy!" "Get cash when you need it...You'll encounter no time warps with STAR TREK VISA. You can use you card to get cash at over 102,000 banks and... " blah, blah, blah "Journey to new frontiers...The next gerneration...your generation...is coming of age!" What will they think of next? ---------------------------------------------------- True story, don't think it will offend anyone. On a local radio station the Mental Health Association had this message: "Does someone in your family suffer from schizoid? You are not alone..." (No kidding!!! Neither are they!!!) Guess the writer's strike has gone further than we thought! ---------------------------------------------------- I found this in a catalog for Public Brand Software. They sell software for IBM PCs. From their tone, I suspect they won't mind my quoting them. -- D. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Note that we used to refer to our phone number as 1-800-IBM-DISK. We have been told by IBM Corporation that we can't do this anymore. While it is tempting to represent IBM as a bully picking on the little guy, we do see their point. The use of their trademark in such a generic sense can lead to a dilution of their identity. (Besides, they have more lawyers than we have disks.) So, in the future, please think of our phone number as: For the amateur radio crowd: 1-800-HAM-DISK For all you couch potatoes: 1-800-HBO-DISK For purists: 1-800-426-3475 Even: 1-800-I-AM-DISK (hear me roar) But not, we repeat, NOT as: 1-800-IBM-DISK We thank you for your support in this matter. ---------------------------------------------------- Two bums were seated on a park bench stealing food from the pigeons. "Say," said one. "If you suddenly found a million bucks would you lend me one hundred?" "That depends," said the second. "What security you got?" ---------------------------------------------------- Well folks. It is Wednesday May 11 in Seattle and the weather forecast is for 80-85 degrees and sunny! Since this is a rare event in the area, one of the local radio stations asked listeners to call in excuses for playing hooky today. Some of the ones I remember: "The extension cord isn't long enough for my electric car" "With all the sun we've been having, the blackberries have grown across my front path and I'm trapped." "Religious reasons. I'm a sun worshipper" "I just forgot" (Told on the next day) "The air conditioner (at work) is broken." ---------------------------------------------------- Last week while the House of Representatives was voting on a funding bill for the Strategic Defense Initiative, the House vote-tallying computer broke down. The computer reported a vote of 358 ayes and 237 nays on an amendment to kill the SDI program offered by Reps. Ron Dellums and Barbara Boxer. The House only has 435 members. The irony was not lost on the opponents of the SDI. Nevertheless, the "manual" count of voice votes revealed defeat of the amendment 299-118. ---------------------------------------------------- Beetle is talking to Zero, says something like, "Hey, Zero. If you can tear this piece of paper in half, I'll give you a quarter." Zero then proceeds to tear the paper in half. Beetle takes one of the halves, tears it in half, and gives it to Zero, saying, "Here's your quarter!" Zero wanders off, saying how neat that is and wouldn't it be great to find someone else to pull this on. He comes across Sarge and says, "Hey, Sarge! If you tear this paper in half, I'll give you 25 cents..." ---------------------------------------------------- Subject: Blame it on the computer -- lost homework! MODERN TIMES: When you were a kid, did you ever tell the teacher ``My dog ate my homework?'' Update: Navy Lt. John Ratkovich, a student at Naval Postgrad in Monterey, tells me that when homework was called for the other day, Lt. Comdr. Al Jones said ``May DOS ate it.'' Right. His disc operating system erased it all, and would a commander tell a fib? [Herb Caen, SFChron 28Apr88] ---------------------------------------------------- For the interested (and the record) these are mainly taken from THE LITTLE BROWN BOOK OF ANECDOTES, edited by Clifton Fadiman. ------------------------------------ In his legal practice, Abraham Lincoln was never greedy for fees and discouraged unnecessary litigation. A man came to him in a passion, asking him to bring a suit for $2.50 against an impoverished debtor. Lincoln tried to dissuade him, but the man was determined upon revenge. When he say that the creditor was not to be put off, Lincoln asked for and got $10 as his legal fee. He gave half of this to the defendant, who thereupon willingly confessed to the debt and paid up the $2.50, thus settling the matter to the entire satisfaction of the irate plaintiff. ------------------------------------ In Paris for the funeral of French president Georges Pompidou in 1974, Nixon remarked, "This is a great day for France." ------------------------------------ Shortly after John F. Kennedy blocked the hike in steel prices in 1961, he was visited by a businessman who expressed wariness about the national economy. "Things look great," said JFK. "Why, if I wasn't president, I'd be buying stocks myself." "If you weren't president," said the businessman, "so would I." ------------------------------------ Dr. Creighton, the Bishop of London many years ago, once removed his cigar case while watching an opera production and inquired of the fellow in the next seat, "Will my smoking bother you?" "Not at all, your Lordship," the man responded, "so long as my getting sick won't bother you." ------------------------------------ After James Whistler did a pencil sketch of Oscar Wilde, Wilde characterized it as a "pretty poor work of art." "I quite agree," said Whistler, "and you're a pretty poor work of nature." ------------------------------------ Following the death of a United States Senator who was a close friend, Woodrow Wilson received a telephone call from an ambitiour politician who said that he wanted to take the Senator's place. Wilson, shocked by the man's crassness, replied, "That's perfectly agreeable with me, but you'll have to speak with the undertaker about it." ---------------------------------------------------- Here at Lehigh University, about three years ago, a CLUD (CLueless User Device) came up to the consultant's window and asked to borrow a stapler so that he could attach his floppy disk to his term paper. After telling him that it would probably not be a good idea, he decided to use tape. He then proceeded to pull his disk out of his back pocket and unfold it. ---------------------------------------------------- My best novice user story comes from way back in tenth grade. At this point, my high school had just invested a fortune in the latest technology: a half- dozen Apple II Pluses. Now, my math teacher was also the sole computer teacher in the school, and wanted to make sure that we were all properly literate. So, the first week of classes, we are all trooped over to the computer room, given one disk each, and given explicit directions on how to format the disk. The first step, of course, was to take the floppy out of its envelope, not to stuff the whole contents in. A few minutes later, Erica (a good friend who, fortunately, probably isn't on the net) comes over to the teacher, saying that she can't get it to work. "Well, what's happening?" asks Mr. Romer (the teacher). "I can't get the floppy disk into the drive. It keeps flopping all over, and bends when I try to put it in." Sure enough, she had carefully removed the magnetic part of the floppy from the paper enclosure... ---------------------------------------------------- (from a list in the consultant office on the bboard) User calls stating that monitor has just gone blank, and is told by consultant to check behind the machine to make sure the monitor cable hasn't come loose. "I can't see anything back there. We just had a power failure and it's too dark to see anything in my office." ---------------------------------------------------- We've all heard stories about users who have stuffed 5 1/4" disks into 3 1/2" drives. A couple of weeks ago, someone called the computing center here complaining of trouble running a PC program. After some interrogation, she revealed that she was trying to run it on a Mac. But she hadn't had any qualms about folding the 5 1/4" disk to put into the Mac's drive. After all, she reasoned, disks operate on magnetic fields, which aren't altered by folding the disk. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. ---------------------------------------------------- A long time ago UNIVAC (now UNISYS) had a mainframe computer called an 1106. They used rotating drum memory. For those of you not familiar with drums, they are massive rotating cylinders. They also tend to possess a great deal of rotational inertia. Anyway, a UNIVAC customer engineer told me that they tried to install these machines in naval vessels, rotating drum and all. The story goes that everything was fine until the ship executed a hard turn to port. The drum, resisting this course alteration, merrily broke loose from its mountings and crashed through the side of the ship. WHOA BOY! ---------------------------------------------------- Sorry to change the subject a little, but this priceless little anecdote occurred while I was working for a hardware store while in college. I'm standing behind the counter, wearing my little scratchy polyester uniform shirt, and this big huge guy walks up to me carrying two rolls of shelf paper and says "Is this going to be enough to cover my shelves?" I stare at him for a moment, and then say "Well, that depends how long your shelves are." Silence. "How long are your shelves?" "Oh," he says, "Three feet each." Silence. "Ok," I say, "How many shelves do you have?" "Four per cabinet." Again silence. "Allright, I'll bite," I say in raw disbelief, "How many cabinets, indeed, do you have?" (I fully expected to hear "Three per room.") "Two." "Fine, so it sounds like you have two cabinets with four shelves each that are three feet long." "Yeah?" "So that sounds to me like 2 * 4 * 3." "Yeah?" "That's 24." "Yeah?" "Those rolls are ten feet each." "Yeah?" This time, ¬I¬ went silent. Long pause.................. Then, with a look of pure enlightenment generally displayed only by Zen masters: "I think I better get another roll." "There is a God." I thought. ---------------------------------------------------- When I was taking a 300 level computer science class in college there was a girl in the class that was a good friend of mine, she was one of those people that was accademiclly briliant with zero common scence. Durring the first week of class the prof always gave every one in the class an account on the system and a common password for everyone in the class. I logged into Karen's account before she did and created a ".profile" which printed out a message to the effect: Karen, I'm having a very bad day today, the freshman are driving me crazy with there stupid errors and the System Administrator was very rough when he mounted the backup tapes. So I suggest, if you want your homework programs to compile correctly, that you log off now and try again when I'm feeling better! Love, PDP/11 I'd forgotten all about my little prank until one day, right before a homework was due and we were talking in the cafateria, she said she had gotten an extention from the prof because "Every time I logged into the computer it gave me a message to loggout imediatley!" She never knew that someone played a joke (alright it really wasn't that good) on her. I decided it would be better not to tell her. ---------------------------------------------------- A few years back, the CS100 class (Computer Science for semi-sentient beings) was given their first Machine Problem (MP 0). For this one, students were given the program listing so the only thing the student had to do for the grade was to conquer the card punch and card reader. To be cute, the TA's punched the program (~60 card), lined up the cards one below the other in sort of a listing style, and zeroxed the "listing" which was handed out so that the students could see what the cards should look like. The language was FORTRAN so this helped show the proper columns. One particular student managed to punch her deck of cards just fine but was having some problems with the card reader. After a few dozen tries, she asked the operator on duty if he could help her with the reader. The op went over and tried the deck once. Only the first card read. Opon closer observation, the first card was the /EOJ (End Of Job) card. She had reversed the order of the cards so that they would match the order of the handout if fanned out. The op explained that the cards were arranged that way just so they could make the handout and that her problem was just that she was trying to read the deck in backwards. The topper: She went back and punched a new deck in the proper order! ----- Then there was the one about the user or (ab)user as we used to call them who stood waiting by the printer for his printout for about 15 min. He then proceeded to ask the operator if the op could check to see what was taking his printout so long. The op checked the queue a number of times during the next 10 or 15 mins and finally told the user, "I don't see it on the queue. Why don't you just send it again." To which the user replied, "Send?" ---------------------------------------------------- Reminds me of the Department Chairman(!) at Seton Hall who last week wouldn't let me copy a book on the Copier because you can't close the lid on a book, and so it 'lets the light in' and breaks the copier. The pages of the book were the same size as the papers I was copying onto, so it wasn't a problem of extra toner being wasted. I also offered to close my eyes while making the copies (in case he was worried about my safety), but he told me that this wouldn't help, since the light would still get into the copier and "Break It". I can just imagine the copier repairman's chuckle when he blamed the broken copier on light 'getting in'. "you let light into the copier, so its your fault it broke". I was tempted to tell this professor that he should also watch out for burned out light bulbs, since if you leave a light socket without a working bulb (or worse, no bulb at all), the electricity escapes into the air and can make you very sick. And of course the 'smoke theory of electronics' (smoke makes electronic circuits work, since circuits stop working once the smoke escapes) came to mind as well... ---- So as not to offend anyone, I should say that this Department Chairman was not from an Engineering Department, and thus was dealing outside of his specialty. ---------------------------------------------------- One customer at a computer store (or perhaps a computer faire) asked a salesman a number of questions about a given model of computer. Does it do this? Yes, it does this. Can it do that? Yes, it can do that. Does it have these? Yes, it has these. Finally he began to become somewhat suspicious of the amazing capabilities of this machine, and asked in as serious a tone as he could muster: Does it have flim-flam flip-flops? Yes, yes, it has flim-flam flip-flops! ---------------------------------------------------- One day I happened to be in our local "mom and pop" computer store, scanning the new magazines, when a fellow came in to buy some floppies for his home computer. The proprietor happened to be behind the counter and asked the man which computer he had. He then took a box from the shelf behind him, and opened it. "How many disks do you need?" he asked. "Oh, two I think" came the answer. The proprietor then rang up the sale, and gave the man his change. With that, the man said "Thanks very much", picked the disks up off the counter, carefully folded them into quarters, and stuffed them into his shirt pocket as he strolled out the door. The experience left me speechless, but I noticed that the owner didn't even flinch. (No doubt because he knew the fellow would be back for some more disks!) ---------------------------------------------------- Jesse Jackson: "We have guided missles but we have misguided leaders, and that's why I want to be your president." (I almost fell onto the floor. Does he write his own stuff?) *start* 16497 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Date: 2 Jun 88 17:46:10 PDT (Thursday) From: Cate3.PA Subject: Life 3.5 To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- "Of course the US Constitution isn't perfect; but it's a lot better than what we have now." ---------------------------------------------------- This one is making the rounds in Xerox Square: What's the difference between Xerox and the 4H Club? The 4H has adult supervision! What's the difference between Xerox and the Titanic? The Titanic had a band! ---------------------------------------------------- In the March 29, 1988 edition of "PC Magazine" is a review of a King James Bible text search/database program called "God Speed." For more information you can circle a nuumber on the "bingo card." The number is 666. I Am not making this up. ---------------------------------------------------- Los Angeles Times, April 26: Eight Netherlands youngsters digging around the foundation of their clubhouse on a vacant lot last Thursday unearthed two glass jars filled with gold coins and jewelry worth about $215,000. According to Dutch law, authorities have 30 years to find the legal owners. If none is found, the gold and jewels become the property of the finders. Cheer up, kids, you only have to wait another 29 years and 360 days. ---------------------------------------------------- From the 26-May-88 Wall Street Journal... In an Orkin Exterminating Co. survey of what pests Pitsburghers fear most, 1.3% named their spouses and kids. ---------------------------------------------------- From the trivia section of a local paper -- "In the classified ads of a New Jersey newspaper sometime back appeared this: 'Parapsychological insights, poems, paintings, ink blots, handwriting analysis, Chinese lessons, lectures on the Far East. Also ironing, $4 an hour...'" ---------------------------------------------------- A while ago there was the story going around about Idi Amin killing off 600 people .... just trying to keep up with the Jonses! ---------------------------------------------------- Then there is always the sign that I saw upon arriving in LA two years ago. (hell of a road trip) The speed limit is posted as 55, but there is a sign telling you that you should slow down to 60 for the next curve. ---------------------------------------------------- OJ: how many law professors does it take to change a light bulb? Hell, you need 250 just to lobby for the research grant. Another: lawyer's dog, running about unleashed, beelines for a butcher shop and steals a roast. Butcher goes to lawyer's office and asks, "if a dog running unleashed steals a piece of meat from my store, do I have a right to demand payment for the meat from the dog's owner?" The lawyer answers, "Absolutely." "Then you owe me $8.50. Your dog was loose and stole a roast from me today." The lawyer, without a word, writes the butcher a check for $8.50 [attorneys don't carry cash -- it's too plebeian -- and the butcher hadn't brought the shop's credit card imprinter to the lawyer's office]. Several periods of time later -- it could be the next day but that would be unrealistic -- the butcher opens the mail and finds an envelope from the lawyer: $20 due for a consultation. ---------------------------------------------------- Diogenes went to look for an honest lawyer. "How's it going?", someone asked. "Not too bad", said Diogenes. "I still have my lantern." ---------------------------------------------------- One day this teacher went to school and told the class that it was his birthday and for an exercise he wanted the class to work together and guess his age from some arbitrary numbers that he had compiled. So he gives the class the figures and tells them to guess his age. The class really works hard and comes up with numerous figures some a little on the high side other far to low, finally, little Poindexter yells out "Teacher, I know your age!" teacher "So, Poindexter tell me my age and how you calculated it," Poindexter, "Your age is 48!" Teacher, "Yes, that's correct, now how did you arrive at the answer?" Poindexter, "Well, my father says that one of our neighbors that lives across the street is half a moron." Teacher, "So, go on?" Poindexter, "Well, he's 24." ---------------------------------------------------- I heard this on our local radio station this morning. It was about how Johnny Carson wrote his own monologue and busted through the picket lines to deliver it. Two of his jokes: About the business with the Reagan's and their Astronomy phase: "I know the zodiac signs are divided into 12 houses; I DIDN'T know that one of them was the White House." About the writer's strike: "Yeah, I had to break through the picket line this morning. Their picketers were carrying blank signs." ---------------------------------------------------- When I was at Swarthmore, a physics prof I worked for had the lab group rolling on the floor and laughing by telling MIT stories. My favorite was the one about the Green building, where over winter break two dozen students entered the building and spent a couple of weeks interchanging the 12th and 13th floors. They rewired the phones and the elevator, repainted numbers on doors, moved furnature around. I'm told the hoax went undetected until someone tried to walk down the stairs from the 12th floor. Too bad Swarthmore doesn't have correspondingly funny tales: all forms of fun are strictly against the rules there :-) For example: someone once exchanged the contents of two lounges in the main building on campus. (hmm, wonder where that idea came from?) Anyway, these were two parlors where people would hang around between classes. Literally hundreds of people passed through them each day. The rooms were right next to the admissions office, and so they were nicely furnished, with a grand piano in one and lots of expensive paintings in both. Not only did no one ever notice the switch, but no one would admit to caring when it was pointed out to them! ---------------------------------------------------- Several years ago here at the University of Rochester, I'm told that someone once rewired the elevator of our 11-story building, and proceeded to repaint the floor numbers in the hall outside the elevators. This would have been fantastic if he hadn't gotten caught while repainting. Imagine, going home to yor apartment on the 7th floor, and finding that someone else lives there! You'd have to go up or down to the bottom or top to figure out what floor you were actually on... ---------------------------------------------------- * A friend of mine at U of Chicago once calculated the resonant frequency of his dorm's stairwells, bought a test record with that tone on it and played it into the stairwells from a number of stereo. Apparently had the entire building shaking visibly before they got scared enough to turn it off. * Someone was foolish enough to penny me into her own room. Amongst other things, I placed a call to the US Embassy in Nepal. The call was completed and rung back some time the next day. * Ran an imaginary student for a student government position. He was named after a dog. He didn't actually make the ballot because his false id was discovered by the administration, but he still won on write-in votes. * I once learned the day before that a professor would be late to one of his classes the next day. I made up a "pop quiz" that was incredibly hard, and then showed up and handed it out to the class, telling them that I was a grad student the prof had sent to proctor. * A friend and I put on surgical greens, masks, booties and so on, and then splashed red food coloring on ourselves. Then we burst into the medical library, arguing loudly, and go over to the reference copy of Gray's Anatomy. I leaf through it, peer at a picture, and point and say triumphantly "See, I *told* you it was on the left side. What are you, dyslexic?" My friend looks abashed, shrugs, and we walk out. ---------------------------------------------------- Another stunt he mentioned required the cooperation of the students in a class. Everyone should simply be a bit louder, more restless, when the teacher is on the right side of the board then when he/she is on the left. By the end of the semister, the teacher was writing in the bottom left hand corner of the board... ---------------------------------------------------- (From: Jennifer A. Schrader) Well, here goes: A long time ago, I was a little girl. I had two big brothers, and, as the stereotype would have it, they tortured me. I am passing the information on to you, so that you, too, may warp the minds of the very young. #1) They got me up at three o'clock on a Saturday morning and got me dressed for school. #2) They sat in the kitchen with wine (whine) glasses whilst running wet fingers around the rim. When I awoke to the high pitched noise, I was informed that Martians had landed and I was to hide under my bed. #3) In the midst of the night, I found it necessary to use the little engineer's room, and when I had returned and snuggled into bed, I flipped over only to find a hand reaching for my face from under the bed. Guess who... #4) Every time I had ice cream, Douglas would tell me that he thought his tasted a little funny. Being a generous (and gullible) child, I let him taste mine until he was sure that his tasted okay. He never ate more than a few spoonfuls, so it took me awhile to figure out what was going on... #5) In a desparate retaliation attempt, I waited for ten minutes behind a bend in the hall to scare the next sibling to pass. Douglas passed, and I scared the... well, I scared him. He grabbed me by the shoulders, shook me, and yelled, "What do you think you're doing? Do you realize if I had had my eyes crossed they could have gotten stuck like that?" Little sisters can't win. I'm going to get back at them by earning more than they do. Heh heh heh. ---------------------------------------------------- And who says our educational system is in dire straits? I submit these compilations as testimony to the debate, taken from children, newspapers, and teachers: "This paper needs a few comas." "When papa passed away they burned his ashes and brought them home in a urinal." "We sat down to a picnic dinner of fricken chicasee." "You shake milk in a big stirrer machine to make it homicidal." "It was so hot during football practice that a lot of kids keeled over from nervous prostitution. Rusty Banazek broke his clavichord in scrimmage." "At the Knights of Columbus dinner, they will serve the same fish as last year." "Tomorrow Helen Henry visits the home of a retired Navy Captain and his wife, an exotic U-shaped structure." "LOST: Male cat. Needs medication. Owner very worried, neutered and declawed." "Winners at the card party were William Davenport, a turkey, and Mrs. Trudy Baker, a chicken." "Dear Teacher: Stanley had to miss some school. He had an attack of whooping cranes in his chest." "Dear Teacher: Lynda was away as she had stripe infection." "Dear Teacher: Please excuse the stink on Bill's clothes. We've been spraying the garden because it is full of abnoxus incests." "Dear Teacher: Please excuse Jane. She had an absent tooth. Wednesday she will have an appointment with the orinthologist." "Dear Teacher: Please excuse my daughter's absence for the past week, as she had a case of the fool." ---------------------------------------------------- Eager to know the result of a physics exam he had taken, my brother asked his teacher, "How far am I from making an 'A' in this course?" Replied the instructor, "Do you want that in light years?" On the morning of my son's wedding, he noticed that one of the tires on his car was flat. He went to a nearby garage to have the tire changed, and while the attendant was working, my son nervously exclaimed, "I'm getting married this afternoon." The attendant looked at him, shook his head and said, "Gee, today really isn't your day, is it?" A couple I know were discussing their wallpaper, which had just been hung. Dov was annoyed at Debby's indifference to what he felt was a poor job. "The problem is that I'm a perfectionist and you're not," he finally said to her. "Exactly!" she replied. "That's why you married me and I married you!" The patient went to his doctor for a checkup, and the doctor wrote out a prescription for him in his usual illegible writing. The patient put it in his pocket, but he forgot to have it filled. Every morning for two years he showed it to the conductor as a railroad pass. Twice it got him into the movies, once into the baseball park and once into the symphony. He got a raise at work by showing it as a note from the boss. One day he mislaid it. His daughter picked it up, played it on the piano and won a scholarship to a conservatory of music. ---------------------------------------------------- CORPORATE DIRECTIVE NUMBER 88-570471 In order to increase the security of all company computing facilities, and to avoid the possibility of unauthorized use of these facilities, new rules are being put into effect concerning the selection of passwords. All users of computing facilities are instructed to change their passwords to conform to these rules immediately. RULES FOR THE SELECTION OF PASSWORDS: 1. A password must be at least six characters long, and must not contain two occurrences of a character in a row, or a sequence of two or more characters from the alphabet in forward or reverse order. Example: HGQQXP is an invalid password. GFEDCB is an invalid password. 2. A password may not contain two or more letters in the same position as any previous password. Example: If a previous password was GKPWTZ, then NRPWHS would be invalid because PW occurs in the same position in both passwords. 3. A password may not contain the name of a month or an abbreviation for a month. Example: MARCHBC is an invalid password. VWMARBC is an invalid password. 4. A password may not contain the numeric representation of a month. Therefore, a password containing any number except zero is invalid. Example: WKBH3LG is invalid because it contains the numeric representation for the month of March. 5. A password may not contain any words from any language. Thus, a password may not contain the letters A, or I, or sequences such as AT, ME, or TO because these are all words. 6. A password may not contain sequences of two or more characters which are adjacent to each other on a keyboard in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal direction. Example: QWERTY is an invalid password. GHNLWT is an invalid password because G and H are horizontally adjacent to each other. HUKWVM is an invalid password because H and U are diagonally adjacent to each other. 7. A password may not contain the name of a person, place, or thing. Example: JOHNBOY is an invalid password. Because of the complexity of the password selection rules, there is actually only one password which passes all the tests. To make the selection of this password simpler for the user, it will be distributed to all supervisors. All users are instructed to obtain this password from his or her supervisor and begin using it immediately. ---------------------------------------------------- Once there were these two birds who, every year for quite a few years, had one egg, which they hatched and nurtured and loved until the little chick was ready to leave the nest. Then, one year, they had TWO eggs! Well, they were just so excited they could hardly stand it; this year they would each have an egg to take care of and love. They kept close watch on those two eggs so that no harm came to them. Then one day when the eggs were ready to hatch, an earthquake shook the tree that the nest was in; the two birds flew away to safety, all the while worrying about those two eggs that were about to hatch. When the tremor was finished, they hurried back to the nest. As they neared it, they heard one strong "Cheep" coming from the nest. They were worried that something might have happened to the other egg, but when they got to the nest, they found that there were two chicks cheeping in unison. This just goes to show that two can cheap as lively as one. *start* 17386 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Sender: Henry Cate III:OSBU North:Xerox Date: 16 Jun 88 18:33:00 PDT (Thursday) Subject: Life 3.6 From: Cate3 To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- "Hey, stewardess.....would you run through that seatbelt demonstration a couple more times? It's incredibly difficult!!" ---------------------------------------------------- A Texan in New York City needed to call a nearby community from a pay phone. "Deposit $1.85 please," instructed the operator. Pulling himself up to full height and dropping into his thickest Texas drawl, he objected, "Ma'am, I'm from Texas, and in Texas we can place a call to Hell and back for $1.85!" "I understand, sir," retorted the operator, "but in Texas, that's a local call." ---------------------------------------------------- One is reminded of the society for the preservation of sea otters whose motto was "Do unto otters as you would have otters do unto you." ---------------------------------------------------- And then there was Pac-Bell's resident expert on fiber-optic communications. Sort of a specialist in light conversation. ---------------------------------------------------- One afternoon The Sea rolled into the office of Alfred Werner, clinical psychologist. The doctor smiled; he hadn't seen his old friend in ages. "Well, well! Long time no sea! How are you doing?" "Swell," replied the Sea saltily. "Then what, Pacifically, is the problem?" "Well," the Sea swished sadly, "I'm getting tired of just going in and out every day, in and out, in and out, in and--" "I understand," Dr. Werner interrupted hastily, "but I fear there's nothing to be done about it. For you see, my friend, you're just fit to be tide." ---------------------------------------------------- I've decided to try my hand at art. My first painting will be an outdoor portrait: a great field, in the middle of which stands a lone gong. A stylized characterization of the West Wind will be blowing softly over the gong. I will call it: "Gong With the Wind." ---------------------------------------------------- Canada's prairie provinces are experiencing severe drought and dust storms. A farmer can wake up to find that all his top soil has blown onto his neighbours farm down the road. But still some farmers manage to find humour in this saying, "It's the only time real estate changes hands without the lawyers getting a cut." ---------------------------------------------------- I have a computer but no printer, so it's not uncommon for friends of mine to type a paper on my computer, save it on a floppy, and go to the computer room or library in order to do the printing. One such fellow came to me today and told me he wasn't sure how to print, could I possible come to the library and help him out. As we were heading out, he turned to me and said, "I don't need the disk, do I?" ---------------------------------------------------- A CE from a now defunct company told me that on his previous job he serviced Turnkey word processor systems. On one machine he had replaced the floppy drives 3 times because, as the user told him, "Whenever I make a backup I can't read it". After the third replacement he watched the user make a backup, he checked the backup himself (just fine). Then while he was packing up his gear he watched , in total disbelief, as the user put a sticky label on the diskette, put the disk into a Selectric and typed the info on the label. He also said that when their software guy asked a user for a copy of a disk that the user was having problems with he got a Xerox(tm) copy (both sides) [Well it was a DS/DD drive]. ---------------------------------------------------- At a dinner table conversation last Saturday night, the conversation turned [to] Apple Macintoshes. One novice user exclaimed how confusing the error messages can sometimes be. She explained that the first time she'd crashed her MAC and saw the dialog box containing the bomb icon she'd rushed out of the room, fearing an imminent explosion. "It was the little sparks coming from the wick of the bomb that really convinced me of the danger." I doubt WYSIWYG was meant to be interpreted so literally. ---------------------------------------------------- My electromagnetics professor, Dr. Andrew Dienes, defines "trivial" as "Any problem that can be solved by a Nobel Laureate in less than 24 hours." You can imagine that I was relieved to hear that my final would be trivial. ---------------------------------------------------- A friend of mine who happens to be British, and has a delightful accent, teaches chemical engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A few years back he was complaining about how deadly dull the undergraduates were. He said that they were so lacking in curiousity and sense of humor, that he would bet that he could show up for his morning lecture wearing a "redcoat" uniform like those worn during the revolutionary war, and nobody would ask anything about it. So he did just that, complete with pointed hat, boots, and sword. There was a very tense moment at the end of the lecture, when he asked "Are there any questions?" One hand went up. The student asked "Will the material on blah-blah-blah be on the exam?"... ---------------------------------------------------- A friend of his had been lecturing on the doppler effect to a really, really dead class. Finally, in sheer exasperation, he pointed to the equations on the board, to be more precise, at the (speed.of.sound- speed.of.object) in the denominator and said: "This particular portion of the equation shows where the sonic boom comes from. As the speed of the object approaches the speed of sound in air, is part slowly goes to zero. Finally, when the object hits the speed of sound, a division by zero error occurs, reality rips, and all of the air in the surrounding area pours out into the 4th dimension." The class took notes.... ---------------------------------------------------- Just to throw in my two cents worth in to the Intuitively Obvious bucket, when I was a math student at Towson State University we were given a final exam that involved proving that two N dimesional matrices were related in a given way. I started with the first matrix and used every theorem that I could remember trying to reach the second, but I got stuck halfway through. Working feverishly on a piece of scrap paper, I started on the second matrix, but couldn't work it back to the first. In a flash of inspiration, I set the two intermediate results equal to each other and copied the second set of equations backwards onto the tail of the first. When I got the paper back, there was a C which was crossed out and replaced by an A, the midpoint of my equations was underlined, with a note saying - At first I doubted that this step was intuitively obvious, but after thinking about it for several hours, I decided that it was. ---------------------------------------------------- Von Neumann and Nobert Weiner were both the subject of many dotty professor stories. Von Neumann supposedly had the habit of simply writing answers to homework assignments on the board (the method of solution being, of course, obvious) when he was asked how to solve problems. One time one of his students tried to get more helpful information by asking if there was another way to solve the problem. Von Neumann looked blank for a moment, thought, and then answered, "Yes.". Weiner was in fact very absent minded. The following story is told about him: When they moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing that he would be absolutely useless on the move, packed him off to MIT while she directed the move. Since she was certain that he would forget that they had moved and where they had moved to, she wrote down the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to him. Naturally, in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached in his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled some notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and threw the piece of paper away. At the end of the day he went home (to the old address in Cambridge, of course). When he got there he realized that they had moved, that he had no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of paper with the address was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl on the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had moved to, saying, "Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Weiner and we've just moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the young girl replied, "Yes daddy, mommy thought you would forget." The capper to the story is that I asked his daughter (the girl in the story) about the truth of the story, many years later. She said that it wasn't quite true -- that he never forgot who his children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what actually happened... ---------------------------------------------------- All right, you asked for it. A (possibly apocryphal) story related to me by a graduate student who had come from a large midwest (Wisconsin?) univ. Seems that one of his classes was taught by the department emeritus prof who was very old (in his 80's) and sometimes a bit vague, but at other times incredi- bly sharp. One day in lecture he was explaining something abstruse and paused to look at the board for a moment. Thereupon he wrote down a result and said, eyes twinking, "And this is intuitively obvious..". Whereupon he smiled, looked out over the class, saw the rows of blank stares, and turned back to the board to contemplate the statement written there. This went on for about a minute, at the end of which time he started to wander, rather deeply in thought, across the stage. This went on for a minute or two, after which the prof. drifted out into the hall and was heard walking back and forth. People started to, well, look at each other and smile. A scout was sent out who reported the old boy was pacing around and muttering to himself. The class, incredibly, remained reasonably calm. About five minutes after the scout had returned, there was a happy shout from the hallway, and the again bright-eyed prof. scuttled back in, pointed to the intuitively obvious result written on the blackboard, turned to the class and said, all aglow, "Yes, yes, it IS intuitively obvious". Same source, different prof. This one happened to not like students coming in late to the math class he taugth..so much so that he would do any of the following to the offender: lock them out, yell at them abusively, throw chalk at them. One day, the prof. was late. Five minutes went by. Silently, one of the studendts went down and started passing up to the audience all the chalk pieces and erasers. The prof came rushing in at last, gave no excuse, and began to lecture. After about a minute, he needed the chalk, and asked "Has anyone seen the chalk?". The entire class stood up and bombarded him with chalk and erasers. The professor was said never to have abused a student for lateness again..... ---------------------------------------------------- In article <546@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu> gae@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu.UUCP (Gerald Edgar) writes: :Schoolmaster: Suppose x is the number of sheep in the problem. :Pupil: But, sir! Suppose x is NOT the number of sheep in the problem. :I [i.e. Littlewood] asked Professor Wittgenstein if this was a profound :philosophical question, and he said that it was. >From Walt Kelly's "POGO" comic strip, the Three Bats (Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered ["How do you spell that, Bemildred?"]) trying to determine if all three of them are present for a meeting, since each one counts only the other two: (from memory, may be a little off) First: The way to solve this is with algebra. Here's my old algebra textbook. It says, "Let X equal the unknown." Second: The unknown, huh? That would be Snorbert Zangox over in Waycross. First: He's unknown? Third: The best! I've never heard of him. Second: Neither have I. Put me down as one not knowin' him. Third: I don't know him, either. First: Neither me. Now I adds up how many don't know him, and I gets "three!" Second: Meaning three of us don't know him, so there's three of us here! First: Man, that algebra is terrific! ---------------------------------------------------- Los Angeles Times, June 7: Jim Berkland, chief geologist for Santa Clara County, thinks he can predict earthquakes by watching the Lost and Found classifieds in the newspapers. He contends that when the number of ads for lost cats goes up sharply, it means an earthquake is imminent. Evidently cats can sense the preliminary stirrings, or something, and they light out. Berkland uses the state's three largest newspapers for this science, including The Times, so you can check The Times Lost and Found yourself if you want to know whether a quake is coming. Marsha Adams, a research consultant and former biologist at the Stanford Institute, made a study of Berkland's theory and reported that, statistically, it seemed to work. However, she noted, the earthquake usually occurred on the same day the lost cats ads reached a peak -- too late to serve as a warning. She suggested that people who see their cats acting funny ought to have a "cat hot line" so they could warn the populace earlier. It takes a day or two for an ad to appear in the newspapers. ---------------------------------------------------- CONSTABULARY NOTES FOM ALL OVER [From the /Oakland (Calif.) Montclarion/] April 20: A citizen reported that a red-haired man in a dark coat in the vicinity of Somerset Road wanted money for nuclear weapons. Police contacted the man and advised him that he needed a permit. ---------------------------------------------------- Once upon a time, two brothers were rummaging through a garbage heap when they came upon an old treasure map. They dusted it off and saw that the directions took them up to the Adirondacks in the dead of winter. Not wishing to miss a good adventure, they packed up some belongings, called to their shaggy dog, and were off. Well, the treasure map was to lead them to a small cabin in the mountains. They walked happily along... the older brother went trudge trudge, the youger went stepstepstep, the dog went lumberlumberlumber. At the end of a grueling day, they found the cabin, kept by a wizened little old man. They spent the night. Well, round about the middle of the night, they were awakened by a huge crash! They rose with a start, but alas, too quickly a large rock fell though the roof and landed on the eldest brother's foot. Tied to it was another map, but the brother was lamed. THe next morning, they set out with the new map. It led down a terrible ravine to a hut that lay at that bottom. They proceeded slowly, the older brother going trudge OW! trudge OW!, the younger brother going stepstepstep, and th shaggy dog goign lumberlumberlumber. At night, in howling winds, they reached the hut. It was empty, but they were happy that no wind penetrated the walls, and they dropped on the floor for a restful night. Round about three in the morning, there was a horribly loud siren noise, wwaking them from sound slumber. Before they could move, an enourmous screaming bird tore through the window and dropped a huge wooden beam on the younger brother's leg. Tied to it was another map. The next day, they set out once again. The older brother went trudge OW! trudge OW!, the younger brother went stepdraaaagstep, the shaggy dog went lumberlumberlumber. At night they reached nothing more than a lean-to, but this was their destination, so they had to make do. Round about four o'clock in the morning, they were startled by a huge roar, and a lion bounded up to them, dropping a massive bone on the dog's foot. The dog yelped, but tied to the bone was another map. The next day, the sorry crew set out once again. The older brother went trudge OW! trudge OW!, the younger went stepdraaaaaagstep, the shaggy dog went lumbyelp!lumberlumbyelp! It wasn't until early the next morning that they reached their destination, which was a huge mansion. At first they were pleased, but when the went inside and saw how rickety the structure was, they were a bit afraid. They were so tired, though, that they went right to sleep. It was night time when they awoke. Slowly, they became aware of a small knocking sound. "rap rap rap" "rap rap rap". They began to search. On the first floor... nothing. THey climbed the stairs, the older brother going trudge OW! trudge OW! the younger brother going stepdraaaaagstep, the dog going lumbyelp!lumber lumbyelp! The second floor, empty, but still, the sound was louder: "rap rap rap" "rap rap rap". Well, to make a long story short, they eventually got up to the attic, wher massive wooden beams supported the roof. "RAP RAP RAP!" they heard. "RAP RAP RAP!" Excited, they felt all along the beams, and when the younger brother found the secret compartment, he held his breath, closed his eyes, and tore it open. Out fell... rapping paper. *start* 20277 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Sender: Henry Cate III:OSBU North:Xerox Date: 16 Jun 88 18:33:37 PDT (Thursday) Subject: Life 3.7 From: Cate3 To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- From the Chronicle, Thursday 1/23/81: Hunter Shot to Death By a Fox Belgrade A fox shot and killed a 38-year-old hunter in central Yugoslavia, the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug reported yesterday. Salih Hajdur, a farmer from the village of Gornje Hrasno in the Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina, went to a nearby forest Sunday to shoot a fox, Tanjug said. Hajdur wounded a fox in the leg, the agency said, but to spare the skin he did not fire again. Instead, he hit the animal with his refle butt. The struggling animal triggered a shot that hit Hajdur in the chest and killed him instantly, Tanjug said. The fox died later, Tanjug added. Associated Press ---------------------------------------------------- Farmer: n. A man who is outstanding in his field. ---------------------------------------------------- Here are some eponymous words from Vol 2 of "The Mathematical Intelligencer." (The article was complainting about the perversive use of personal names in mathematical literature.) Etymologies are from American Heritage. Eponym: a real or legendary person from whom a theory, idea, or object takes its name. Sandwich After Fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-92), for whom sandwiches were made so that he could stay at the gambling table without interruptions for meals. Shrapnel Invented by General Henry Shrapnel (1761-1842), British artillery officer. Silhouette After Etienne de Silhouette (1709-67) with reference to his evanescent career (March-November 1759) as French controller-general. Cardigan After James Thomas Brudenell, Seventh Earl of Cardigan. Quisling After Vikdun Quisling, the Norwegian Prime Minister who invited the Germans to occupy his country at the start of World War II. Chauvinism After Nicolas Chauvin, a soldier excessively devoted to Napoleon; meaning blind allegiance. I think the word has been changed recently, since male chauvinist appears to refer to a person expecting to receive blind allegiance rather than one giving it. gat: contraction of gatling gun, the name of the first machine gun, invented by R. G. Gatling. Not to be confused with "Tommy guns" which are the Thompson submachine guns. A gat has come be a a generic term for any portable firearm. grangerize: to illustrate text with pictures taken from other books or publications, from Jame Granger, an Anglican divine who in 1769 published a "Biographical History of England", leaving spaces in the text where illustrations filched from other texts could be inserted. guillotine: the inventor, a French physician, J. I. Guillotin, thought his invention was a great humanitarian contribution: a speedier and more efficient method than the drawn-out tortures which had been used previously for administering the death penalty. guy: actually derives from Guy Fawkes and the British festival, Guy Fawkes' Day. ---------------------------------------------------- I have an enjoyable book full of such words: "O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun" by Willard R. Espy (published by Potter). Espy calls it "a bobtailed generally chronological listing of proper names that have become improper and uncommonly common; together with a smattering of proper names commonly used...and certain other diversions." Here are a few samples. Boycott -- In 1880, Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was land agent in County Mayo, Ireland, for an absentee owner, the Earl of Erne. Though the harvest had been disastrous, Captain Boycott refused to reduce rents and attempted to evict any tenants who could not pay in full. As a result, he became the object of the earliest known effort to force an alteration of policy by concerted nonintercourse. His servants departed en masse. No one would sell him food. Life became so miserable for him that at last he gave up and returned to England. To boycott is "to combine in abstaining from, or preventing dealings with, as a means of intimidation or coercion." Derrick -- Goodman Derrick, another Tyburn hangman, was as adept with the axe as with the noose; he cut off the head of the Earl of Essex in 1601. But it was his adeptness at gibbeting that won him vernacular immortality. Any hoisting apparatus employing a tackle rigged at the end of a spar is a derrick. Dukes -- The Duke of Wellington's nose compared in magnitude with those of Cyrano de Bergerac and Schnozzola Durante. His troops called him "Nosey." Cockneys began to call noses dukes in his honor. Fists, by extension, were duke-busters. Duke-buster shrank back to duke, but retained the meaning "fist." When you are ordered to put up your dukes, you are being challenged to fisticuffs. Charlatan -- Though villainy is as ancient as man, one particular form of it was named only in the 14th century, when the sharp trading of men from Cerreto, a village about ninety miles north of Rome, made them notorious and their motives suspect. Under the influence of Italian ciarlare, "to chatter," a Cerretano became a ciarlatano, and, in English, a charlatan, "one who pretends to unheld knowledge or ability." Monkey wrench -- A monkey wrench is a wrench with a fixed jaw and an adjustable jaw set at right angles to the handle. Tradition says it was first devised by a London blacksmith named Charles Moncke, Moncke changing to monkey by folk derivation. A difficulty with this theory, as Mencken has pointed out, is that the British call a monkey wrench a spanner. In 1932-33, the Boston Transcript traced the invention to 1856, crediting it to a Yankee named Monk, employed by the firm of Bemis and Call in Springfield, Massachusetts. Gibberish -- "rapid, inarticulate, foolish talk"--probably corrupts the imitative "jabber." But Dr. Samuel Johnson, king of lexicographers (though occasionally he nodded on his throne: once he called an attic the highest room of a house, and the cockloft the room over the attic), attributed gibberish to Geber, the name of a legendary Arabian alchemist. Fudge -- Isaac D'Israeli, father of the 19th-century British prime minister, found in a 17th-century pamphlet a curious origin of the word fudge, meaning "Nonsense! Humbug!" He quotes: "There was in our time one Captain Fudge, commander of a merchantman [the Black Eagle], who upon his return from a voyage, how ill fraught soever his ship was, always brought home to his owners a good crop of lies; so much that now, aboard ship, the sailors when they hear a great lie told, cry out, 'You fudge it.'" ---------------------------------------------------- While browsing in the dictionary, I noticed that computer software has come of age: now included in my Webster's is the word GIGO [garbage in, garbage out]! Ah, how fast programmer's fame spreads. By the way, how about the word "foreshorten". I can't figure out how it could ever come to be called that. Shouldn't it be "forelengthen" or "aftshorten"? ---------------------------------------------------- By WILLIAM SAFIRE c. 1980 N.Y. Times News Service Signs of the Times The most threatened man in the English-speaking world must be named William Stickers. Throughout Great Britain, blank walls and freshly painted fences bear the admonition: ''BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.'' His accomplice, Bill Posters, has also been widely warned, although in the United States the sign painter usually prefers the antimail ''POST NO BILLS.'' Time now for the first annual ''Signs of the Times'' awards, for the most engaging, cryptic or confusing notices posted on purpose by serious people. (From the injunction in the New Testament: ''O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?'') The sign requiring the most patience: At the Howard Johnson restaurant near Cornell University, patrons are greeted with a notice reading ''PLEASE WAIT FOR HOSTESS TO BE SEATED.'' Reports student Leslie Sara Goldsmith: ''I waited patiently for about 10 minutes, but the young lady failed to sit down, and feeling rather neglected, I felt compelled to sit first.'' The most glaring example of unparalleled construction: ''NO BALL PLAYING, BIKE RIDING, LITTERING, SPITTING OR DOGS.'' Runner-up in this category is seen on Indiana highways: ''WATCH YOUR SPEED / WE ARE.'' The most imaginatively phrased, hand-lettered notice at City College of New York was submitted by Ed Early of Stamford, Conn.: ''MAILMAN, PLEASE LEAVE BOOK WHICH WAS DROPPED IN HERE YESTERDAY WITH THE ELEVATOR MAN.'' The most schizophrenic directive - actually, two signs that beat as one - was sent in by Thomas Clinton of the University of Pittsburgh: ''NO SMOKING ON ELEVATORS / USE STAIRS IN AN EMERGENCY.'' (Mr. Clinton, a chemistry teacher, also reports he saw a sign in an eyeglass shop that advertised: ''EYES EXAMINED WHILE YOU WAIT,'' which he finds ''by far the most comfortable procedure.'') The sign that most evokes sympathy for inanimate objects can be found, says realtor Robert McKee of New York, on Connecticut's Merritt Parkway: ''DEPRESSED STORM DRAINS.'' The sense of helplessness this sign summons is akin to ''WATCH FOR FALLING ROCKS.'' Perhaps the sign writer means ''fallen.'' Illinois motorists are still trying to figure out the South Lake Shore Drive advice: ''DISABLED CARS REQUIRED TO PULL OFF ROADWAY.'' Most ubiquitous mistake in a sign is ''TEN ITEMS OR LESS'' at speedy checkout counters in supermarkets. Perhaps we could do with fewer, or less, supermarkets. A more creative semantic foul-up is reported by Selma Fischer to be in Woolworth's on Seventh Avenue and West 50th Street in New York: ''NO ERROR MADE WITHOUT CUSTOMER BEING PRESENT.'' Graphic design takes an award at Harold's Chicken Shack in Hyde Park, Chicago. David Harmin describes a sign that has a large ''NO'' on the left, and smaller lettering on the right saying: ''DOGS / EATING / BICYCLES.'' Though this may have been intended as an admonition against three sins, taken together it warns of an event that has not often been witnessed. (My pet, Peeve, munching a tire, acknowledges the regards sent from Paula Diamond's bete, Noire.) Competition was keen for the sexiest sign. ''SOFT SHOULDERS'' was a frequently submitted entry; a subtler message was sent in by Fritz Golden of Philadelphia, who read a Kama Sutra meaning into the countertop signs at ticket windows: ''NEXT POSITION, PLEASE.'' But the best can be found in Manhattan, at many intersections. ''I picture people prostrating themselves in the crosswalk,'' writes Barbara Nicoll of Hartsdale, N.Y., ''to be seduced or even just tickled by passers-by . . . '' The romantic grabber: ''YIELD TO PEDESTRIANS IN CROSSWALK.'' ---------------------------------------------------- OBSERVER: Marriage A La Mode By RUSSELL BAKER c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK - In our third year of marriage my wife telephoned to ask if I would like to meet her. I did not want to meet her or anyone else. It had been seven years since I had met anybody at all, and though I had recently thought it might do me good to meet somebody - if only to see whether people still looked the way they used to - I did not want to start by meeting my wife. One of the advantages of electronic living was that you never had to meet your wife. The man who installed my computer and television cables had harped on that. "One of its big advantages," he said, "is that you'll never have to meet your wife." At the time, of course, I did not intend to marry. I changed my mind only after setting up my tax picture in the computer and discovering that a wife of a certain income profile would cut my tax bill by nearly 2 percent. It was a simple matter to plug into the central information bank, obtain the names of several thousand single women in the same tax predicament and, for a small fee, have the engagement and marriage arranged by the bank. The ceremony was performed by a minister of the Ecumenical Computer Church while I was reading the sports news in the electronic newspaper on my video terminal in New York and my bride, who lives in Oregon, was monitoring a Phil Donahue interview with three well-adjusted transsexuals on her cable TV. At the appropriate moment I punched "I do" and "I will" into my computer, switched into "check-account shopping mode" and ordered my bank to authorize an Oregon jeweler to deliver her a wedding ring. It was exhilarating being married. To celebrate, I put on a video cassette of the Super Bowl game of 1995 and spent half the night watching the Chattanooga Data trounce the Fargo Inputs by a score of 35 to 3. After that I forgot about being married except at tax time, when it was highly convenient. Naturally, it was a surprise when she telephoned to propose a meeting. I should point out that I did not answer the phone myself. I had not answered a telephone for years. I had a machine that not only answered for me, but also made calls for me. My machine, speaking in a voice entirely unlike my own, said, "I am very busy now scanning my display terminal to select a meal to be delivered to my food slot so that I will not have to be interrupted while watching the cricket test match from Pakistan on my cable television during the evening. Please state your message at the sound of the beep and my machine will process your call." On this evening the machine said, "Your wife has telephoned to ask if you would like to meet her." "Tell her," I told the machine, "I have not met anybody in seven years and do not propose to start now." While the machine was transmitting the message, a noise at the door indicated that the central restaurant bank was having my dinner delivered at the food slot. Since the restaurant bank had not yet replaced all its delivery people with robots, I waited a safe interval before opening the slot, so as not to risk catching a glimpse of a human being. This irritated my telephone machine. "You may not want to see a human being," said the machine, "but I'd like to, once in a while." "Nonsense," I said, "you see me 24 hours a day." "People ought to see people, ought to talk to people," said the machine. "If God had meant people to see people, he wouldn't have created electronic living," I said. "If God wanted people to talk to people, he wouldn't have given us the telephone-answering machine." I went to the slot to collect my dinner. Instead of a steak, I found a small electonic device. "So," I said, "they have finally succeeded in inventing the electronic steak. This ought to teach the beef trust a little humility." I put my computer in "dining mode." Instantly the TV set activated a video cassette of a 1968 tape of "Bowling For Dollars" and presented me with a fork and a steak knife. The small electronic device spoke up. "Do not carve me," it said. "Kiss me. I am your wife and I am dying for love. At the sound of the beep, place your computer in 'osculation mode' and activate my 'input' key by framing your lips in the pursed position." It was my telephone machine that replied. "Don't waste your time, baby," it said. "That bird has been dead for years." It uttered a highly suggestive "beep." My wife "beeped" back. My wife? But I was married to a tax shelter, not to a flirting beeper. Or was I? It had been so long since I had met anybody. I thought of going to the window, raising the blinds, but I didn't. It is better not to know some things. I sat back to enjoy "Bowling For Dollars." The telephone machine said, "If you'd turn off that tube, machines could have a little privacy around here." I turned it off and sat in the dark. The beeping became intense. ---------------------------------------------------- Today I saw an ad in the paper for the Panasonic "Talking Genius" microwave oven. ("It actually talks!") Can't you just envision this marvel as merely the first in a long line of vocal household appliances? Won't it be great when your microwave, your dishwasher, and your toaster are all babbling away, each trying to get your attention? And even better: when they build voice recognition into these devices, you can let them talk to each other... Since talking home appliances will be programmed by their manufacturers, they'll reek of advertising. Every time you turn on that blender, it'll remind you that it's an Ostracizer, and do it's spiel about how well it "slices, dices, chops, and spices". It might even try to sell you the company's "food processor". Since the manufacturers will hire programmers to build the things, we can look forward to error messages like Error! Something's wrong (lixcntaqpgprev = 0)! ---------------------------------------------------- The exotic Animal Collector: A collector of exotic animals heard of a remote island in the Pacific in the lagoons of which were porpoises who were alleged to literally live forever. The collector traveled to the island where the chief of the native inhabitants confirmed the story. Our friend the collector was told that capture of a porpoise was pretty near impossible, but legend had it that the fast moving, slippery fellows could be taken as follows: climb up to the top of a mountain and from its sheer seaward cliff obtain from a nest a baby sea gull. Then take the sea gull down to the seashore and float it out onto the waters in a small raft, following in a boat. The porpoise might then be netted as it leaped from the water to devour its favorite delicacy. So the man climbed the mountain, and at risk of life and limb, captured a little gull chick. As he was bringing it down the mountain, he came upon a lion in his path who wore a T-shirt with "State" printed across it. Deciding the lion looked pretty tame and harmless, the man attempted to step over the animal as it lay across his path. As he did so, the lion leaped up, devouring the collector. Moral: Never take a young gull across a state lion for immortal porpoises. ---------------------------------------------------- Date: 02/03/81 01:37:33 From: JMTURN@MIT-AI Subject: IBM/VU IIIII BBBB M M I B B MM MM I BBBB M M M I B B M M IIIII BBBB M M New Updates and Fixes to IBM/VU This is a notification of two patches to IBM/VU (Virtual Universe) and a new release designed for users not requiring the full capibilities of a virtual universe. Several users have reported errors resulting from recursive calls to the Universe Creation Utility (UCU). This utility, called from IEBSAGAN, is used to initialize the virtual space which will hold the universe to be simulated. On occasion, the universe created by this routine will contain technologies capable of creating their 'own' virtual universe processors, which in turn call on the UCU. While the stack structure supporting the UCU was designed with this in mind, no system can handle unlimited recursion. Release 134 will contain a patch that will request user verification before a new level is created. Another problem that has been experienced occurs during the use of black holes and neutron stars in the virtual universe. Although the mass storage media provided with the VU processor is of the highest quality, it can not handle storage at such a density. The highest density that is supported is 2.32E16 grams/cc. DO NOT EXCEED THIS LIMIT. Severe gravitaional effects have serious impact on the reliability of the system. V134 will also contain a program (IEBFORWARD) that can deal with these problems. Due for release in April is IBM/VSS (Virtual Solar System). This is designed for the casual user, who does not require the full use of a universe. One possible use of this package is to provide uniform testing conditions for programs that take input regarding the phase of the moon. In addition, it is estimated that the cost of simulating the solar system and a Voyager flyby is 1/5 that of actually running such a mission. IBM Software Division *start* 19940 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Sender: Henry Cate III:OSBU North:Xerox Date: 16 Jun 88 18:34:42 PDT (Thursday) Subject: Life 3.8 From: Cate3 To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- LOS ANGELES (AP) - The only son of Academy Award-winning actor Ray Milland was found dead in his West Los Angeles apartment with a gunshot wound in the head and a rifle by his side, police said today. "It's apparently an undetermined cause of death right now," Detective Sgt. Glenn Varner said this morning. "We don't like to jump into conclusions." ---------------------------------------------------- From an article on meteorites in last Sunday's New York Times magazine: "Very large meteorites, however, ... strike the earth without slowing down at all. Because they are more massive than the column of air they displace during their passage through the atmosphere, the atmosphere is incapable of decelerating them." ---------------------------------------------------- Self-Defeating inventions (edited): 1. Elevator Earth Shoes 2. Heat n' eat popsicles 3. See-through mirror 4. Revolving basement restaurant 5. G-rated pornflick 6. Economy car conversion - fiberglass VW body on a Porsche chassis 7. Roll-on hairspray 8. Solar-powered foghorn 9. Moped exercycle 10. Objective journalism 11. Braille speedometers Also... "A commercial on KMPX ... for Michel's Crepes - pronounced "crapes" by the announcer - ends with 'It's like having a French chef in the freezer.' Pauvre Pierre." ---------------------------------------------------- I read in the paper the other week that Ohio State University researchers have devised plastic "trees" that attract woodpeckers to nest in them. The Plastic trees are made of a soft polystyrene that is similar to rotten wood. They want the woodpeckers to come back to get rid of tree eating bugs. Isn't this a great country we live in were we can't leave a few old trees stand for woodpeckers to live in but put up genuine simulated rotten trees made of plastic instead. ---------------------------------------------------- Inducing the Body To Form New Bones. . . BOSTON - can induce the body to form new bones of its own - a discovery that may have many uses in correcting birth defects, treating accident victims and fighting dental disease. Slug AM-New Bones. New, will stand. 500 words. Embargoed by source until 11 p.m. EDT. Laserphoto BX12. --------------------------- OBSERVER: The Legal Pitch By RUSSELL BAKER c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK - Since the Supreme Court granted lawyers the right to advertise, a few of the more adventurous new law firms which cater to middle-income Americans have been testing the television commercial as a way of attracting mass business. So far their commercials have been duller than a lecture on torts, which is a pity, because we middle-income folks really need reasonably priced legal services and would flock to them in droves if they were advertised persuasively. To help the cause, I would like to suggest just a few of the many irresistible commercials that might be produced on behalf of, say, the firm of Burger & Warren. The first would open with a shot of a jeweler cutting a large, expensive diamond. We see the blow struck. The diamond shatters into ruin. The jeweler rises in despair. Enter Robert Young, carrying a pot of Sanka brand. "Bill, what's the matter?" he asks the jeweler. "My doctor says it's too much caffeine," says Bill. "Why don't you drink Sanka brand?" asks Robert Young. At this point a stern man in a snap-brim hat enters, lays a heavy arm on Robert Young's shoulder and slaps a legal document into his hand, at the same time saying: "Mr. Young, this is a restraining order issued by Judge Hardy at the request of Burger & Warren, attorneys for Bill." "That's right, Mr. Young," says Bill. "I got so nervous about expecting you to pop in here with Sanka brand every time I ruined a diamond that I couldn't cut the mustard any more, much less the diamonds. Then I heard about Burger & Warren's low-priced legal services." He embraces the man in the snap-brim hat, who smiles into the camera, saying, "Our restraining orders are available in a wide selection for as little as $37.50." "This doesn't mean I'll have to go to jail, does it?" asks Robert Young with a chuckle. "No, sir," says Bill, "but if you ever do, remember, Burger & Warren can get you out with a habeas corpus for only $19.95." "Fees slightly higher on weekends," says the snap-brim hat. Everybody chuckles. The second commercial opens with a middle-aged woman seated at her living-room desk. She is frowning as though unable to balance her checkbook. Off camera we hear a voice, obviously a strange voice which does not belong in this house, probably an actor's voice which belongs on a stage. The voice says, "Something wrong, Mrs. Murkin?" Mrs. Murkin looks up at the camera. "Just not feeling myself today." Whereupon the unseen man asks, with insinuating insolence, "Constipation?" At this moment we hear the voice of Officer O'Leary saying, "All right, Mac, get those hands up." The camera turns to show us Officer O'Leary holding an actor at gunpoint and, behind him, a man in a snap-brim hat. "Take him down to headquarters and grill him, O'Leary," says the snap-brim hat. "You'll probably find he's the same housebreaker who's been terrorizing housewives down on Walnut Street by turning up in the laundry room to ask why they use inferior detergents." The camera cuts to Mrs. Murkin, speaking to the audience. "I didn't know there was any way to stop actors from walking right into my living room and asking me vulgar questions until somebody told me about Burger & Warren," she says. "That's right, Mrs. Murkin," says the man in the snap-brim hat, wrapping the strong arm of the law around her shoulder. "For a consultation fee of only $20, we were able to tell you that these embarrassments constituted criminal breaking and entering by a professional actor." "And now," says Mrs. Murkin, "I can look worried in my own living room without ever having to discuss my bowels with strangers again, thanks to Burger & Warren." In the next commercial, an aged, arthritic housewife is seated behind a table on which sits a heavy iron skillet. Off-camera an unseen man with an actor's voice says, "Mrs. Klomp, I want you to try to lift that skillet with your aged, arthritic old hand." Mrs. Klomp starts to lift the skillet, then shrieks with pain, doubles up in agony, drops the skillet on her foot and collapses on the floor. "What's wrong?" cries the actor's voice. "You're just supposed to tell me you couldn't pick up the pan until you got a dose of aspirin." "That was before somebody told me about Burger & Warren," says Mrs. Klomp, smiling in agony. "That's right, Mrs. Klomp," says a man in a snap-brim hat, entering left. "Thanks to Burger & Warren, you were able to learn that the sums to be gained in court for pain and suffering far outweigh the fee for doing aspirin commercials. How is your leg?" "Feels broken in two places." "Congratulations, Mrs. Klomp," says the man in the snap-brim hat. "You will never have to work again." The actor's voice off camera says, "There's a name for this kind of game." "And if you want to know what it is," says the snap-brim hat, "phone Burger & Warren for an appointment." ---------------------------------------------------- YONKERS, N.Y. (UPI) An enthusiastic Blue Cross computer sent George and Mary Blagmon 2,500 bills for the same $183.03 charge 2,499 more bills than they should have gotten. "When they first started coming, I thought it was a joke, you know. But then every day, stacks and stacks of bills would arrive," Blagmon said ayesteray(sic). The bills, all for $183.03, began arriving April 8, with payment due at the end of the month. "I called Blue Cross and told them what was happening, but at first they didn't understand," she said. "We had never had anything like this hapopen before," said a spokesman for the health insurance plan. He said the bill-typing machine operates at 6,000 characters a second. ---------------------------------------------------- What If It's a Tie? TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - Bruce Mackenzie-Low and Steve Roberts are determined to get their quarter's worth out of a space-age war of man against computer. At last check, the computer was fast approaching battle fatigue. Mackenzie-Low, 21, and Roberts, 19, stopped by a 7-Eleven convenience store here around 1:30 a.m. Thursday to play the electronic game Asteroids. ''We're not trying to kill off the machine; we're trying to prove a point - that you can get to a point where you're virtuous enough to get your money's worth,'' said Mackenzie-Low. Spending 25 cents - the cost of their initial game - they had amassed 7 million points by Thursday afternoon and, according to Mackenzie-Low, were ''going strong. We've got it technically down to where every 10,000 points the machine throws in an extra ship.'' He said they wanted to better the 17 million mark, which they claim would tie any known world record for the game. The two Tucson steak-house employees play the game ''quite a bit, but it's not like we are fanatics,'' Mackenzie-Low said, taking a break while Roberts, also known as ''Cozmic,'' manned the space guns. ''It's kind of like the battle of the galaxies. We're going to see who dies first - us or the machine. I think the machine is weakening,'' Roberts said. ''We'll beat it by tomorrow, God willing and 7-Eleven willing.'' ---------------------------------------------------- OBSERVER: How Shall I Dear Thee? By RUSSELL BAKER c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK - A friend, as Lyndon Johnson used to say, is "somebody you can go to the well with." Not for an instant would I consider going to the well with Times Square. I certainly wouldn't invite Times Square home to meet the folks. Truth is, whenever I see Times Square on the sidewalk I cross the street to avoid it. Why then do I receive mail addressed to "Dear Friend of Times Square"? For the same reason I get mail addressed to "Dear Fellow Angler" and "Dear Decisionmaker." Because America is undergoing a salutation crisis, that's why. The severity of this crisis is indicated by the "Dear Fellow Angler." I was flattered by this form of address at first, thinking it embraced me in the brotherhood of sharpsters who know how to work the angles. It has long been my hope to be greeted as "Dear Fellow Finagler," thus winning membership in that class for which the income-tax laws are written. "Dear Fellow Angler" seemed like a step toward this goal. Closer reading, however, showed I was being addressed by the Izaak Walton League, whose idea of a "dear fellow angler" is someone who hooks fish. As one who has not fished since the age of 8 and plans never to fish again, I was puzzled. Being addressed as "Dear Decisionmaker" was downright nerve-racking, since my paralysis at decision time is notorious on six continents. Could this letter be from some cruel master of sarcasm who knew I sat home biting my nails all weekend because I couldn't decide whether I preferred to see "Stir Crazy" or "The Devil and Max Devlin"? No. It came from a complete stranger, in fact a large corporation ("our sales now exceed $500 million"), which wanted to sell me its payroll, accounting and financial expertise. Each of these letters had three things in common. All were from complete strangers, all wanted me to pass some money their way and none of the letter-writers knew my name. Examination of a two-week accumulation of money-seeking mail revealed a fourth characteristic. The people sending these please don't even know whether I am male or female. "Dear Sir or Madam of the Press." This is a plea for publicity for a new book. "Be a columnist and report facts!" it commands. The fact I want to report right now is that I am not a madam of the press. While I'm at it, let me advise a certain charity which lusts after my bank account that I am not "Dear Friend of the Arts" either. Lord knows, I have tried to be a friend of art, but art has snubbed me for years as a common drudge who sold out to Grub Street. It's too late to extend the hand of friendship into my wallet now, arts. I know who my real friends are. They do not include a certain large institution in Utah which hails me as "Dear Business Friend." I never make business friends. Years ago Uncle Charlie advised me, "Never mix business and friendship, boy. That way you'll never have to cut a friend's heart out." Uncle Charlie also warned me about becoming an investor. "If you become an investor," he said, "sooner or later you're going to be wiped out like all those buzzards in 1929, and while you're waiting to go broke you're going to have to put up with a lot of mail addressed to 'Dear Investor.' " Now I get the mail even though I have followed Uncle Charlie's advice. "Dear Investor," says a letter from Wall Street trying to lure me into the gold business. I am concerned about these ill-informed salutations. Naturally there is a letter that catches my eye. "Dear Concerned American," it begins. But no, it is not about the salutation crisis. It comes from a complete stranger who wants me to buy his novel about the Red menace. Apparently he cares not a whit about the salutation menace, although it infects the highest levels of government. For evidence, I submit Sen. Daniel Moynihan's newsletter. It begins, "Dear Yorker." Does Moynihan believe he now represents York, Pennsylvania? More likely, I think, he has an acute case of salutationitis which produces severe inflammation of the prose style when the sufferer attempts to compose a mass mailing. It is everywhere and spreading. An insurance-company scribe writes, "Dear Policy Holder." Can anyone imagine a policy holder being dear to an insurance company in any but the crassest sense of the word? "Dear Collector," begins a vendor of small statuary to a man who has never collected anything in his life but matchbook covers. "Dear Environmentalist," writes a nature-lobby amanuensis to a man who has deliberately chosen to live in New York. A wordsmith for a magazine publisher begins with "Dear Civilized Friend" (my idea of civilization's finest achievement is the 1969 Buick Electra), and a letter from a public-television station starts out with "Dear Viewer." Why not "Dear Moneybags"? The gun-control lobby that addresses me as "Dear Potential Handgun Victim" at least knows that I am still alive, which is more than can be said for New York magazine wondering why a subscription hasn't been renewed. Its author begins, "Dear Silent One." I have received two copies of this letter. They will be forwarded to my late grandfathers. ---------------------------------------------------- From "Software News"; August 3, 1981 ------------------------------------ COMPUTERS CONSUME HACKERS Psychologists have warned that computers have spawned a group of addicts, who often neglect nutrition, personal lives or anything interfering with their activities in front of a computer console, according to an article in "Science Digest Magazine". Particularly acute among college and high school-age youths, the computer addiction phenomenon is just another escape from social adjustment in many cases. "Everyone has problems socially to some degree, and the computer can act as just another escape mechanism," said Ralph Gorin, director of computer facilities at Stanford University. "The youngster (or `hacker' as the addicts have been called) feels like `I just can't stand it anymore' so he runs down to the computer room. The computer doesn't care what time it is or what you look like or what you may have been doing lately. The computer doesn't scold you or talk back," he continued. -- Carry Him Off --- "I remember one hacker. We literally had to carry him off his chair to feed him and put him to sleep. We really feared for his health," an MIT computer science professor was quoted as saying. Although the typical hackers are attempting to create the "ultimate program," they seldom make "desirable" programmers, Joseph Weizenbaum, author and also MIT Computer Science Professor, claimed in the article. The so-called "hacker" makes the program so complex and esoteric, others have difficulty understanding it, he said. Furthermore, the hacker rarely keeps records, Weizenbaum added. "Computers are attractive because, to a higher degree than any other object, they are interesting and malleable," said Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford professor of psychology. Like people, they interact, and like people, they answer questions. However, they answer more questions and respond to them more accurately, the article pointed out. -- Subtle -- "The youngsters can form as many subtle nuances and textured relationships with the computers as they can with people," said Sherry Turkle, a sociology professor at MIT. Computers are becoming more and more "our world," the article concludes, meaning these addicts are not just a freak phenomenon. "So perhaps hackers are, after all, harbingers of the world to come," the article concludes. -------------------------------------------------- END OF ARTICLE -------------------------------------------------- I wonder how Jack Webb might have handled this... ****** SCENE FROM "DRAGNET, 1981" ****** Hacker at console: Let's see, now. If I hit an escape in TECO, I'll... Sgt. Friday (bursting in and dragging kid from console): All right, you, up against the wall. (Slams kid against wall while handcuffing him.) Hacker: Hey, what've I done? What is all this? Friday: Just shut up, kid. You're hacking. It's antisocial, unethical, and unsanitary. Also, you've got long sideburns. I thought we got rid of all you hippies back in the 70's. C'mon, we're going downtown... [Downtown at "Parker Center"] Friday: Got another one, Bill. Bill Gannon (Friday's partner): My God, will they ever learn? Friday: THIS one's going to. Bill: Where you taking him? Friday: The usual place, that big cell we reserve for murderers, rapists, drug dealers, longhairs, suspected homosexuals, and TECO users. Bill: I'm sure he falls into several of those categories. Friday: No doubt. [ Woman bursts into office. She has "Motorcycle Mama" tattooed on her left forearm ] Woman: What have you done with my son? Hacker: Uh, hi, mom! Friday: This your son, lady? Woman: He is indeed. What are you doing with him? What has he done? Friday: He has long sideburns. Woman: I'll admit that's pretty bad. Anything else? Friday: He's a hacker. Woman: A HACKER?! What are you talking about? Friday: We found him down at the University computer center, working on TECO macros. Woman: MY SON! I don't believe it. He's always told me he went out at night to pick up girls for sadomasochistic sex practices. Friday: Nothing so innocent as that, I'm afraid. He may only be a small-time hacker now, but that's only the start. We see this sort of thing every day. They start on TECO. Then they progress to display editors. Before you know it, they're writing their own system calls, and there's no stopping them! Woman [sobbing]: Oh my God. My God. Friday: He's not lost yet. We may be able to save him. We have a special "reorientation" course for people like him. While we're at it, we'll cut his sideburns. Woman [clutching Friday's hand]: Oh thank you. Thank you. ---------- *start* 15815 00071 UU @00045 01536 ftffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff @Sender: Henry Cate III:OSBU North:Xerox Date: 16 Jun 88 18:35:37 PDT (Thursday) Subject: Life 3.9 From: Cate3 To: Cate3 ---------------------------------------------------- A FEW FROM STEVEN WRIGHT After they make styrofoam, what do they ship it in? You can't have everything...where would you put it? My grandfather invented Cliff's Notes. It all started back in 1912...well, to make a long story short... I bought some powdered water....but I didn't know what to add. ---------------------------------------------------- I was driving along stuck behind a local city bus. It lumbered uphill, emitting great quantities of thick black diesel exhaust. Through the haze, I could just make out the ad on the back of the bus for an area FM station. The slogan: "Fresh Country Air". ---------------------------------------------------- There was this city doctor who started a practice in the countryside. He once had to go to a farm to attend to a sick farmer who lived there. After a few housecalls he stopped coming to the farm. The puzzled farmer finally phoned him to ask whats the matter, didn't he like him or somethin'. The doctor said, "No, its your ducks at the entrance...every time I enter the farm, they insult me!" ---------------------------------------------------- America, Russia and Japan are sending up a two year shuttle mission with one astronaut from each country. Since it's going to be two years up there, each may take any form of entertainment weighing 150 pound or less. The American approaches the NASA board and asks to take his 125 lb wife. They approve. The Japanese astronaut says, "I've always wanted to learn Greek. I want 150 lbs of books to learn Greek with." The NASA board approves. The Russian astronaut thinks for a second and says, "It's gonna be two years up there. I want 150 pounds of the best Cuban cigars ever made." Again, NASA okays it. Two years later, the shuttle lands and everyone is gathered outside the shuttle to see what each astronaut got out of his personal entertainment. Well, it's obvious what the American's been up to, He and his wife are each holding and infant. The crowd cheers. The Japanese astronaut steps out and makes a 10 minute speech in absolutely perfect Greek. The crowd doesn't understand a word of it, but they're impressed and they cheer. The Russian astronaut stomps out, clenches the podium until his knuckles turn white, glares at the first row waving a chewed up cigar at them and says: "Anybody got a match?" ---------------------------------------------------- I got this from the June issue of "Discover".... ...Among science students Caltech is the capital of retaliation. A particularly satisfying incident in the early 1970's involved a math professor who annoyed students by his mechanical, predictable approach to teaching - his lecture notes were straight from his book. One student got hold of a device that changed the normal frequency in an electrical outlet to any desired value. He plugged the classroom clock into it and, over serveral weeks, upped the speed -first by 10 percent, then 12.5 percent, then 15 percent. Each day the frazzled professor raced through the tried-and-true lecture faster and faster, until finally he was reduced to fast-forward gibberish. ---------------------------------------------------- Washington at War is like Washington at peace, only more so. Consider the following incident (from David Brinkley's Washington Goes to War): [A] vice president of a New York City bank heard of a Washington job opening in the Office of Economic Warfare, applied for it and awaited an answer. While he waited, Leo Crowley, director of OEW, dropped into the same New York bank and asked its president to recommend somebody for the job he had open in Washington. The bank president recommended the same vice president who had already applied for the job. The vice president was hired on the spot and moved to Washington. Weeks later, at work in his new office, he got a letter from the OEW that had been sent to his old New York address and forwarded to him in Washington. The letter said he had been rejected because he was not considered qualified for the job. Looking again, he found he had signed the letter himself. ---------------------------------------------------- To: HUMAN-NETS at MIT-MC I found this hanging in the hall here: To the Editor ... (The following was a letter-to-the-editor in a recent issue of the "National Observer.") "There are in the country two very large monopolies. The larger of the two has the following record: The Vietnam War, Watergate, double-digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines and the 8-cent postcard. The second is responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles," electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite. Guess which one is now going to tell the other how to run the telephone business? I can hardly wait for the results." ---------------------------------------------------- advertisement seen in weekend paper: Vacation Time! 1972 Corsair 18' trailer, well-maintained and ready for summer fun! Your's [sic] for just $2695. With all extras, just $7195. ABC Auto, .... ---------------------------------------------------- Sighted the other day in Palo Alto... LOVE THY NEIGHBOR TUNE THY PIANO ---------------------------------------------------- This week the Supreme Court settled a tax dispute between RCA Corp. and the IRS. It was for RCA's taxes for the years 1958 and 1959. That's only 24 years! ---------------------------------------------------- A quote from today's SF Chronical-- "...the automated office is still in its infancy. More IBM Selectric typewriters are stolen in a year than word processing computers sold..." ---------------------------------------------------- Quote from this month's "Intel Solutions" - "Intel's own Board of Directors could not agree on whether to proceed with the commercial sale of the 4004. Their resistance was underscored by the company's marketing department which, based on the belief that microprocessors would only be sold as minicomputer replacements, initially estimated the entire world-wide market at only a few thousand units per year." ---------------------------------------------------- LEMMINGS DON'T GROW OLDER THEY JUST DIE "You have a seatbelt; has it hugged you today?" ---------------------------------------------------- I know of Richard Mitchell only by the following quote from "Less than words can say." "Should we raise a generation of literate Americans, very little of America as we know it would survive." ---------------------------------------------------- From the column, "Skeptical Eye," in DISCOVER magazine, January 1982. ---------------------------------------------------- Not to mention the classic: Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal, if you don't use your thumbs. -Tom Lehrer Counting in binary is just like counting in decimal if you are all thumbs. -Glaser and Way Digital is to analog as steps are to ramps. Herb Caen noted today that, in a certain building in San Francisco, every door leading to a staircase bears the notice "These Stairs Are Alarmed"; further reflection suggests that this tension is appropriate, since, after all, a relaxed staircase is a slide. ---------------------------------------------------- Washington, February 8, 1982 Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., made these points yesterday in Senate debate of whether to televise Senate sessions: "I don't want to spend three hours every morning getting prettied up." "The longer we speak, the less we say. Only the Lord will know what will happen in this chanmber when the red light goes on." "We will have to get our hair fluffed, get our wives to tell us what tie to wear - and nothing makes me madder than to have my wife tell me what tie to wear - and we will have to shine our shoes." "If this were televised, there would be 97 senators catching hell at home for not being here." ------------------------------------------------------ A Record Claim. There it was, printed in the New York Times, and an obvious candidate for scrutiny by Skeptical Eye. The story was about a Pennsylvania doctor named Arthur Lintgen, who could look at a phonograph record with its label covered and, from the pattern of grooves, correctly identify the recording. In some instances, he could even name the conductor. It was obviously a case for James Randi, DISCOVER's favorite investigator of psychics and other charlatans. Randi was happy to oblige. "I thought the doctor's claims were quite far-fetched," he says. "I called Lntgen and asked if he would mind taking a test identifying some of MY records." Lintgen agreed, but explained that he preferred fully orchestrated classical music from Beethoven's time forward, and nothing as avant garde as electronic music. Randi agreed to Lintgen's conditions and arranged to meet him in two hours. Dashing off to a record store, Randi bought the following recordings: Beethoven's Sixth; Ravel's "Bolero"; Holst's "The Planets"; Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture"; Mozart's 40th and 41st symphonies; and two versions of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." In adition, as controls for his planned scientific test, Randi picked up a rock album by Alice Cooper and a voice (without music) recording entitled "So You Want To Be a Magician." Randi covered the labels and matrix numbers of all the albums with layers of aluminum foil and paper. He then gave the disguised records to a colleague, who covered the labels another time, so that when the test began Randi himself did not know which album was which. In science, this is called a double-blind test; it prevents the experimenter's bias from influencing the results. DISCOVER does not fool around. When Randi handed the first album to Lintgen, the doctor examined both sides. "This is a pair of classical symphonies," he said, "but I think it's pre-Beethoven probably a pair of Mozart symphonies. -- At the end of the test, when all of the labels were uncovered, the record turned out to be Mozart's 40th and 41st symphonies. -- Randi gave Lintgen another record. He examined the grooves and asked, "Is this one complete composition? If it is, I don't know it. But I'm almost sure it's Beethoven's Sixth." He took a closer look: "Oh I see, they've added an extra overture . . . the "Prometheus" Overture." -- Lintgen was correct. -- Another record. "This is gibberish," Lintgen said. "It's not classical. It doesn't seem to have much structure." -- Alice Cooper. -- Another. Lintgen laughed. "There are no instruments on this. If I had to guess, I'd say it was solo vocal." -- So You Want To Be a Magician. -- Next. "This is Holst's Planets. I've never seen this recording before. Must be digital. And probably a German orchestra." -- Indeed it was the Berlin Philharmonic. -- An so the test went; the doctor never made a mistake. How does he do it? He is a classical music buff, and expert in the dynamics of orchestral music; he knows every passage of hundreds of symphonies, and recognizes the patterns made in the grooves by diferent rhythms and volumes of sound. Says Randi, "He's the real thing there's no doubt in my mind. I was flabbergasted." Lintgen, dedicated to medicine, regards his unusual talent as nothing more than a hobby. Unlike others challenged by Skeptical Eye, he claims no paranormal powers, and, in a controlled test, demonstrated that his ability was authentic. DISCOVER's staff, jaded by spurious claims of the paranormal, welcomes Lintgen's most refreshing rebuff. ---------------------------------------------------- From "Sailing", by Henry Beard & Roy McKie ... sailing: the fine art of getting wet and becoming ill while slowly going nowhere at great expense. alcohol stove: compact stove used in small-boat galleys to bring liquids to body temperature and solid foods to cabin temperature, usually within one hour. aneroid barometer: meteorological instrument which sailors often use to confirm the onset of bad weather. Its readings, together with heavy rain, severe rolling, high winds, dark skies, and a deep cloud cover, indicate the presence of a storm. battery: electrochemical storage device capable of lighting an incandescent lamp of a wattage about equal to that of a refrigerator bulb for a period of 15 minutes after having been charged for 2 hours. berth: any horizontal surface whose total area does not exceed one half of the surface area of an average person at rest, onto which at least one liter of some liquid seeps during any 12-hour period, and above which there are not less than 10 kilograms of improperly secured objects. boom: laterally mounted pole to which a sail is fastened. Often used during jibing to shift crew members to a fixed, horizontal position. brightwork: mental effort through which the more intelligent individuals on board ship evade their share of boring and unpleasant tasks, such as polishing brass hardware. chronometer: precision intrument which registers sharp impacts by displaying a telltale spiderweb pattern on its glass face, by the absence of a normal ticking sound when held to the ear, or by the presence of small, loose pieces moving around within its case when shaken. It also indicates excess humidity by forming tiny droplets on the inside of its face, and when stopped, it displays the correct time twice each day. flashlight: tubular metal container used on shipboard for storing dead batteries prior to their disposal. porthole: a glass-covered opening in the hull designed in such a way that when closed (while at sea) it admits light and water, and when open (while at anchor) it admits light, air, and insects (except in Canadian waters, where most species are too large to gain entry in this manner). radar: extremely realistic kind of electronic game often found on larger sailboats. ---------------------------------------------------- MEDINA, Wash. (AP) - Puli is a well-behaved Hungarian sheep dog who spends most of his time lying in front of a fireplace, never jumps on the furniture and never makes any noise. Puli has been dead four years. But his owners, Suzanne and Rob Fleming, continue to enjoy their freeze-dried dog. "It's sort of like Puli is still alive because of all the laughs he gets," Suzanne Fleming said. The Flemings once left the fluffy white dog in the back seat of their car while they went sailing. Upon returning, they asked a friend to let the dog out. "Larry kept whistling, 'Come here, boy,' took a closer look and said, 'Uh, Rob, I think you might have left your dog in the car too long. He's not moving.' We were in tears we were laughing so hard," Suzanne Fleming said. The dog was diagnosed as having spinal cancer in 1984, and the Flemings had him put to death. For $650 a taxidermist in Portland, Ore., posed the dog lying on its side with head up and looking alert, then freeze-dried him. The dog weighs about 10 pounds and needs only occasional cleaning. The Flemings' teen-age daughter was not as enthusiastic as her parents about their decision to have the family pet preserved instead of buried. Suzanne Fleming understood her daughter's anger. "I mean, how do you tell your friends that your parents are having (the family) dog freeze-dried?" she asked.