旼컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� � � � H - M A I L 1 5 . T X T � � � 突袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴袴� If you've seen the previous ones, you won't be needing an introduction. If you haven't... WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?! Title: H-MAIL15.TXT (66 lines per page) File size: 200,918 bytes Date: 13-10-95 [Standard advert] All H-MAIL?? files are available at 旼컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴커 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 � � The HMVH Corporation � 읕컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴켸 Bulletin Board System [+27 11] (011) 941-1341 USR V.34/V.fc (24 Hours) or generic V.32bis/V.42bis depending entirely on current telephone line conditions!! 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 WHO IS DAVE BARRY? This should answer your question... The World According To Dave Barry (America's most outrageous columnist is dead serious about humor) Article by Eric Zorn Every week, an informed cadre of East Coast residents who, the poor slobs, do not live near a newspaper that carries syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry, logs onto a private computer bulletin board to read Barry's latest assault on journalistic conventions. Maybe this time he's suggested that Mark Goodson, the game-show producer, should have his bowels ripped out by wolves or that Congress should free John Hinckley and pass a law requiring Jodie Foster to date him. Or maybe he's written that once an airplane takes off, the crew usually puts it on automatic pilot and relaxes by trying on women's clothing, or that Mother Nature is a vicious, irresponsible slut. You just never know. Barry, easily America's most preposterous newspaper columnist, weaves a weekly tapestry of mangled facts, ludicrous propositions and penetrating if somewhat warped observations in some 70 papers. Those who dislike his work call it tasteless and sophomoric - a judgment he embraces as though it were praise. Those who like it say it's wonderfully bizarre. Either way, most readers agree they've never read anything quite like it. Here's Barry covering the Miss America pageant last year for the Miami Herald: "After a day of smiling like insane persons and talking about how they would very much like to help handicapped animals, [the contestants] went back to their hotel rooms and unwound by smoking enormous cigars and spitting out the window onto elderly pedestrians." Here's Barry on sports: "Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing." And Barry on babies: "A child can go only so far in life without potty train- ing. It is not mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation's state legislators." Those who read and contribute to the Boston-area Barry bulletin board [there are at least three others nationwide, each associated with large high-tech companies] send in analyses and critiques of these types of observations as well as information on where he has published lately, entries to Dave Barry Write-Alike contests and the poop on petitions and letter-writing campaigns organized to get the Boston Globe to print his column regularly and make unnecessary this underground nonsense. Barry himself is flattered but keeps out of the fray. He's unconcerned that his column is not published by Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles newspapers and that he has yet to break into the more prestigious periodicals, such as the New Yorker, Esquire and the Atlantic. "I'm just as happy not to be part of the literary establishment," he says in a voice lightly laced with East Coast vowels. "I don't think of myself as remotely literary or deep or even a little bit thoughtful." So there. Dave Barry has other things to worry about. Like on a recent Friday morning when he pondered, over breakfast at Denny's near his home in the Delaware River valley of Pennsylvania, whether he should spend an $800 paycheck he'd just received from Ms. magazine on an electric guitar or on a new sofa. The family clearly could have used the sofa. Barry says that he and his wife "were both born without whatever brain part it is that enables people to decorate their homes" and that the current sofa is "covered with a blanket to keep guests from looking directly at it and being blinded or driven insane." But priorities are priorities. "For 15 years I've been lamenting that when I left college, I sold my guitar," he says, sounding eager rather than remorseful and munching a bite of scrapple, a side-dish indigenous to western Pennsylvania consisting of leftover pig parts fried up to look like Spam gone bad. "I had a Fender Jazzmaster. Great guitar. I would have sold my amp, too, but the night before, a friend and I threw it out the dormitory window. We were really drunk, and all we could say was `The Who! The Who!'" "We did, however, take the time to measure it to make sure it would go through the window. It did. A clean shot. There were at least 30 people gathered outside to watch it land." Choosing to buy a new guitar over a new sofa turned out, in the end, to be easy, Barry, 38, has never really grown up and remains sort of a demented Peter Pan in blue jeans, sneakers and golf shirts. For all that he is a middle-class, suburban family man with professional responsibilities and furniture on his mind, inside he's still the same devious kid who spent hours in high school in Pleasantville, N.Y., plotting the best way to send a truck loaded with dynamite through the front doors of the nearby headquarters of Reader's Digest magazine. He never considered for a minute, of course, that 20 years later the same Reader's Digest would propel him to international celebrity by reprinting part of one of his books. Such are the ironies that run thickly through the life of our most cynical natural resource, a man who rose slowly through the journalistic ranks and only made it when he turned around and ran roughshod over all the sacred canons of the Fourth Estate. "I am hostile, vicious, unsafe and reprehensible," he says, ticking off the adjectives as though they indicated virtues. "There are times when I'll write things I know are offensive just for the sheer thrill of seeing them in a news- paper. I discovered along time ago that you can get away with almost anything if you think it's funny." And get away with it he has. Barry's full-time job is one of the most unusual in journalism. He is a staff writer for the Miami Herald, yet lives in bucolic Glen Mills, Pa., 22 miles outside Philadelphia. He writes one column a week and three or four longer pieces a year for the Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic, and sends the paper periodic, wry dispatches from major events such as the Super Bowl, the Live Aid concert and political conventions. "Time was when the Democrats were no competition in terms of patriotism," filed Barry from the Republican gathering in Dallas last summer. "They were always nominating their presidential candidates at 3 a.m. amidst clouds of marijuana smoke, and it was always somebody like George McGovern, who would make a speech where he'd call on Cuba to invade the United States, and for the closing ceremony they'd have Eldridge Cleaver spit on a Bible." He flies to Miami several times a year to meet with his editors and work on stories, but the arrangement leaves him plenty of time to dabble in other pro- jects, such as writing satirical self-help tracts for Rodale Press, a normally straitlaced publishing house in Emmaus, Pa. The editors there noticed him when he was still a struggling and little-known humorist and hired him to write do- it-yourself projects to liven up "New Shelter," a magazine for geodesic-done types. They then asked him to stretch it into an entire home repair manual, which became his first book, "The Taming of the Screw," a 1983 paperback. "A common problem is that the lights flicker," he wrote. "This sometimes means that your electrical system is inadequate, but more often it means that your home is possessed by demons... If you're not sure whether your house is possessed, see `The Amityville Horror,' a fine documentary film based on an actual book. He also finds time to write half a dozen snappy, smartypants essays a year for magazines such as Glamour, Redbook, Ms., and Historic Preservation. He has no designs whatsoever on serious prose, fiction, poetry, screenplays or TV scripts. "I don't have a novel percolating in me," he says. "I don't have vision, like Garrison Keillor, nor do I have the patience to work on a slow build-up for a big pay-off. I like a lot of quick yuks. Nothing I'm doing is immortal." "I often describe myself as superficial. People assume I'm being modest, that I really believe I'm a deep thinker with lots of important ideas I'm getting across through comedy. But I really am superficial and I really am a philistine." Well, sort of. It's quickly clear in talking to Barry that he's very serious about being flip - his shallowness runs deep, in other words - and that his iconoclasm is not idle pose. "My motivation in writing is hostility," he says brightly. "I honestly feel a great deal of contempt toward rude and stupid people. I'm not the kind of person who can say, well, it doesn't matter. To me it always matters." Politically, for example, Barry says he is an anarchist. He tosses off the fact lightly at first, as though, well, of course, such a crazy writer would be an anarchist. But press him on the point over a few beers, and he'll say that, yes, he really does believe that government is bad and there should be no laws. His hatred for politicians - he compares them to "brain-damaged turnips" - and his attitude toward organized religion - "a load of horse manure" - are genuine. This from the eldest son of a Presbyterian minister. He and three siblings grew up in Armonk, N.Y., under modest circumstances in a home where, as he writes, "every summer we had huge, brazen ants striding around the kitchen demanding food and running up long-distance telephone charges. My mother spent much of her time whapping at them with brooms and spraying them with deadly chemicals. Nothing worked. The ants used to lie on their backs, laughing at the brooms and the chemicals and calling for more." He was not a particularly athletic youth, so he specialized in practical jokes, minor vandalism and the gray area in between. He became widely admired by his peers at school for flushing a cherry bomb down a toilet and helping carry a VW up the steps into the lobby. The guys used to get together to play loadball, a drunken, disorganized version of tackle football, and Barry's lengthy, detailed and bogus accounts of the games would slip past the faculty advisor onto the pages of the school news- paper. A star was born. As an English major at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Barry's primary passion was playing guitar and piano. He even cut a record with the Federal Duck, a very minor rock band, but soon realized his true talents lay elsewhere. He wanted to write for the student-run Haverford News but disliked the idea of trafficking in facts. When the editors assigned him a feature story on the local Nixon campaign headquarters, he stayed in his room and made the whole thing up. "I loved to write funny," he remembers. "It was great to see people passing my stuff around the dining room and laughing." But the late 1960's were not a particularly amusing time to be a young man in America. To avoid the draft and stay out of Vietnam, Barry got a deferral as a conscientious objector, largely on the strength of his father's ministerial work and the fact that Haverford College was founded by Quakers. "I would have told my draft board that Daffy Duck was the supreme being, if that's what they wanted to hear," he says. As a CO he had to work two years after graduation drawing up grant proposals for the Episcopal Church in New York City. To amuse himself he fired off memos to the area comptroller and various clergymen proposing that the church give money to absurd, nonexistent charities. "All I wanted to do was write," he says. "Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be like Robert Benchley, who basically got paid for making up short, funny things. I just didn't see any direct, clear way for that to happen. Periodi- cally I would think, `Time to get responsible,' and I'd apply to law school. One time I was even accepted and put a deposit on an apartment in San Francisco." But the voice of reason saved the day. As a leftist and budding anarchist, Barry realized at the last minute he would make a lousy lawyer. So, using contacts from his school days and trading on his experience working college summers as a go-fer and intern on the Congressional Quarterly, he landed a job in 1971 as a reporter for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pa., a short drive from where he now lives. "I covered a lot of raw sewage," he says. "The only thing suburban people care more about than zoning is sewage." At the same time he contributed once a week to a staff-written column called "Ad Libs," always attempting to write funny and sometimes succeeding. Beth Pyle, a reporter who had started at the paper a week after Barry, was appalled at first by his stinging humor and the way he openly insulted other members of the staff, though they didn't seem to mind because they thought he was only kidding. "He was out of control, just a smartass," she says. "But as I got to know him, I discovered I liked the way he thought. He's one of the most serious people I've ever met. He's got a lot of anger about and impatience with stupidity and ridiculousness in the world. He's deadly serious about the things he lampoons, but it comes out funny in his writing. And sometimes in person." Pyle and Barry became close friends and helped each other through the ends of their disintegrating first marriages. In July 1975, after they were both divorced, they married each other in an informal ceremony that concluded with a back-yard volleyball game. By that time, Barry, who had risen to news editor at the Daily Local News, was working as a correspondent for the Philadelphia office of the Associated Press, a profoundly unfunny organization. "It was all very rote," he says. "I hated feeding information to semi-retarded radio news people, which I did all the time. I hated being polite when some lame cretin who couldn't write a paragraph of his own would call the AP and ask them to do it. I hated dealing with guys calling up and saying, `Hi, this is the Shippensburg Gazette. We got a guy in a yacht race in Monaco - we don't know his name - can you tell us how he did?'" The experience drove Barry out of journalism altogether. After half a year at the AP, he quit to become a business-writing instructor with Burger Associates, a corporate consulting firm run by one of his neighbors. The Barrys still live where they did then, in a green two-story house on a cou- ple of acres in a hilly, wooded area called Tanguy Homesteads. The Homesteads were originally incorporated as a 40-family utopian commune before breaking into what Barry calls "a close-knit suburb." For the next eight years, he was away from home almost half the time, traveling coast to coast extrolling the virtues of clear concise writing to eager business executives. "They all agreed it was worthwhile and a good thing to do, but they would never dream of doing it themselves because of the pressure in great, illiterate cor- porate America to be unclear," he says. "I became a sort of religious figure. I would tell them something they wanted to hear, and it cleansed their spirits." Beth, meanwhile had become features editor at the Daily Local News. She hired her husband part-time to start writing weekly humor pieces again, this time with a photo logo. "It was basically the same column I'm writing today, only less consistently good," says Barry, who is not at all bashful about admitting to being funny. "Eventually I got a bunch of them stacked up to send around to the various syndication services. All the big ones, like the Washington Post Writers Group, sent them back with vomit stains on them." One small California feature syndicate was interested, however, and began selling the column to newspapers, though not very aggressively. Barry conti- nued to teach and freelance, scoring his first significant coup with a 1981 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine about Beth's ordeal giving birth to their son Robert. "It was a vicious attack on natural childbirth that really hit a nerve," he says. "All through the 1970's parents had been bombarded with smarmy nonsense about how beautiful childbirth is and how it doesn't hurt and how all you have to do is breathe right. I just came along and pointed out that it hurts like hell, breathing doesn't do a whole lot and most of what your hear in birthing classes is stupid." The story was widely reprinted, passed around and tacked onto bulletin boards. Big, distant newspapers such as The Tribune and Miami Herald expressed interest is seeing more of his work. The Herald even flew him down to Miami, wined and dined him and offered him a full-time staff job, but he didn't want to move, so the deal fell through. A year later, however, when he decided to quit Burger Associates to write full time, the Herald relaxed its residency rules and agreed to hire him and let him stay in Glen Mills. He chose the Herald over the Philadelphia Inquirer, which also wanted to hire him, because the idea of having his boss more than 1,000 miles away appealed to him. "He is the only humorist I know who makes people laugh out loud," says Tropic editor Bene Weingarten. "He writes these massive exaggerations of fundamental truths that are so familiar to people that they can't help but identify with them." "Purely as a writer he is brilliant. He uses words in thoroughly unexpected combinations, like the time he wrote the the four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." Weingarten snorts. "I can't tell you why that's funny, but it's funny as hell. It's undefinable genius." Barry's columns are the single largest source of letters to Tropic, many of them from outraged and incensed citizens who have taken him literally. The magazine prints without comment parts of these hostile letters, such as one >from a government information office in British Honduras calling Barry an "ugly American" and insisting that agricultural products are the country's main export, not, as he had written, lice. His reputation for nutty journalism has reached the point in Miami that, when he's reporting on a story, normally serious sources such as Florida Gov. Bob Graham, U.S. Rep. Dante Fascell and Florida International University Environ- mental Studies director Jack Parker supply him with wacky quotes: "One way to reduce the traffic damage to I-95 would be to make the exit ramps very high, so the the cars would actually shoot off into space," said Parker when Barry interviewed him for an article on Miami's interstate highway. "Perhaps the exit ramps could be located over Alice Wainwright Park so the cars would go off into the bay, where they would form a reef, which would attract lobsters." When he gets delicious actual quotations like this, Barry is forced to take great pains to emphasize to his readers that, this time, he's telling the truth. But mostly this is not a problem. Indeed his first book, "The Taming of the Screw," contains as nearly as possible no useful or verifiable information, despite the fact that it looks, at first glance, as though it might be just another how-to book from Rodale Press. It was published when Barry was virtually unknown and sold just over 50,000 copies - a reasonably good showing but nothing compared to the 190,000 copies of last year's "Babies and Other Hazards of Sex," an 88-page expansion of the popular article on natural childbirth. "All a newborn baby really needs is food, warmth and love," he wrote. "Pretty much like a hamster, only with fewer signs of intelligence." "Bad Habit," a hardback collection of columns published earlier this year by Doubleday & Co. has sold fewer than 10,000 copies and is generally unavailable in stores. Barry refused to do a publicity tour because his former syndicate stood to see most of the sales proceeds. But Rodale Press, undaunted, has already printed 100,000 copies of "Stay Fit and Healthy Until You're Dead," Barry's irreverent treatment of the exercise craze slated for release this month. "Professional ice hockey is an ideal way for the entire family to keep fit," he maintains within. "The kids will love participating in a loose, freewheeling sport where everybody makes the play-offs and the only activity that is specifically prohibited is selling narcotics to your opponents on the ice." On nutrition he advises: "Each morning you should take a vitamin A pill, followed by a vitamin D, followed by an E, until you spelled the healthful mnemonic phrase, 'A DEAD CAD BAKED A BAD CAKE, ACE.'" He is also branching into television, where he hosted four pilot episodes of "That's My Baby," a parental-help talk show produced by Minneapolis public TV station KTCA. The station will produce and distribute the show as a series if it can find a corporate underwriter. It hired him on the strength of his two guest appearances on "The Tonight Show," which were riotous successes even though he did go on last, "after the pigs who knew how to weave." Privately, though, Beth Barry says life with Dave is not a laugh a minute: "He's just normal at home. He's very disciplined about his writing and takes it very seriously. When we go to parties, people expect him to be a clown, which I think is very demeaning to him. "We were at a party about a year ago with all the up and coming yuppie-type writers and editors in Philadelphia. He felt the pressure to be funny and ended up just making an ass of himself. Later he was really embarrassed about it, and so was I." Beth, who quit the Daily Local News when Robert (now four years old) was born, recently started freelance business-writing and ghost-writing a newspaper column for a butcher. Nothing she composes is humorous. She works all day in an upstairs office, while her husband pecks away on his Radio Shack word processor in a basement office decorated with cartoon drawings and littered with back copies of supermarket tabloids from which he claims to take inspiration. "Beth buys them," he says. "We don't subscribe because if they were to get lost in the mail, we'd get behind on events. Like last week - `COUPLE FLEES TALKING BEAR.' Big story. We could have missed it." She is his toughest critic. Before any of his work is sent out for publication, Beth scrutinizes it for logic, grammar and recycled jokes. She also checks to see if it's funny: only rarely does she laugh out loud. "Whenever I do, he runs up and says, `What, what, what? You laughed. I gotta know exactly what you laughed at and why,'" she says. "Beth has seen all the devices I use," he says. "The jokes about goat waste, the tendency to introduce a subject by going back to the dawn of time, the way I compare stupid people's brains to coleslaw and prune pits, that kind of thing." "Barry kills about one in five columns or budding ideas before they see print, but he retains a strong, almost arrogant confidence that he can take any sub- ject and, just by thinking and working hard, massage it into something funny. "Everything has humor potential except Auschwitz and Ethiopia," he says flatly. "In general I don't worry about being offensive. I never did think of `offen- sive' as a criticism. There's a long, glorious tradition of offending people in American humor writing." It usually takes him three days working from 9 a.m. until early afternoon to put together a 1,000-word column. He writes seven days a week, and both his wife and editor say they are impressed with his dedication. He takes time out each day to chauffeur his son around and to play with the family's goofy new dog, a female Labrador/shepherd named Earnest that several months ago took the place of their old dog, who was run over and killed by a garbage truck. His major hobby is making, and bottling, his own beer - by far his favorite ingestible. He ends up jogging two miles every day up and down Twin Pine Way so he can drink it and not get fat. In the winter he goes to Philadelphia 76ers pro basketball games, where he has season seats at courtside and can holler at the referees. Everything in his milieu - the dog's stupidity, his son's ingenuous charm, beer, jogging, basketball - are grist for his mill and show up in his columns. He's never at a loss for ideas, which generally come from news events, ads, the aforementioned supermarket tabloids or, frequently, mail from his readers. "Over and over and over people write, `I've finally found someone whose mind works like mine,'" he says. "My column jumps out at people because, histori- cally, newspapers have assumed that their readers are idiots. I can't blame them. Most of the people who come to newspaper offices or write to them are the ones who are trying to prove that the Trilateral Commission is putting communist radio transmitters in everyone's teeth. "I write a hipper, less predictable, more offensive column than mainstream humor columnists, who I think are obvious and not particularly funny. I aim at intelligent people. Readers love the idea that a newspaper thinks they're smart enough to get the joke." Though he has carved out a niche as America's least accurate columnist - "Rembrandt's first name was Beauregard, which is why he never used it" - Barry does spend a good deal of time researching the subjects he wades into. The sole purpose, however, is to make sure that his distortions of fact have some sort of internal logic, no matter how screwy. Read enough from Barry's oeuvre in one sitting and you start to see a bit of method in his madness. Aside from playing fast and loose with the facts, other oft-used arrows in his quiver include: *Exaggeration: "The New Right thinks George Bush is Che Guevara." *Oversimplification: "The Army is a place where you get up early in the morning to be yelled at by people with short haircuts and tiny brains." *Gleeful bad taste: "Have you ever stopped to think what life would be like without flowers? I mean, what would you send to dead people? Grapes, maybe. Then there would be something to eat at a viewing." *And something he calls "judo," in which he attempts to make the reader stumble over his expectations: "...the Mayo Clinic, named after its founder, Dr. Ted Clinic." He says he wants his work to read as though he were "drunk, out of control" when he wrote it, though he remorselessly edits and re-edits each piece, and depends very little on inspiration or mood to be funny. He was, in fact, able to crank out a humor column on the day after his father died in April, 1984, an event that prompted the only serious writing he published in many years. It was a rambling, revelatory essay for the Miami Herald, the ending of which read: So I go in for my last words because I have to go back home, and my mother and I agree I probably won't see him again. I sit next to him on the bed, hoping he can't see that I'm crying. I love you, Dad, I say. He says, I love you too, I'd like some oatmeal. So I go back out to the living room, where my mother and my wife and my son are sitting on the sofa, in a line, waiting for the outcome, and I say, He wants some oatmeal. I am laughing and crying about this. My mother thinks maybe I should go back in and try to have a more meaningful last talk, but I don't. Driving home, I'm glad I didn't. I think: He and I have been talking ever since I learned how. A million words. All of them final, now. I don't need to make him give me any more, like souvenirs. I think: Let me not define his death on my terms. Let him have his oatmeal. I can hardly see the road. Readers' response to his public grief was positive and his editors encouraged him to write more in the same vein, an invitation he declined. Asked why, he says, "I don't mind using the device of writing to make people laugh, but I'm suspicious of those who use the device of writing to make people cry. I just don't trust them intellectually. How many different subjects can anyone really say they care about?" Barry calls this his "cop out" and leaves it at that. He doesn't see himself as a crusader or righter of wrongs, and he remains content - more than content, actually - to hang out in the country, drink a few beers, write a few columns and, these days, sit in the living room on a nasty old sofa and play his new electric guitar. It's a Gibson Les Paul model. Great guitar. The amp he bought to go with it "could destroy a greenhouse." Beth didn't mind. There's plenty of time in life to buy a sofa. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 The young girl was having a heart-to-heart talk with her mother on her first visit home since starting college. "Mom, I have to tell you," the girl confessed. "I lost my virginity last weekend." "I'm not surprised," said her mother. "It was bound to happen sooner or later. I just hope it was a romantic and pleasurable experience." "Well, yes and no," the pretty student remarked. "The first eight guys felt great, but after them my pussy got real sore." "Adam," the heavenly voice called to the Garden of Eden, "what did you and Eve do today?" "We ate some fruit, Lord," Adam said reverently. "Did you eat of the forbidden tree?" asked God. "Yes, Lord, we did," Adam confessed. "And then what did you do?" God asked. "We made mad, passionate love all afternoon." "Where is Eve now?" the Lord bellowed. "She's down at the brook washing herself out." "Oh, no," the Lord moaned." Now all the fish are going to smell like that!" Two guys wandered into a bar. One of the men shouted to the barkeeper,"Hiya, Mike. Set 'em up for me and my pal here." Then he turned to his slightly dim partner and boasted, "This is a great bar. For every two drinks you buy, the house gives you one. And the pinball machines in the back are free!" "That's not so great,"responded the friend. "There's a bar across town That'll match you drink for drink, and you can get laid in the back for free." "Where is this place?" the first guy exclaimed. "Oh, I don't know," the dim fellow replied, "but my wife goes there all the time." An Israeli was sitting between two Arabs on a long airplane flight. He had just removed his shoes and gotten comfortable when one of the Arabs nudged him and said,"Hey, Jew, go get us some orange juice." To avoid any trouble, the Israeli did so. When he left, both Arabs spit in his shoes. The Israeli came back with the juice, which the Arabs gulped down. The rest of the flight was uneventful. The plane landed, and the Israeli put on his shoes and felt the squishing inside. He turned to the Arabs and said,"If there is ever going to be peace in the Middle East, the Arabs will have to stop spitting in the shoes of Jews, and the Jews will have to stop pissing in the Arabs' orange juice." A well dressed lawyer went into a bar for a martini and found himself beside a scrungy-looking drunk who kept mumbling and studying something in his hand. The attorney leaned closer while the drunk held the tiny object up to the light,slurring "Well, it looks like plastic." Then he rolled it between his fingers,adding,"But it feels like rubber." Curious, the lawyer asked, "What do you have there mister?" The drunk stammered,"Damn if I know, but it looks like plastic and feels like rubber." The lawyer said,"Let me take a look." And the drunk handed it over. The attorney rolled it between his thumb and fingers, then examined it closely. "Yeah, it does look like plastic and feel like rubber, but I don't know what it is. Where did you get it anyway?" The drunk replied, "Outta my nose." With the sun beginning to rise, the cabin of the jetliner was suddenly illuminated. "Who turned on the fucking lights?" a male passenger, who had been surly since boarding, snarled at a stewardess. The girl had had enough of this particular character."These are the breakfast lights, sir," she answered with forced sweetness. "The fucking lights are much dimmer, and you snored right through them." 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Three women - a German, a Jew and a Polack - all gave birth to seven-pound baby boys at the same time. The nurses got the babies mixed up somehow and couldn't tell which baby belonged to which mother. After an hour of mass confusion the father of the German baby decided he'd settle the problem. He walked into the nursery and lined up the three infants in a row. He clicked his heels, raised his arm and shouted, "Heil Hitler!" The German baby snapped to attention, the Jewish baby shit, and the Polack baby played in it. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Bill had just returned from a week of honeymooning, and his best friend asked him how it went. "The first night we did it nine times," Bill said."The second night, eight times. The third night, seven times. The fourth night, six times. The fifth night, five times. The sixth night, four times, and the last night, nothing!" "Nothing?" his pal asked. "How come?" "Hey, you ever tried putting a marshmallow in a parking meter?" A man who smelled like a distillery flopped on a subway seat next to a priest. The man's tie was stained, his face was plastered with red lipstick, and a half empty bottle of gin was sticking out of his torn coat pocket. He opened his newspaper and began reading. After a few minutes the disheveled guy turned to the priest and asked, "Say, Father, what causes arthritis?" "Mister, it's caused by loose living, being with cheap, wicked women, too much alcohol and a contempt for your fellow man." "Well, I'll be damned," the drunk muttered, returning to his paper. The priest, thinking about what he had said, nudged the man and apologized. "I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to come on so strong. How long have you had arthritis?" "I don't have it, Father. I was just reading here that the Pope does." Two high-school buddies were attending the senior prom. "Suzy wants to go out to my car. She's really hot," one boy said. "I'm really nervous. I know I'll goof up!" "Take it easy," his friend assured him. "All you gotta do is compliment her. Chicks love to be complemented. You'll have her in the palm of your hand." About a half-hour later the young man came back, rubbing a black eye. "Shit, man! What happened to you?!" his buddy asked. "I took your advice." "Didn't you compliment her?" "sure I did. We got in my car and started kissing. I told her that for such full lips, hers sure tasted sweet. She liked that. After a while I started feeling her tits, and I told her that for such large breasts they sure were firm. She like that too." "It sounds like you were doing great," his friend said. "Well," the other answered, "that's when everything went wrong. I got her dress up and her panties off, and I tried to think of another compliment." "What did you say?" "For such a large crack, it doesn't stink much." While sports fishing off the Florida coast, a tourist capsized his boat. He could swim, but his fear of alligators kept him clinging to the overturned craft. Spotting and old beachcomber standing on the shore, the tourist shouted,"Are there any gators around here?!" "Naw," the man hollered back, "they ain't been around for years!" "Feeling safe, the tourist started swimming leisurely toward the shore. About halfway there he asked the guy,"How'd you get rid of the gators?" "We didn't do nothin'," the beachcomber said. "The sharks got 'em." A gambler was telling a friend about his first junket to Las Vegas and how hard it was to get any sleep. "I was awakened at one, two and four in the morning by a drunk chorus girl banging on the door and screaming," he recalled. "That's terrible," the friend said." How'd you ever get any sleep?" "At five o'clock I finally unlocked the door and let her out," the gambler laughed. Two ferocious cannibal chiefs sat licking their fingers after a large meal. "Your wife makes a delicious roast,"one chief said. "Thanks," his friend said."I'm gonna miss her." From the outset, the blind date was a fiasco and it was intensified by the fact that the fellow was too intensitive and ego-ridden to realize it. The moment of truth came in the supper club as he clutched the girl's thigh and whispered, "Baby, how's about our cutting out to my pad so I can slip you nine inches?" There was a moment of silence, and then the girl said, "You know, I really don't think you could get it up three times in a row!" After a wild freeway chase, the motorcycle cop waved the speeding sports car over to the curb. When he walked up to the drivers window, he was surprised to find a very attractive redhead behind the wheel. "Ma'am," he said ."I'm afraid we're going to have to give you a Breathalyzer test to see whether or not you've been drinking." The test was taken and as the officer eyed the results, he said, "Lady, you've had a couple of stiff ones." "That's amazing!"the girl cried."You mean it shows that,too!" The blind daters had really hit it off and at the end of the evening, as they were beginning to undress each other in his apartment, the fellow said, "Before we go any further, Charmaine, tell me - do you have any special fetishes that I should take into account in bed?" "As a matter of fact," smiled the girl, "I do happen to have a foot fetish - but I suppose I'd settle for maybe seven or eight inches." Visiting a lawyer for advice, the wife said, "I want you to help me obtain a divorce. My husband is getting a little queer to sleep with." "What do you mean?" asked the attorney. "Does he force you to indulge in unusual sex practices?" "No, he doesn't," replied the woman, "and neither does the little queer." 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 The nervous young bride became irritated by her husband's lusty advances on their wedding night and reprimanded him severely. "I demand proper manners in bed," she declared, "just as I do at the dinner table." Amused by his wife's formality, the groom smoothed his rumpled hair and climbed quietly between the sheets. "Is that better?" he asked, with a hint of a smile." "Yes," replied the girl, "much better." "Very good, darling," the husband whispered. "Now would you be so kind as to please pass the pussy." 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 It was a warm, sunny Sunday, so a man and his wife decided to take in the zoo. They spent the day, and at closing time they walked past the gorilla cage, and the man noticed the gorilla looking at his wife. "That gorilla is getting excited just looking at your tits," he said. "Why don't you take your blouse off and we'll see what he does?" At first she declined. But finally persuaded by her husband, she took off her blouse and bra. The gorilla went nuts. He started grunting and jumping up and down. "Hey," the husband said, "let's really blow his mind. Take off all your clothes and we'll see what he does." Again she said no and again he persuaded her. This time the ape really went bananas! He climbed up and down the bars, did flips, ran around in circles and tossed his food all over the cage. The husband went over to the cage, opened the door and pushed his wife in. "Now," said the husband, "tell that motherfucker you have a headache!" Marge was getting pretty upset about her husband's lack of attention and decided to come on a little stronger to him. After dinner, she put on her sexy, backless nightgown backward and sauntered into the living room. "Notice anything?" she asked slyly. "Yes, you've got your nightgown on backward," her husband answered simply. "How could you tell?" she cooed. "Because the shit stains are in the front," he said. After his annual physical, the sexually active bachelor was waiting in the doctor's office for the results. "Well," said the doctor, "I have good news and bad news for you." "The way I feel, please give me the good news first" replied the bachelor. "The good news," announced the doctor, "is that your penis has grown an additional four inches since your last exam." "Great!" the man shouted. "What is the bad news?" "It's malignant," replied the doctor. Three guys - a Frenchman, a German and a Polack, were sitting in a bar. In walked a mean looking black guy looking for a fight. He sat down, ordered a beer, took a drink, went over and slapped the Frenchman and said, "I like fucking white women." The Frenchman looked at him and thought,"Well,that's great." Then the big black guy went over to the German, hit him on the shoulder and said, "I like fucking white women." The German looked at him and said, "Good for you." The black guy sat down and took another drink of his beer. He got up, walked over to the Polack and belted him on the back, then said, "I like fucking white women." The Polack sat and thought for a second and finally said, "I don't blame you. I don't like fucking those black ones either." A husky foreigner, looking for sex, accepted a prostitute's terms. When she undressed, he noticed that she had no pubic hair. The man shouted, "What, no wool? In my country all women have wool down there." The prostitute snapped back, "What do you want to do, knit or fuck?" An old maid wanted to travel by bus to the pet cemetery with the remains of her cat. As she boarded the bus, she whispered to the driver, "I have a dead pussy." The driver pointed to the woman in the seat behind him and said, "Sit with my wife. You two have alot in common." Two men were walking in the park when they came upon this dog that had bent itself into a weird position and was licking its balls. One man said, "Gee! I wish I could do that." The other man replied, "I think you better get to be friends first." After attending a party for his boss, the life of the party was nursing a king-size hangover and asked his wife, "What the hell happened?" "As usual, you made an ass of yourself in front of your boss," replied the wife. "Piss on him," answered the husband. "You did," said the wife, "and he fired you." "Well, fuck him," said the husband. "I did, and you go back to work in the morning." This fellow was screwing his best friend's wife when he suddenly stopped and sat on the edge of the bed, holding his head in his hands. "What the hell has happened to you?" the lady asked. "I feel like a regular son of a bitch, getting my best friends pussy," the man moaned. The lady reached over and patted him on the back. "Well, if that's all it is, you can stop worrying," she said. "You're not getting his pussy. His pussy is five to six inches deeper." 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 One evening a man was at home watching TV and eating peanuts. He'd toss them in the air, then catch them in his mouth. In the middle of catching one, his wife asked a question, and as he turned to answer her, a peanut fell in his ear. He tried and tried to dig it out but succeeded in only pushing it in deeper. He called his wife for assistance, and after hours of trying they became worried and decided to go to the hospital. As they were ready to go out the door, their daughter came home with her date. After being informed of the problem, their daughter's date said he could get the peanut out. The young man told the father to sit down, then shoved two fingers up the father's nose and told him to blow hard. When the father blew, the peanut flew out. The mother and daughter jumped and yelled for joy. The mother said to the young man, "That was wonderful. You should be a doctor!" The ungrateful father jumped up, twisted the boy's arm behind his back and yelled, "Doctor, my ass! He's going to be our son-in-law. Smell his fingers!" 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 A man walked into a crowded doctor's office. As he approached the desk, the receptionist asked "Yes sir,may we help you?" "There's something wrong with my dick," he replied. The receptionist became aggravated and said, "You shouldn't come into a crowded office and say things like that." "Why not? You asked me what was wrong and I told you." he said. "We do not use language like that here," she said. "Please go outside and come back in and say that there's something wrong with your ear or whatever." The man walked out, waited several minutes and reentered. The receptionist smiled smugly and asked, "Yes?" "There's something wrong with my ear," he stated. The receptionist nodded approvingly. "And what is wrong with your ear, sir?" "I can't piss out of it." the man replied. One night a man heard howls coming from his basement and went down to discover a female cat being raped by a mouse. fascinated by what he saw, the man gained the mouse's confidence with some cheese and then took him next door. The mouse repeated his amazing performance by raping a German Sheppard. The man, very excited by this, was dying to show someone his discovery. He rushed home and woke up his wife but before he could explain, she saw the mouse, screamed, and covered her head with the blanket. "Don't be afraid, darling," said the man. "Wait until I tell you about this." "Get out of here!" cried his wife. "And take that sex maniac with you!" Tired of the boring "straights" she'd been laying, a chick decided she'd find out if bikers were really the heavy "cocksmen" that she heard they were. So she picked up a gigantic bro and went went with him up to his pad. Stripped and ready, anxiously awaiting some real action, she was astonished to see that his fully erect crank was only two inches long. "Who," she demanded scornfully,"do you think you're gonna satisfy with that?" Grinning confidently, the bro replied,"Me!" The common symptoms of swine flu are: High fever, upset stomach, occasional cramps and an irresistable urge to fuck in the mud. A conductor, while taking tickets on the train, noticed a lady with a small and extremely ugly baby on her lap. "Lady," the conductor said, "that is by far the ugliest baby I have ever seen." The woman, horrified by the conductor's comment, began screaming at him, and demanded that her money be refunded and the conductor be fired. The head conductor then came into the car and tried to smooth things over. "Listen, lady," he said, "if you will forget all about this matter, I'll see that you get the best treatment possible, I'll give you your money back, and I'll even try to find you a nice, ripe banana for that monkey of yours." An Eastern newspaper correspondent had just arrived in an old Western town when he noticed a curious lack of women. Walking into the local saloon he asked a cocky shitkicker, "What do you fellas do around here for entertainment?" "Ya mean women?" asked the shitkicker. "We ain't got none. 'Round here folks fuck sheep." "That's disgusting," cried the correspondent, "I've never heard of such moral degredation." However, after a few months, the correspondent's rocks were beginning to ache and the sheep were looking more and more attractive. So he finally went out and found himself a comely sheep, brought her back to his room, shampooed her and then tied ribbons in her hair. After a bottle of champagne, he lured the sheep into his bedchamber and released his pent-up frustrations. Afterward, he escorted his four-legged lover to the saloon for a drink. As the correspondent and his wooly mate entered, a hush fell over the patrons and the anxious couple became the object of many stares. "You goddamn bunch of hypocrites!" the reporter yelled. "You've been fucking sheep for years, but when I do it up right you look at me like I'm some sort of crazy pervert!" One cowboy in the back of the crowd spoke up, "Yeah, but that's the sheriff's gal!" 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Question: What's invisible and smells like carrots ? Answer: Bunny farts Question: What is the difference between white fairy tales and black fairy tales? Answer: White fairy tales start out, "Once upon a time," and black fairy tales start out, "You motherfuckers ain't gonna believe this shit, but...." Question: What was Roman Polanski's latest movie? Answer: "Close Encounters with the Third Grade." Question: Why did the chicken cross the road ? Answer: to show the possum it could be done ! Question: Why should you wrap a hamster in electrician's tape? Answer: So it won't explode when you fuck it. Question: What do you call a prostitute with a runny nose? Answer: Full. Question: What is the hardest part of a vegetable to eat? Answer: The wheelchair. Question: How did Roman Polanski's girlfriend die? Answer: It was a crib death. Question: Why do female paratroopers wear jockstraps? Answer: So they don't whistle on the way down. Question: Why do bald men have holes in their pockets? Answer: Because they like to run their hand through their hair. Question: What's grosser than gross? Answer: When you kiss your grandmother and she slips you the tongue. Question: What is the modern woman's idea of the perfect man? Anser: One who's two-and-a-half feet tall, has a ten-inch tongue, and can breathe through his ears. Question: What do you call an old Raggedy Ann doll with a rock in her mouth ? Answer: A dirty cotton rock sucker ! Question: What is the difference between a fox and a pig? Answer: About five drinks? Question: Why was Lady Di disappointed on her honeymoon? Answer: She thought all rulers had twelve inches! Question: How many animals can you find in a pair of pantyhose? Answer: Two calves; ten little piggies; one ass; one pussy; one thousand hares; maybe some crabs; and a dead fish nobody can find. Question: How can you tell when someone likes Moose Head ? Answer: Antler marks on their thighs ! Question: Why can't you go the bathroom at a Beatles concert? Answer: There's no John. Question: What's the difference between snowmen and snowwomen? Answer: Snowballs Question: Hear about the Helen Keller doll? Answer: Wind it up and it walks into walls. Question: What has a thousand teeth and eats weenies? Answer: A zipper. Question: Why does Miss Piggy douche in vinegar and oil? Answer: Because Kermit likes sweet and sour pork. Question: How do you make a woman's toes curl ? Answer: Forget to take her pantyhose off ! Question: What kind of wood doesn't float? Answer: Natalie Wood Question: What is the difference between Jimmy Swaggert and a pickpocket ? Answer: A pickpocket wants to snatch your watch ! Question: What is the difference between an Italian woman and a gorilla ? Answer: 50 pounds and an accent Question: What do you call an Ethiopian in a dinner jacket? Answer: An optimist ! Question: What do Yoko Ono and Ethiopians have in common ? Answer: They are both living off dead beetles ! Question: Why do men like big tits and tight pussys? Answer: Because they have big mouths and little penises. Question: What do you call an Ethiopian with a dog ? Answer: A vegetarian ! Question: What's a practical nurse? Answer: One who marries a wealthy old patient. Question: What's 3 two-letter words that mean small? Answer: "Is it in?" Question: What do you get when you cross a rooster with a telephone pole? Answer: A twelve-foot cock that wants to reach out and touch someone. Question: What do you get when you cross a donkey with an onion? Answer: A piece of ass that brings tears to your eyes. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 PARKINSON'S LAW: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. PARKINSON'S LAW, MODIFIED: The junk you have will expand to fill the available space. THE PETER PRINCIPLE: In every hierarchy, each employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. CHEOPS' LAW: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget. MURPHY'S LAW: If something can go wrong, it will. WEILER'S LAW: Nothing is impossible for the man who does not have to do it himself. FINAGLE'S LAW: Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse. RUDIN'S LAW: In a crisis that forces a choice to be made among alternative courses of action, most people will choose the worst one possible. UNNAMED LAW: If it happens, it must be possible. CLARKE'S THIRD LAW: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishible from magic. GUMPERSON'S LAW: The outcome of a given desired probability will be inverse to the degree of desirability. (After a salary raise, you will have less money at the end of the month than you had before.) * (The more a recruit knows about a given subject, the better chance * he has of being assigned to something else.) CUTLER WEBSTER'S LAW: There are two sides to every argument unless a man is personally involved, in which case there is only one. ALBRECHT'S LAW: Social innovations tend to the level of minimum tolerable well being. PATRICKS'S THEOREM: If the experiment works, you must be using the wrong equipment. SKINNER'S CONSTANT: (also Fynnegan's Finagling Factor) That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you got, gives the answer you should have gotton. HORNER'S FIVE THUMB POSTULATE: Experience varies directly with the equipment ruined. FLAOLE'S LAW OF THE PERVERSITY OF INANIMATE OBJECTS: Any inanimate object, regardless of its composition or configuration, may be expected to perform at any time - in a totally unexpected manner for reasons that are either entirely obscure or also completely mysterious. ALLEN'S AXIOM: When all else fails, read the instructions. THE SPARE PARTS PRINCIPLE: The accessability during recovery of small parts which fall from the workbench, varies directly with the size of the part, and inversely with its importance to the completion of the work underway. THE COMPENSATION COROLLARY: The experiment must be considered a success if no more than 50% of the observed measurements must be discarded to obtain a correspondence with theory. THE ORDERING PRINCIPLE: Those supplies necessary for yesterday's experiment must be ordered by no later than noon tomorrow. THE ULTIMATE PRINCIPLE: By definition, when you are investigating the unknown - you do not know what you will find. THE FUTILITY FACTOR: No experiment is ever a complete failure - it can always serve as a bad example. Why did the chicken cross the road half way? He wanted to lay it on the line. System stopping for 2 minutes, 1 minute ago. YOUR SUBSYSTEM HAS DIED..... Startrek makes your sterile NEW FORTRAN H EXTENDED - GO TO STATEMENTS ARE NOW ILLEGAL. SEE ASPNEWS FOR DETAILS. Allison's Precept The best simple-minded test of expertise in a particular area is the ability to win money in a series of bets on future occurrences in that area. Corollary to Anthony's Law On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first always strike your toes. Army Axiom Any order that can be misunderstood has been misunderstood. Axiom of the Pipe (Trischmann's Paradox) A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth. Baker's Law Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it. Barber's Laws of Backpacking The integral of the gravitational potential taken around any loop trail you choose to hike always comes out positive. Any stone in your boot always migrates against the pressure gradient to exactly the point of most pressure. The weight of your pack increases in direct proportion to the amount of food you consume from it. If you run out of food, the pack weight goes on increasing anyway. The number of stones in your boot is directly proportional to the number of hours you have been on the trail. Backpacking - The size of each of the stones in your boot is directly proportional to the number of hours you have been on the trail. The remaining distance to your chosen campsite remains constant as twilight approaches. The net weight of your boots is proportional to the cube of the number of hours you have been on the trail. When you arrive at your chosen campsite, it is full. Forthoffer's Cynical Summary of Barzun's Laws 1) That which has not yet been taught directly can never be taught directly. 2) If at first you don't succeed, you will never succeed. Baxter's First Law Government intervention in the free market always leads to a lower national standard of living. Baxter's Second Law The adoption of fractional gold reserves in a currency system always leads to depreciation, devaluation, demonetization and, ultimately, to complete destruction of that currency. Baxter's Third Law In a free market good money always drives bad money out of circulation. Becker's Law It is much harder to find a job than to keep one. Beifeld's Principle The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and receptive young female increases by pyramidal progression when he is already in the company of (1) a date, (2) his wife, and (3) a better looking and richer male friend. Bicycle Law All bicycles weigh 50 pounds: A 30-pound bicycle needs a 20-pound lock and chain. A 40-pound bicycle needs a 10-pound lock and chain. A 50-pound bicycle needs no lock or chain. Blaauw's Law Established technology tends to persist in spite of new technology. Booker's Law An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction. Boren's Laws 1) When in doubt, mumble. 2) When in trouble, delegate. 3) When in charge, ponder. Brien's First Law At some time in the life cycle of virtually every organization, its ability to succeed in spite of itself runs out. Brook's Law Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Brown's Law of Business Success Our customer's paperwork is profit. Our own paperwork is loss. Bucy's Law Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man. Bustlin' Billy's Bogus Beliefs 1) The organization of any program reflects the organization of the people who develop it. 2) There is no such thing as a "dirty capitalist," only a capitalist. 3) Anything is possible, but nothing is easy. 4) Capitalism can exist in one of only two states -- welfare or warfare. 5) I'd rather go whoring than warring. 6) History proves nothing. Bye's First Law of Model Railroading Anytime you wish to demonstrate something, the number of faults is proportional to the number of viewers. Bye's Second Law of Model Railroading The desire for modeling a prototype is inversely proportional to the decline of the prototype. Cahn's Axiom When all else fails, read the instructions. Camp's Law A coup that is known in advance is a coup that does not take place. Canada Bill Jones' Motto It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money. Canada Bill Jones' Supplement A Smith and Wesson beats four aces. Cheop's Law Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget. Chisholm's Law of Human Interaction Anytime things appear to be going better you have overlooked something. Chisholm's Third Law Proposals, as understood by the proposer, will be judged otherwise by others. Corollary 1: If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will. Corollary 2: If you do something which you are sure will meet with everyone's approval, somebody won't like it. Corollary 3: Procedures devised to implement the purpose won't quite work. Churchill's Commentary on Man Man will occasionally stumble over the truth but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on. Clarke's First Law When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Clarke's Second Law The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. Clarke's Third Law Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clarke's Law of Revolutionary Ideas Every revolutionary idea - in Science, Politics, Art or Whatever - evokes three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the three phrases: 1) "It is completely impossible -- don't waste my time." 2) "It is possible, but it is not worth doing." 3) "I said it was a good idea all along." Cohen's Law What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts -- not the facts themselves. Cole's Law Thinly sliced cabbage. Commoner's Three Laws of Ecology 1) No action is without side-effects. 2) Nothing ever goes away. 3) There is no free lunch. Cook's Law Much work -- much food, little work -- little food, no work -- burial at sea. Cornuelle's Law Authority tends to assign jobs to those least able to do them. Crane's Law (Friedman's Reiteration) There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Diogenes' First Dictum The more heavily a man is supposed to be taxed, the more power he has to escape being taxed. Diogenes' Second Dictum If a taxpayer thinks he can cheat safely, he probably will. Dow's Law In a hierarchical organization, the higher the level, the greater the confusion. Dunne's Law The territory behind rhetoric is too often mined with equivocation. Ehrman's Corollary to Ginsberg's Theorem 1) Things will get worse before they get better. 2) Who said things would get better. Ettorre's Observation The other line moves faster. Evan's Law of Politics When team members are finally in a position to help the team, it turns out they have quit the team. Everitt's Form of the Second Law of Thermodynamics Confusion (entropy) is always increasing in society. Only if someone or something works extremely hard can this confusion be reduced to order in a limited region. Nevertheless, this effort will still result in an increase in the total confusion of society at large. Extended Epstein-Heisenberg Principle In an R & D orbit, only 2 of the existing 3 parameters can be defined simultaneously. The parameters are: task, time and resources ($). Farber's First Law Give him an inch and he'll screw you. Farber's Second Law A hand in the bush is worth two anywhere else. Farber's Third Law We're all going down the same road in different directions. Farber's Fourth Law Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows. The Fifth Rule You have taken yourself too seriously. Finagle's First Law If an experiment works, something has gone wrong. Finagle's Second Law No matter what result is anticipated, there will always be someone eager to (a) misinterpret it, (b) fake it, or (c) believe it happened to his own pet theory. Finagle's Third Law In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake. Corollary 1: No one whom you ask for help will see it. Corollary 2: Everyone who stops by with unsought advice will see it immediately. Finagle's Fourth Law Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only makes it worse. Finagle's Rules In case of doubt, make it sound convincing. Experiments should be reproducible. They should all fail in the same way. Do not believe in miracles. Rely on them. First Law of Bicycling No matter which way you ride it's uphill and against the wind. First Law of Bridge It's always the partner's fault. First Law of Canoeing (Alfred Andrews' Canoeing Postulate) No matter which direction you start it's always against the wind coming back. First Law of Debate Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference. First Law of Office Holders Get re-elected. Fitz-Gibbon's Law Creativity varies inversely with the number of cooks involved with the broth. Flap's Law Any inanimate object, regardless of its position or configuration, may be expected to perform at any time in a totally unexpected manner for reasons that are either entirely obscure or else completely mysterious. Fortis' Three Great Lies of Life 1) Money isn't everything. 2) It's great to be a Negro. 3) I'm only going to put it in a little way. Fourteenth Corollary of Atwood's General Law of Dynamic Negatives No books are lost by loaning except those you particularly wanted to keep. Franklin's Rule Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall not be disappointed. Gilb's Laws of Unreliability 1) Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Corollary: At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer. 2) Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable. Ginsberg's Theorem 1) You can't win. 2) You can't break even. 3) You can't even quit the game. Golden Rules of Indulgence Everything in excess! To enjoy the full flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks. Yield to temptation; it may never pass your way again. Gray's Law of Programming n+1 trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same time as n trivial tasks. Logg's Rebuttal to Gray's Law of Programming n+1 trivial tasks take twice as long as n trivial tasks. Gresham's Law Trivial matters are handled promptly; important matters are never solved. Whenver possible blame the hardware. Grosch's Law Computing power increases as the square of the cost. If you want to do it twice as cheaply, you have to do it four times as fast. Gummidge'e Law The amount of expertise varies in inverse proportion to the number of statements understood by the general public. Gumperson's Law The probability of anything happening is in inverse ratio to its desirability. Hacker's Law of Personnel Anyone having supervisory responsibility for the completion of a task will invariably protest that more resources are needed. Hagerty's Law If you lose your temper at a newspaper columnist, he'll get rich or famous or both. Haldane's Law The Universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer than we CAN imagine. Harper's Magazine's Law You never find an article until you replace it. Hartley's First Law You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float on his back you've got something. Hartley's Second Law Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself. Harvard Law Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases. Heller's Law The first myth of management is that it exists. Hendrickson's Law If a problem causes many meetings, the meetings eventually become more important than the problem. Hoare's Law of Large Programs Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out. Horner's Five Thumb Postulate Experience varies directly with equipment ruined. Howard's First Law of Theater Use it. Howe's Law Every man has a scheme that will not work. Hull's Theorem The combined pull of several patrons is the sum of their separate pulls multiplied by the number of patrons. IBM Pollyanna Principle Machines should work. People should think. Imhoff's Law The organization of any bureaucracy is very much like a septic tank -- the REALLY big chunks always rise to the top. Iron Law of Distribution Them what has - gets. Italian Proverb She who is silent consents. Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Governments No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session. Jay's Laws of Leadership 1) Changing things is central to leadership, and changing them before anyone else is creativeness. 2) To build something that endures, it is of the greatest importance to have a long tenure in office -- to rule for many years. You can achieve a quick success in a year or two, but nearly all of the great tycoons have continued their building much longer. Jenkinson's Law It won't work. John Cameron's Law No matter how many times you've had it, if it's offered, take it, because it'll never be quite the same again. John's Axiom When your opponent is down, kick him. John's Collateral Corollary In order to get a loan you must first prove you don't need it. Johnson's Corollary to Heller's Law Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within your organization. Johnson's First Law of Auto Repair Any tool dropped while repairing an automobile will roll under the car to the vehicle's exact geographic center. Johnson-Laird's Law Toothache tends to start on Saturday night. Jones' Law The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone he can blame it on. Jones' Motto Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate. Kamin's First Law All currencies will decrease in value and purchasing power over the long term, unless they are freely and fully convertable into gold and that gold is traded freely without restrictions of any kind. Kamin's Second Law Threat of capital controls accelerates marginal capital outflows. Kamin's Third Law Combined total taxation from all levels of government will always increase (until the government is replaced by war or revolution). Kamin's Fourth Law Government inflation is always worse than statistics indicate; central bankers are biased toward inflation when the money unit is non-convertible, and without gold or silver backing. Kamin's Fifth Law Purchasing power of currency is always lost far more rapidly than ever regained. (Those who expect even fluctuations in both directions play a losing game.) Kamin's Sixth Law When attempting to predict and forcast macro-economic moves or economic legislation by a politician, never be misled by what he says; instead watch what he does. Kamin's Seventh Law Politicians will always inflate when given the opportunity. Katz's Law Men and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted. Kerr-Martin Law 1) In dealing with their OWN problems, faculty members are the most extreme conservatives. 2) In dealing with OTHER people's problems, they are the world's most extreme liberals. Kirkland's Law The usefulness of any meeting is in inverse proportion to the attendance. Kitman's Law Pure drivel tends to drive off the TV screen ordinary drivel. Lani's Principles of Economics 1) Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed. 2) $100 placed at 7% interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000 by which time it will be worth nothing. 3) In God we trust, all others pay cash. La Rochefoucauld's Law It is more shameful to distrust one's friends than to be deceived by them. Law of Communications The inevitable result of improved and enlarged communications between different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased area of misunderstanding. Law of Computability Applied to Social Science If at first you don't succeed, transform your data set. Law of Selective Gravity (The Buttered Side Down Law) An object will fall so as to do the most damage. Law of the Perversity of Nature (Mrs. Murphy's Corollary) You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter. Law of Superiority The first example of superior principle is always inferior to the developed example of inferior principle. Laws of Computerdom According to Golub 1) Fuzzy project objectives are used to avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs. 2) A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete than expected; a carefully planned project will take only twice as long. 3) The effort required to correct course increases geometrically with time. 4) Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress. Laws of Computer Programming 1) Any given program, when running, is obsolete. 2) Any given program costs more and takes longer. 3) If a program is useful, it will have to be changed. 4) If a program is useless, it will have to be documented. 5) Any given program will expand to fill all available memory. 6) The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its output. Laws of Gardening 1) Other people's tools work only in other people's yards. 2) Fanzy gizmos don't work. 3) If nobody uses it, there's a reason. 4) You get the most of what you need the least. Le Chatelier's Law If some stress is brought to bear on a system in equilibrium, the equilibrium is displaced in the direction which tends to undo the effect of the stress. Les Miserables Metalaw All laws, whether good, bad, or indifferent, must be obeyed to the letter. Long's Notes 1) Always store beer in a dark place. Lord Falkland's Rule When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision. Lowery's Law If it jams -- force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway. Malek's Law Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way. Malinowski's Law Looking from far above, from our high places of safety in the developed civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. Dean Martin's Definition of Drunkenness You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on. Martin-Berthelot Principle Of all possible committee reactions to any given agenda item, the reaction that will occur is the one which will liberate the greatest amount of hot air. Match's Maxim A fool in a high station is like a man on the top of a high mountain: everything appears small to him and he appears small to everybody. Matsch's Law It is better to have a horrible ending than to have horrors without end. McClaughry's Codicil on Jone's Motto To make an enemy, do someone a favor. McClaughry's Law of Zoning Where zoning is not needed, it will work perfectly; where it is desperately needed, it always breaks down. McGoon's Law The probability of winning is inversely proportional to the amount of the wager. McNaughton's Rule Any argument worth making within the bureaucracy must be capable of being expressed in a simple declarative sentence that is obviously true once stated. H. L. Mencken's Law Those who can -- do. Those who cannot -- teach. Those who cannot teach -- administrate. (Martin's extension) Merrill's First Corollary There are no winners in life; only survivors. Merrill's Second Corollary In the highway of life, the average happening is of about as much true significance as a dead skunk in the middle of the road. Meskimen's Law There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over. Michehl's Theorem Less is more. Pastore's Comment on Michehl's Theorem Nothing is ultimate. Miller's Law You can't tell how deep a puddle is until you step into it. Mobil's Maxim Bad regulation begets worse regulation. Murphy's First Law Nothing is as easy as it looks. Murphy's Second Law Everything takes longer than you think. Murphy's Third Law In any field of scientific endeavor, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Murphy's Fourth Law If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Murphy's Fifth Law If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway. Murphy's Sixth Law If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop. Murphy's Seventh Law Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. Murphy's Eighth Law If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. Murphy's Ninth Law Nature always sides with the hidden flaw. Murphy's Tenth Law Mother nature is a bitch. Murphy's Eleventh Law It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious. Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics Things get worse under pressure. Newton's Little-known Seventh Law A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead. Nienberg's Law Progress is made on alternate Fridays. Ninety-ten Rule of Project Schedules The first ninety percent of the task takes ten percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent. O'Brien's Principle (The $357.73 Theory) Auditors always reject any expense account with a bottom line divisible by 5 or 10. Oeser's Law There is a tendency for the person in the most powerful position in an organization to spend all his time serving on committees and signing letters. Ordering Principle Those supplies necessary for yesterday's experiment must be ordered no later than tomorrow noon. Osborn's Law Variables won't, constants aren't. O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Laws Murphy was an optimist. Pardo's Postulates 1) Anything good is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. 2) The three faithful things in life are money, a dog, and an old woman. 3) Don't care if you're rich or not, as long as you can live comfortably and have everything you want. Pareto's Law (The 20/80 Law) 20% of the customers account for 80% of the turnover, 20% of components account for 80% of the cost, and so forth. Parker's Rule of Parlimentary Procedure A motion to adjourn is always in order. Parker's Law of Political Statements The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility and vice versa. Parkinson's First Law Work expands to fill the time available for its completion; the thing to be done swells in perceived importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent in its completion. Parkinson's Second Law Expenditures rise to meet income. Parkinson's Third Law If there is a way to delay an important decision the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it. Parkinson's Fourth Law The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done. Parkinson's Law of Delay Delay is the deadliest form of denial. Pastore's Truths 1) Even paranoids have enemies. 2) This job is marginally better than daytime TV. 3) On alcohol: four is one more than more than enough. Peckham's Law Beauty times brains equals a constant. Peer's Law The solution to a problem changes the problem. Peter Principle In every hierarchy, whether it be government or business, each employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence; every post tends to be filled by an employee incompetent to execute its duties. Peter's Corollaries 1) Incompetence knows no barriers of time or place. 2) Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence. 3) If at first you don't succeed, try something else. Peter's Inversion Internal consistency is valued more highly than efficiency. Peter's Paradox Employees in a hierarchy do not really object to incompetence in their colleagues. Peter's Perfect People Palliative Each of us is a mixture of good qualities and some (perhaps) not-so-good qualities. In considering our fellow people we should remember their good qualities and realize that their faults only prove that they are, after all, human. We should refrain from making harsh judgements of people just because they happen to be dirty, rotten, no-good sons-of-bitches. Peter's Placebo An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance. Peter's Theorem Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence. Potter's Law The amount of flak received on any subject is inversely proportional to the subject's true value. Productivity Equation The productivity, P, of a group of people is: P = N x T x (.55 - .00005 x N x (N - 1) ) where N is the number of people in the group and T is the number of hours in a work period. Professor Gordon's Rule of Evolving Bryographic Systems While bryographic plants are typically encountered in substrata of earthy or mineral matter in concreted state, discrete substrata elements occasionally display a roughly spherical configuration which, in presence of suitable gravitational and other effects, lends itself to combined translatory and rotational motion. One notices in such cases an absence of the otherwise typical accretion of bryophyta. We therefore conclude that a rolling stone gathers no moss. Pudder's Law Anything that begins well ends badly. Anything that begins badly ends worse. Puritan's Law Evil is live spelled backwards. Puritan's Second Law If it feels good, don't do it. Q's Law No matter what stage of completion one reaches in a North Sea (oil) field, the cost of the remainder of the project remains the same. Rangnekar's Modified Rules Concerning Decisions 1) If you must make a decision, delay it. 2) If you can authorize someone else to avoid a decision, do so. 3) If you can form a committee, have them avoid the decision. 4) If you can otherwise avoid a decision, avoid it immediately. Rayburn's Rule If you want to get along, go along. Riddle's Constant There are coexisting elements in frustration phenomena which separate expected results from achieved results. Ross' Law Never characterize the importance of a statement in advance. Rudin's Law In a crisis that forces a choice to be made among alternative courses of action, most people will choose the worst one possible. Rule of Accuracy When working toward the solution of a problem it always helps if you know the answer. Sam's Axiom 1) Any line, however short, is still too long. 2) Work is the crabgrass of life, but money is the water that keeps it green. Sattinger's Law It works better if you plug it in. Segal's Law A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure. Sevareid's Law The chief cause of problems is solutions. Shalit's Law The intensity of movie publicity is in inverse ratio to the quality of the movie. Shanahan's Law The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present. Shaw's Principle Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it. Simmon's Law The desire for racial integration increases with the square of the distance from the actual event. Simon's Law Everything put together sooner or later falls apart. Skinner's Constant (Flannegan's Finagling Factor) That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you should have gotten. Snafu Equations 1) Given any problem containing n equations, there will be n + 1 unknowns. 2) An object or bit of information most needed, will be least available. 3) Any device requiring service or adjustment will be least accessible. 4) Interchangable devices won't. Sociology's Iron Law of Oligarchy In every organized activity, no matter the sphere, a small number will become the oligarchial leaders and the others will follow. Spare Parts Principle The accessibility, during recovery of small parts which fall from the work bench, varies directly with the size of the part and inversely with its importance to the completion of work underway. Steele's Plagiarism of Somebody's Philosophy Everyone should believe in something -- I believe I'll have another drink. Sturgeon's Law 90 per cent of everything is crud. Swipple Rule of Order He who shouts loudest has the floor. Terman's Law There is no direct relationship between the quality of an educational program and its cost. Terman's Law of Innovation If you want a track team to win the high jump you find one person who can jump seven feet, not seven people who can jump one foot. Theory of the International Society of Philosophic Engineering In any calculation, any error which can creep in will. Thoreau's Law If you see a man approaching with the obvious intent of doing you good, run for your life. Transcription Law The number of errors made is equal to the number of 'squares' employed. Truman's Law If you cannot convince them, confuse them. Truths of Management 1) Think before you act; it's not your money. 2) All good management is the expression of one great idea. 3) No executive devotes effort to proving himself wrong. 4) Cash in must exceed cash out. 5) Management capability is always less than the organization actually needs. 6) Either an executive can do his job or he can't. 7) If sophisticated calculations are needed to justify an action, don't do it. Truth 5.1 of Management Organizations always have too many managers. 10) The easiest way of making money is to stop losing it. Tuccille's First Law of Reality Industry always moves in to fill an economic vacuum. Vail's Axiom In any human enterprise, work seeks the lowest hierarchial level. Vique's Law A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle. Vonnegut's Corollary Beauty may be only skin deep, but ugliness goes right to the core. Weaver's Law When several reporters share a cab on an assignment, the reporter in the front seat pays for all. Weaver's Corollary (Doyle's Corollary) No matter how many reporters share a cab, and no matter who pays, each puts the full fare on his own expense account. Weber-Fechner Law The least change in stimulus necessary to produce a perceptible change in response is proportional to the stimulus already existing. Weiler's Law Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself. Weinberg's Law If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. Weinberg's Corollary An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy. Westheimer's Rule To estimate the time it takes to do a task: estimate the time you think it should take, multiply by 2, and change the unit of measure to the next highest unit. Thus we allocate 2 days for a one hour task. White's Chappaquidick Theorem The sooner and in more detail you announce bad news, the better. White's Observations of Committee Operation 1) People very rarely think in groups; they talk together, they exchange information, they adjudicate, they make compromises. But they do not think; they do not create. 2) A really new idea affronts current agreement. White's Statement Don't lose heart... Owen's Comment on White's Statement ...they might want to cut it out... Byrd's Addition to Owen's Comment on White's Statement ...and they want to avoid a lengthy search. Wiker's Law Government expands to absorb revenue and then some. Wolf's Law (An Optimistic View of a Pessimistic World) It isn't that things will necessarily go wrong (Murphy's Law), but rather that they will take so much more time and effort than you think if they are not to go wrong. Worker's Dilemma Law (or Management's Put-Down Law) 1) No matter how much you do, you'll never do enough. 2) What you don't do is always more important than what you do do. Wynne's Law Negative slack tends to increase. Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving System Dynamics Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger can. (Old worms never die, they just worm their way into larger cans). Zymurgy's Law on the Availability of Volunteer Labor People are always available for work in the past tense. Zymurgy's Seventh Exception to Murphy's Laws When it rains, it pours. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 At a football game two Texans were seated behind two nuns. One Texan said to his friend, "I can't wait to get back to Dallas. There are only ten Catholics there." His buddy replied, "I can't wait to get back to Houston. There are only five Catholics there." Finally, one of the nuns commented, "You both should go to hell! There aren't any Catholics there!" 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 New York Times Magazine Section, 9/17/95, p. 24. Bang for the Buck Private enterprise has once again leapfrogged over government. Instead of considering war an expense, a Nashua, N.H., company has found an unsual way to make money on armed conflict: tourism. David Booth, president of War Tours Ltd., promises clients front-line battle exposure, including being shot at and viewing the effects of heavy artillery. For about $6,000, the war traveler receives a package tour of several danger spots. The price includes boots and body armour, which may be kept as souveniers. "Our guides are combat-experienced veterans," Booth says. But the tourists do not get to carry weapons. For that you have to enlist in a real army. And there is no guarantee of personal safety. Nor do tourists get to choose their destinations. Booth says trips have included parts of the former Soviet Union (he won't say where) and spots on the Indian Ocean. Who goes on such trips? "Many of these are individuals who somehow missed serving in Vietnam," Booth says. "War has always been considered a rite of passage, and we're ready to provide that experience." 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Three men are hiking in the Amazon Rainforest, a Canadian, an American, and a Newfie. The natives stop them and tell them "We are going to kill you and make your skin into canoes, but you get to choose how you want to die." The Canadian says "Give me a knife so I can cut my throat." They give him the knife, he slits his throat, and they make a canoe out of his skin. The American says "Give me a gun so I can shoot myself." They give him the gun, he shoots himself in the head, and they make a canoe out of his skin. The Newfie says "Give me a fork." The natives ask him why he wants a fork and he says "You said I could choose the way I want to die, now give me a fork." They give him the fork, he scratches his entire body and just before he dies he says "HA, HA, HA, Let's see you make a canoe out of this!" 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 CISCO SYSTEMS TO HAVE CITY RENAMED San Jose, California, September 8, 1995 -- Cisco Systems, Inc., (NASDAQ: CSCO), the leading global supplier of internetworking solutions, today announced their agreement with San Francisco, CA to rename the city. Coming on the heels of the 3COM/Candlestick agreement, the city has agreed to roll over again and accept $5,000,000.00 over a period of 5 years to have the name shortened to cisco, CA. According to a company spokesman, "When we saw how easily the city of San Francisco had rolled over for the 3COM deal, we knew we had an excellent opportunity. The chance to reinforce cisco's presence in the networking community and the world at large is something that we just couldn't pass up. For the price, it's quite a steal." 3COM officials declined to comment on a report that they had tried to block the deal due to their concern that 3COM Park (formerly Candlestick Park) would now be located in cisco, CA. "With the number of national and international visitors, TV coverage, and the 1999 Superbowl to be held in the newly renamed city, cisco will continue to extend its reach into every facet of the networking world" said the spokesman. "We are proud of the outstanding accomplishments of our employees and partners in fiscal 1995 and we see this as an excellent opportunity to reward them for their dedication." Cisco Systems, Inc. is the leading global supplier of enterprise networks, including routers, LAN and ATM switches, dial-up access servers and network management software. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Construction project, Atomic Bomb The following paper is taken from The journal of Irreproducible Results, Volume 25/Number 4/1979. P.O. Box 234 Chicago Heights, Illinois 60411 Subscription's 1 year for $3.70 1. INTRODUCTION Worldwide controversy has been generated recently from several court decisions in the United States which have restricted popular magazines from printing articles which describe how to make an atomic bomb. The reason usually given by the courts is that national security would be compromised if such information were generally available. But, since it is commonly known that all of the information is publicly available in most major metropolitan libraries, obviously the court's officially stated position is covering up a more important factor; namely, that such atomic devices would prove too difficult for the average citizen to construct. The United States courts cannot afford to insult the vast majorities by insinuating that they do not have the intelligence of a cabbage, and thus the "official" press releases claim national security as a blanket restriction. The rumors that have unfortunately occurred as a result of widespread misinformation can (and must) be cleared up now, for the construction project this month is the construction of a thermonuclear device, which will hopefully clear up any misconceptions you might have about such a project. We will see how easy it is to make a device of your very own in ten easy steps, to have and hold as you see fit, without annoying interference from the government or the courts. The project will cost between $5,000 and $30,000 dollars, depending on how fancy you want the final product to be. Since last week's column, "Let's Make a Time Machine", was received so well in the new step-by-step format, this month's column will follow the same format. 2. CONSTRUCTION METHOD 1. First, obtain about 50 pounds (110 kg) of weapons grade Plutonium at your local supplier (see NOTE 1). A nuclear power plant is not recommended, as large quantities of missing Plutonium tends to make plant engineers unhappy. We suggest that you contact your local terrorist organization, or perhaps the Junior Achievement in your neighborhood. 2. Please remember that Plutonium, especially pure, refined Plutonium, is somewhat dangerous. Wash your hands with soap and warm water after handling the material, and don't allow your children or pets to play in it or eat it. Any left over Plutonium dust is excellent as an insect repellant. You may wish to keep the substance in a lead box if you can find one in your local junk yard, but an old coffee can will do nicely. 3. Fashion together a metal enclosure to house the device. Most common varieties of sheet metal can be bent to disguise this enclosure as, for example, a briefcase, a lunch pail, or a Buick. Do not use tinfoil. 4. Arrange the Plutonium into two hemispheral shapes, separated by about 4 cm. Use rubber cement to hold the Plutonium dust together. 5. Now get about 100 pounds (220 kg) of trinitrotoluene (TNT). Gelignite is much better, but messier to work with. Your helpful hardware man will be happy to provide you with this item. 6. Pack the TNT around the hemisphere arrangement constructed in step 4. If you cannot find Gelignite, fell free to use TNT packed in with Playdo or any modeling clay. Colored clay is acceptable, but there is no need to get fancy at this point. 7. Enclose the structure from step 6 into the enclosure made in step 3. Use a strong glue such as "Crazy Glue" to bind the hemisphere arrangement against the enclosure to prevent accidental detonation which might result from vibration or mishandling. 8. To detonate the device, obtain a radio controlled (RC) servo mechanism, as found in RC model airplanes and cars. With a modicum of effort, a remote plunger can be made that will strike a detonator cap to effect a small explosion. These detonatior caps can be found in the electrical supply section of your local supermarket. We recommend the "Blast-O-Mactic" brand because they are no deposit-no return. 9. Now hide the completed device from the neighbors and children. The garage is not recommended because of high humidity and the extreme range of temperatures experienced there. Nuclear devices have been known to spontaneously detonate in these unstable conditions. The hall closet or under the kitchen sink will be perfectly suitable. 10. Now you are the proud owner of a working thermonuclear device! It is a great ice-breaker at parties, and in a pinch, can be used for national defense. 3. THEORY OF OPERATION The device basically works when the detonated TNT compresses the Plutonium into a critical mass. The critical mass then produces a nuclear chain recation similar to the domino chain reaction (discussed in this column, "Dominos on the March", March, 1968). The chain reaction then promptly produces a big thermonuclear reaction. And there you have it, a 10 megaton explosion! 4. NEXT MONTH'S COLUMN In next month's column, we will learn how to clone your neighbor's wife in six easy steps. This project promises to be an exciting weekend full of fun and profit. Common kitchen utensils will be all you need. See you next month! 5. NOTES 1. Plutonium (PU), atomic number 94, is a radioactive metallic element formed by the decay of Neptunium and is similar in chemical structure to Uranium, Saturium, Jupiternium, and Marsium. 6. PREVIOUS MONTH'S COLUMNS 1. Let's Make Test Tube Babies! May, 1979 2. Let's Make a Solar System! June, 1979 3. Let's Make a Economic Recession! July, 1979 4. Let's Make an Anti-Gravity Machine! August, 1979 5. Let's Make Contact with an Alien Race! September, 1979 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 What is the difference between a blonde and a mosquito? ......When you slap a mosquito it quits sucking. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Well these two fleas met one day and one flea asked the other "How do you feel today"? The second flea said "Not too good, I think it is because I live in this rock star's beard, and with all of the wind and noise, I can never get any sleep". The first flea said "Heh man, you should try living where I am living in this nice warm pussy! It's so soft - I think I am in flea Heaven." The second flea said that he would try it out. A couple days later, the two fleas met again and the first flea asked the other how he was feeling, and the second flea said "Not too good, I went to that nice warm hairy pussy you were telling me about, and it was so nice! Well, after a while, I fell asleep and when I woke up I was back with the rock star.... 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 GUIDE TO SAFE FAX Q: DO I HAVE TO BE MARRIED TO HAVE SAFE FAX? A: Although married people fax quite often, there are many single people who fax complete strangers every day. Q: MY PARENTS SAY THEY NEVER HAD FAX WHEN THEY WERE YOUNG AND WERE ONLY ALLOWED TO WRITE MEMOS TO EACH OTHER UNTIL THEY WERE TWENTYONE. HOW OLD DO YOU THINK SOMEONE SHOULD BE BEFORE THEY CAN FAX ? A: Faxing can be performed at any age, once you learn the correct procedure. Q: IF I FAX MYSELF, WILL I GO BLIND? A: Certainly not, as far as we can see. Q: THERE IS A PLACE ON OUR STREET WHERE YOU CAN GO AND PAY FOR FAX. IS THIS LEGAL? A: Yes. many people have no other outlet for their fax drives and Must pay a "professional" when their needs to fax become too great. Q: SHOULD A COVER ALWAYS BE USED FOR FAXING? A: Unless you are really sure of the one you're faxing, a cover sheet should be used to insure safe fax. Q: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I INCORRECTLY DO THE PROCEDURE AND I FAX PREMATURELY? A: Don't panic. Many people prematurely fax when they haven't faxed in a long time. Just start Over; Most people won't mind if you try again. Q: I HAVE A PERSONAL AND BUSINESS FAX. CAN TRANSMISSIONS BECOME MIXED UP? A: Being bi-faxual can be confusing, but as long as you use a cover with each one, you won't transmit anything You're not supposed to. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 A man goes to the doctor and says to the doctor: "It hurts when I press here" (pressing his side) "And when I press here" (pressing the other side) "And here" (his leg) "And here, here and here" (his other leg, and both arms) So the doctor examined him all over and finally discovered what was wrong... "You've got a broken finger!" 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 A long time ago there was an Indian chief. One day, he found he couldn't fart, no matter how hard he tried, so he visited the tribe's medicine man. "Big chief, no toot," he said. The medicine man thought, then had an idea. He gave the chief a big plate of beans, and told him to eat them all. But the chief it back the next morning. "Big chief, no toot." Ahah! thinks the medicine man. He gets a pot full of beans, and tells the chief to eat them all. The problem persists: "Big chief, no toot." "I've got it," says the medicine man. "Eat this truckful of beans." THIS better fix the problem. The next morning, the chief's wife comes and sees the medicine man, sobbing, "Big toot, no chief!" 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 LANGUAGES TO LOOK OUT FOR Courtesy of an informed source- APL, BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, PASCAL, RPG ...These programming languages are well known and (more or less) loved throughout the computer industry. There are numerous other languages, however, that are less well-known yet still have ardent devotees. In fact, these little known languages generally have the most fanatic admirers. For those who wish to know more about these obscure languages --- and why they are obscure --- we present the following catalogue. C- This language was named for the grade received by its creator when he submitted it as a class project in a graduate programming class. C- is best described as a "low level" programming language. In general, the language requires more C- statements than machine code instructions to execute a given task. In this respect, it is very similar to COBOL. DOGO Developed at MIOT (Massachusetts Institute of Obedience Training). DOGO heralds a new era of computer-literate pets. DOGO commands include SIT, HEEL, STAY, PLAY-DEAD, and ROLLOVER. An innovative feature of DOGO is "puppy graphics", a small cocker spaniel that occasionally leaves deposits as it travels across the screen. FIFTH FIFTH is a precise mathematical language in which the data types refer to quantities. The data types range from CC, OUNCE, SHOT, and JIGGER, to FIFTH (hence the name of the language), LITER, MAGNUM, and BLOTTO. Commands refer to ingredients such as CHABLIS, CHARDONNAY, CABERNET, GIN, VERMOUTH, VODKA, SCOTCH, BOURBON, CANADIAN, COORS, BUD, EVERCLEAR, AND WHAT-EVERS-AROUND. The many versions of the FIFTH language reflect the sophistication and financial status of its users. Commands in the ELITE dialect include VSOP, LAFITE, and WAITERS-RECOMMENDATION. The GUTTER dialect commands include THUNDERBIRD, RIPPLE, and HOUSE-RED. The GUTTER dialect is a particular favorite of frustrated FORTH programmers, who end up using this language. LAIDBACK This language was developed at the Marin County Center for T'ai Chi, Mellowness, and Computer Programming (now defunct), as an alternative to the more intense atmosphere in nearby Silicon Valley. The center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs while they worked. Unfortunately, few programmers could survive there because the center outlawed Pizza and Coca-Cola in favor of Tofu and Perrier. Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle and non-threatening language (all of its error messages are in lower case). For example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the message: i hate to bother you, but i just can't relate to that. can you find the time to try it again? LITHP This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence of an "S" in its character set. Programmers and users must therefore substitute "TH". LITHP is said to be useful in prothething lithtth. This language was developed in California, but is now widely used in Washington, D.C. It is the current subset of the international bureaucratic language known as DOUBLESPEAK. Commands include REVENUE-ENHANCEMENT, STOCKMAN, CAPWEINBERGER, MALCOMB-BALDRIDGE, CABINET, CHOP-WOOD, LAXALT and SCENARIO. WATT and BURFORD have been removed from the commands, while there is a current effort to add MEESE. The operating system used is NEW-RIGHT and the designated memory is THE-RANCH. COMMIES (program bugs) are removed with the GRENADA command. A REAGAN program commences with LANDSLIDE and terminates with SENILITY. SARTE Named after the late existential philosopher, SARTE is an extremely unstructured language. Statements in SARTE have no purpose; they just are. Thus SARTE programs are left to define their own functions. SARTE programmers tend to be boring and depressing and are no fun at parties. SIMPLE SIMPLE is the acronym for Sheer Idiot's Monopurpose Programming Linguistic Environment. This language, developed at Hanover College for Technological misfits, was designed to make it impossible to write code with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN, END, and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can't make a syntax error. SLOBOL SLOBOL is best known for the speed, or the lack of it, of the compiler. Although many compilers allow you to take a coffee break while they compile, the SLOBOL compile allows you to travel to Columbia to pick the coffee. Forty-three programmers are known to have died of boredom sitting at their terminals while waiting for a SLOBOL program to compile. VALGOL From its modest beginnings in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry. VALGOL commands include REALLY, LIKE, WELL, and Y*KNOW. Variables are assigned with the =LIKE and =TOTAL operators. Other operators include the California Booleans, AX and NOWAY. Repetitions of the code are handled in FOR-SURE loops. Here is a sample program: LIKE Y*KNOW (IMEAN) START IF PIZZA=LIKE BITCHEN AND GUY=LIKE TUBULAR AND VALLEY GIRL=LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2 THEN FOR I=LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100 DO*WAH-(DITTY**2) BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT) SURE LIKE BAG THIS PROGRAM REALLY LIKE TOTALLY (Y*KNOW) IM*SURE GOTO THE MALL VALGO is characterized by its unfriendly error messages...for example, when the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the message: GAG ME WITH A SPOON! (This article originally appeared in the DEC APL SIG newsletter THE SPECIAL CHARACTER SET and has gathered steam ever since.) 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Little Red Riding Hood - A Politically Correct Fairy Tale by Jim Garner copied by Andy Tiarks April 24, 1993 originally appeared in "Comic Relief" April, 1993 There once was a young person named Red Riding Hood who lived with her mother on the edge of a large wood. One day her mother asked her to take a basket of fresh fruit and mineral water to her grandmother's house -- not because this was womyn's work, mind you, but because the deed was generous and helped engender a feeling of community. Furthermore, her grandmother was not sick, but rather was in full physical and mental health and was fully capable of taking care of herself as a mature adult. So Red Riding Hood set off with her basket of food through the woods. Many people she knew believed that the forest was a foreboding and dangerous place and never set foot in it. Red Riding Hood, however, was confident in her own budding sexuality that such obvious Freudian imagery did not hinder her. On her way to Grandma's house, Red Riding Hood was accosted by a Wolf, who asked her what was in her basket. She replied, "Some healthful snacks for my grandmother, who is certainly capable of taking care of herself as a mature adult." The Wolf said, "You know, my dear, it isn't safe for a little girl to walk through these woods alone." Red Riding Hood said, "I find your sexist remark offensive in the extreme, but I will ignore it because of your traditional status as an outcast from society, the stress of which has caused you to develop your own, entirely valid worldview. Now, if you'll excuse, me I must be on my way." Red Riding Hood walked on along the main path. But, because his status outside society had freed him from slavish adherence to linear, Western-style thought, the Wolf knew of a quicker route to Grandma's house. He burst into the house and ate Grandma, an entirely valid course of action for a carnivore such as himself. Then, unhampered by rigid, traditionalist notions of what was masculine or feminine, he put on grandma's nightclothes and crawled into bed. Red Riding Hood entered the cottage and said, "Grandma, I have brought you some fat-free, sodium-free snacks to salute you in your role of a wise and nurturing matriarch." From the bed, the Wolf said softly, "Come closer, child, so that I might see you." Red Riding Hood said, "Oh, I forgot you are as optically challenged as a bat. Grandma, what big eyes you have!" "They have seen much, and forgiven much, my dear." "Grandma, what a big nose you have -- only relatively, of course, and certainly attractive in its own way." "It has smelled much, and forgiven much, my dear." "Grandma, what big teeth you have!" The Wolf said, "I am happy with who I am and what I am," and leaped out of bed. He grabbed Red Riding Hood in his claws, intent on devouring her. Red Riding Hood screamed, not out of alarm at the Wolf's apparent tendency toward cross-dressing, but because of his willful invasion of her personal space. Her screams were heard by a passing woodchopper-person (or log-fuel technician, as he preferred to be called). When he burst into the cottage, he saw the melee and tried to intervene. But as he raised his ax, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf both stopped. "And what do you think you're doing?" asked Red Riding Hood. The woodchopper-person blinked and tried to answer, but no words came to him. "Bursting in here like a Neanderthal, trusting your weapon to do your thinking for you!" she said. "Sexist! Speciesist! How dare you assume that women and wolves can't solve their own problems without a man's help!" When she heard Red Riding Hood's speech, Grandma jumped out of the Wolf's mouth, took the woodchopper-person's axe, and cut his head off. After this ordeal, Red Riding Hood, Grandma, and the Wolf felt a certain commonality of purpose. They decided to set up an alternative household based on mutual respect and cooperation, and they lived together in the woods happily ever after. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 PRISON VS. WORK: In prison they spend the majority of their time in a 8' x 10'cell. At work, I spend most of my time in a 6' x 8' pod. In prison they get three meals a day. At work I only get a break for one meal and I have to pay for that one. In prison you get time off for good behavior. At work I get rewarded for good behavior with more work. At work I must wear an ID badge at all times. In prison they provide you with clothing with the ID conveniently sewn onto the clothes. At work there is a dress standard but I must buy my own clothes. In prison there is a dress standard, but they supply the clothes. At work I must carry around a security card and unlock and open all the doors myself. In prison a guard locks and unlocks all the doors for me. In prison they can watch TV and play games. At work I can get fired for watching TV and playing games. In prison they will pay my way through school to learn a new career and give me time to do it. At work they will pay for my education but I must do it on my own time. In prison they have exercise rooms that they allow you to use almost whenever you want. At work we have an exercise room that you can use but it must be on your time. In prison I can fall asleep on the job and no serious consequences comes from my actions. At work if I fall asleep on the job I get put on the next RIF list. In prison they ball and chain you when you go somewhere. At work you are just ball and chained. In prison you have full medical coverage with no deductibles. At work, you get partial coverage and pay all the deductibles. In prison all expenses are paid by the taxpayer, with no work on their part. At work, you get to pay all the expenses to go to work, and then deduct the taxes from your salary to pay for the prisoners. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 A guy picks up his girlfriend to go for a ride in his new car. As they are cruising along, they start getting fisky. She undoes his pants and plays with him eventually getting into a good stroke. He is speeding along the back roads just enjoying life and doesn't realize the speed he is going. As she goes faster, he gets closer and closer and gets a little heavy footed on the gas pedal. She goes faster, he goes faster. On and on 'till he is going about 90 MPH. All the sudden he starts to cum like crazy. So hard that he loses control of the car and flies off the road... The Troopers arrive first on the scene. One goes up to the car, the other starts searching the perimeter. The trooper that goes up to the car sees the driver safe in his seat. Trooper: Are you ok? Driver: No good seat belts... Trooper: Sit there 'till the peramedics come to check you out. Although, you look fine. I think that seatbelt saved your life. Driver: No good shitty seatbelts..! Trooper: (confused) What do you mean. They saved your life. Driver: No good fucking shitty ass seatbelts! Trooper: I don't know what you can complain about. They saved your life. Driver: No good fucking, son of a bitchin, shitty, good for nothing seatbelts!!! In the meantime the other trooper has found the girlfriend some 200 feet from the car. She is dead. He notifies the first trooper by radio. Trooper: You may, after all, have a concussion or something. Your not making sense. Those seatbelts saved your life. Your girlfriend wasn't wearing hers and she got thrown 200 feet from the car and was killed. Driver: Look what she has in her hand... 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Q B X - 1 SINGLE-BOARD NUCLEAR REACTOR SUPPLIES STANDBY POWER FOR 12 YEARS Now available on a full-length plugin card for IBM PC or compatible computers, the QBX-1 add-on nuclear-reactor card provides backup power for as long as 12 years. When the card senses a power failure, explosive bolts eject moderator and control rods from the reactor's interior within 20 usec, bringing the reactor to its fully rated output of 20 kW in less than a millisecond. Over its 12-year active life, the reactor's power decreases by 25% to 15 kW. Integral heat fins provide convection cooling of the reactor's 500W power dissipation while in its standby condition. If your computer's fans can't furnish 400 ft3/sec of forced air for cooling, consider buying the manufacturer's heavy-water cooling jacket and stainless-steel pump module, which fit con- veniently under a desk or workbench. Latches on each side of the reactor module let you quickly exchange the radioactive core, should you need to replace it. An optional circular viewing port of lead glass lets you check the mechanical assemblies. To protect users from undue radiation, each reactor includes a shielding kit comprising five self-stick lead plates and 20 radiation-monitoring film badges. The lead plates mount inside your computer's enclosure and reduce the gamma rays that cause soft errors to floppy-disk and RAM data. For further protection, consider buying the manufacturer's 200-ft extension cords for keyboards and monitors. Because the reactor can supply more than enough power for your computer, you can sell excess power to your local utility company. An add-on phasing and metering kit (PMK-1) lets you connect your reactor to the local power grid. Each PMK-1 includes standard power-sale contracts and Rural Electrification Board rules and regulations. Although not required in all localities, each reactor card package includes a standard 23-volume site-evacuation plan. The plan includes blank forms for you to fill in the name and address of your reactor side and then mail to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. As an option, the manufacturer supplies the plan on 12 MS-DOS-compatible disks in Wordstar format. User-friendly templates let you type in information so that your word processor can create a complete, printed document. Reactor prices start at $2.3 million. Delivery, seven years ARO. Luminesent Electronics Products Inc. Box U-235 Trinity Site, NM 43210 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 This happend a couple of weeks ago. Opening scene: A local bank lobby full of customers waiting patiently in line for the next available teller. There was this lady standing line with the rest of the customers waiting for her turn at the window. She had her little girl with her. The little girl was running between the ropes and the other customers. The mother scolded her and told her to be still. The little girl kept running in and out of the ropes until the mother had finally gotten fed up with her. She reached down and grabbed her daughter by the arm, and in a stern voice said, "If you don't stop running I'm going to spank you." The little girl responded in an equally stern voice and said, "If you don't let go of my arm I'm gonna tell Grandma I saw you kissing daddy's "pee-pee." The lady froze rock solid. The whole place got so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Jaws dropped, tellers froze in the middle of their transactions, and everybody just stood there and watched the lady turn beet red. She quietly picked up her daughter and carried her outside. When the door closed, everyone in the bank busted up. ... The manure is sure to impact the rotary ventilator... 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 You know the difference between the American and the Canadian Senate? In the US, you have to win an election to get in. In Canada, you have to lose one. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 THE CORPORATE STRUCTURE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD Leaps tall buildings in a single bound Is more powerful than a speeding locomotive Is faster than a speeding bullet Walks on water Gives policy to God. PRESIDENT Leaps short buildings in a single bound Is more powerful than a switch engine Is just as fast as a speeding bullet Walks on water if the sea is calm Talks with God. EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Leaps short buildings with a running start and favorable winds Is almost as powerful as a switch engine Is faster than a speeding BB Walks on water in an indoor swimming pool Talks with God if special request is approved. VICE PRESIDENT Barely clears a quonset hut Loses a tug of war with a locomotive Can fire a speeding bullet Swims well Is occasionally addressed by God. GENERAL MANAGER Leaves high marks on the wall when trying to leap buildings Is run over by a locomotive Can sometimes handle a gun without inflicting self injury Dog paddles Talks to animals. MANAGER Runs into buildings Recognizes locomotives two out of three times Is not issued ammunition Can stay afloat with a life preserver Talks to walls. TRAINEE Falls over doorsteps when trying to enter buildings Says, "Look at the choo-choo" Wets himself with a water pistol Plays in mud puddles Mumbles to himself. BOOKKEEPER Lifts buildings and walks under them Kicks locomotives off the tracks Catches speeding bullets in her teeth and eats them Freezes water with a single glance SHE IS GOD. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 The Hacker's Song By Dave Touretzky and Don Libes (with no apologies whatever to Monty Python) -- I'm a hacker and I'm OK I work all night and I sleep all day. -- I wrote some hacks in APL, each on a single line. They're mutually recursive, and run in n-squared time. (chorus) Oh, he's a hacker and he's ok, He works all night and he sleeps all day. I'm a hacker and I'm ok, I work all night and I sleep all day. -- I wrote two hacks in Macro, with UUO's galore. One plays Nim on the console lights while the other zeros core. (chorus) I wrote a hack in SNOBOL with FORTRAN subroutines. It spits out trashy stories for ladies' magazines. (chorus) I wrote some hacks in InterLisp, they barely fit in core. The swapper thrashed its guts out, So now it runs no more. (chorus) I wrote a hack in microcode, with a goto on each line. It runs as fast as Superman, But not quite every time. (chorus) I wrote some hacks in Ada, and still can't run them yet. Do you suppose we'll see that day? On it I would not bet. (chorus) I wrote a hack for UNIX, when it was still in vogue. It knows the tricks to PacMan, and plays mean games of Rogue. (chorus) I wrote some hacks, distributed, across our neat gateway. Each one of its 10 functions kills RIG in a different way! (chorus) I wrote some hacks in Mlisp, to edit files of root. It writes them back no-execute, and now it won't reboot! (chorus) I wrote some hacks to manage jobs with PLITS and IPC. Its very first activity was firing the faculty. (chorus) I wrote some hacks with P and V to synchronize my life. Now I can't use the bathroom, I'm deadlocked with my wife! (chorus) I wrote a hack(in theory), it may not ever halt. But if it does, just watch out... [Fatal Error: Infinite Page Fault] (chorus) I wrote a hack with hough transforms for the folks at DoD. It'll guide their fancy missles to Washington D.C. -- I'm a hacker and I'm OK I work all night and I sleep all day. I'll have a system of my own someday, that'll run my code in a hacked up way. --tvr 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Three fags are sitting in a hot tub, when all of a sudden, sperm is floating on top of the water. One looks at the other two and exclaims, "Allright, who farted?" Two fags are walking down the street when a very good looking man starts walking towards them. One says to the other, "I've had him". And the other queries,"No shit?". And the first replies, "Well, a little bit !" A farmer in Bainbridge, Georgia was out looking over his soybean field when a bus full of blacks rounded a corner on the red clay road too fast and rolled over on its side. Losing no time, the farmer ran back to the barn for his pick and shovel, and started burying the bus. Just as he finished up the job, the county sheriff arrived on the scene. "Say, didn't a bus fulla niggers just go off the road around here?" "Yep," replied the farmer. "Well, where'd they get to?" "I buried 'em," the farmer answered. "Gee," the sheriff said, "Were they all dead?" The farmer looked the sheriff straight in the eye and said, "Well, some of 'em said they wasn't, but you know how niggers lie!" 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Secretary: "May I use your dictaphone?" Polish boss: "No. Use your finger like everyone else!" 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Takeoff on the Dire Straits song "Walk of Life" Walk of Sprite Here comes hacker using PC's procomm baba boot it baby what I say Here comes hacker saying he wish he got a woman down on the match board tryin to make it pay He got the ACTION, he got the pascal Oh yeah, the boy can play Dedication, diversion hackin tilll the nighttime becomes the day he sings the song that sings about a PC he sings the song about the byte yeah he do the walk do the walk of sprite yeah he do the walk of sprite Here comes hacker gonna tell you a story hand me now my word procssesing shoes] here comes hacker with the power and the memory saving it up, to chat with you he got the ACTION, he got the fortran oh yeah, the boy can play dedication, diversion hackin till the nighttime becomes the day he sings the song that sings about a PC he sings the song about the byte yeah he do the walk do the walk of sprite yeah he do the walk of sprite Here comes hacker using PC's procomm baba boot it baby what I say here comes hacker sayin he wish he had a woman down on the match board tryin to make it pay he got the ACTION, he got the pascal oh yeah, the boy can play dedication, diversion hackin till the nightime becomes the day and after all the cold starts and double-saves there just the story bout the downloads and the strife he do the walk do the walk of sprite--yeah he do the walk of sprite!!! (c) 1986 Melt Cober Music Ltd. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 RUDOLF GIULIANI: PROSECUTOR AS PARTY POOPER The following five memos reprinted below were all circulated in Rudolf Giuliani's Manhattan office last summer. Memo #1: Written by a member of the U.S. Attorney's official memo memo writing staff. M E M O R A N D U M Date: June 14, 1988 From: The Boat Ride Committee Re: The Summer Boat Ride To: All Staff and Summer Students The Summer Boat Ride will be on Monday, July 18, from 7-11, PM. Boarding begins at 6:30 PM at Pier 62 at 23rd Street. etc..... Memo #2: Written by a member of the U.S. Attorney's official memo writing staff. M E M O R A N D U M Date: July 13, 1988 From: The Boat Ride Committee Re: 1988 Summer Boat Ride To: All Staff and Summer Students We are once again oversubscribed for the summer boat ride by more than 100 people. We therefore need your help in reducing the number of attendees. If you signed up for the boat ride but now know that you cannot attend, _or_ if you no longer plan to bring a guest, _or_ if, given our oversubscription problem, you generously decide not to bring a guest, please inform Mildred Miles as soon as possible. Your cooperation is most appreciated and will help us avoid more drastic means to reduce attendance. At the time of boarding, we will have to check attendance, which is limited to those persons who submitted RSVP forms by no later than July 11. etc... Memo #3: Written by a member of the U.S. Attorney's official memo writing staff. M E M O R A N D U M Date: July 15, 1988 From: The Boat Ride Committee Re: 1988 Summer Boat Ride To: All Staff and Summer Students Because we have not been able to solve our oversubscription problem for the summer boat ride, we unfortunately will have to cut back on the number of guests at the event. We regret that we will only be able to accomodate spouses or "significant others" of staff. Please do not bring as guests anyone but a spouse or "significant other." In addition, using other people's RSVP's as a means of getting friends on board will not be permitted. Only those people who submitted RSVP forms by July 11 will be allowed to board the boat. We will be checking attendance that night, so please bring office ID's with you to the boat ride. To avoid embarrassment for yourself or others, please abide by these request. We thank you for your cooperation in solving this difficult overcrowding problem. Memo #4: Written by an anonymous parodist in Giuliani's office and circulated as if written by the U.S. Attorney's official memo writing staff. M E M O R A N D U M Date: July 15, 1988 From: The Boat Ride Committee Re: 1988 Summer Boat Ride To: All Staff and Summer Students. Some confusion has apparently arisen concerning the precise meaning of the term "significant other", as expressed in today's previous memorandum about authorized attendees at the boat ride. By "significant other," we mean truly significant others, i.e., persons with whom you have slept within the past month. Lest further confusion arise as a result of this classification, let us go further into defining our terms. By "slept with", we mean sexual relations, including but not limited to sexual intercourse and oral sex. Only those others who satisfy this definition of "significant" will be allowed to board the boat. To avoid embarrassment for yourself and others, you and your guest should be prepared to respond truthfully to questions concerning the nature and degree of your intimacy. We thank you for your cooperation in our efforts to solve the problem of overcrowding at this year's boat ride. Memo #5: Written by U.S. Attorney Rudolf Giuliani himself. M E M O R A N D U M Date: July 15, 1988 From: Rudolf Giuliani To: The entire office Apparently the office was circulated today with a memo concerning Monday's boat ride that may have been intended as humor or as a practical joke. It was neither humorous nor a joke. In fact, it was distasteful and upsetting to many. Everyone in the office can appreciate someone with a sense of humor. I hope that the person who sent this will understand that this message was out of bounds and offensive. It ought not to have been done and under no circumstances is it or anything like it to be repeated. Fair warning. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Adidas: Adverytising Does Influeance Dumb A**hole's Selection. All Day I Dream About Sex. AIDS: Adios Infected Dick Sucker. Anus Injected Death Sentence. AMC: All Makes of Cars. Amiga: A Merely Insignificant Games Addition. Asinine Machine Invented for Gaming Adolescents. Audi: Accelerates Under Demonic Influence. Bitch: Beautiful, Intelligent, Talented, Charming and Horny. BMW: Babbling Mechanical Wrench. Basic Marin (county, Ca) Wheels. Beastly, Monstrous Wonder. Beautiful Masterpiece on Wheels. Mechanical Wonder. Big Money Waste. , Why? Works. Blasphemous Motorized Wreck. Born Moderately Wealthy. Break My Window. Broken Money Waster. Brutal Money Waster. Bumbling Mechanical Wretch. BNR: Built, Never Runs. Buick: Big Ugly Import Car Killer. Big Ugly Indestructable Compact Killer. CBM: Crash-prone Buggy Machines. CCBS: Close Cover Before Striking. Chevrolet: Car Has Extensive Valve Rattle On Long Extended Trips. Chevy: Charged HEaVilY. Cheapest Heap Ever Visioned Yet. Cruddy Hick Engine, Very Yucky. DEC: Delay in Error Correction. Dildo: Deep Inter-Labial Device for Orgasm. Dodge: Dead On Delivery, Go Easy. Guarantee Expired. Or Dying Garbage Emitter. Drips Oil, Drops Grease Everywhere. DOS: Damned Obfuscated S**t. Fiat: Failure In Automotive Technology. Fix It Again, Tony. Futile (Feeble, F**king) Italian Attempt at Transportation. Fila (shoes): First In Ladies Attention. Found In Lowlife's Apparel. Ford: First On Race Day. Fix Or Repair Daily. Found On Road Dead. Fraternal Order of Restored DeSoto's. F***ed On Race Day. Over Rebuilt Dodge. GM: General Mainteneance. GMC: Garage Man's Companion. Generally Mediocre Cars. Get More Chicks. Got a Mechanic Coming. Got More Crap. IBM: IBM, UBM, we all BM for IBM. I Became Macintosh. Been hipMotized. Beg Mercy. Blame Microsoft. Bought Macintosh. Built Macintosh. Icky Blue Machines. Idiotic Bull Meter. Idiots Become Managers. Idiots' Bewilderment Machines. Idiots Bought Me. Bumblers and Morons. Illustrative of Bad Marketing. I'm Being Mobbedwithwhatdoesibmstandforanswers. Moved. Imitation Burrough's Machine. Immense Bins of Money. Bowel Movement. Bucket of Manure. Imperialism By Marketing. Impractical, But Marketable. In a Befuddled Manner. Bleakest Mordor. Business for Money. Incest Breeds Morons. Increasingly Becoming Moot. Incredible Bunch of Muffinheads. Bundle of Money. Incredibly Big Machine. Monopoly. Incredibly Brilliant Marketing. Industry's Biggest Mistake. Inefficient But Marketable. Inept Bull Meter. Inert Blue Monoliths. Inferior But Marketable. Inherently Bogus Measurements. Insipid Brainless Monster. Insolence Breeds Mediocrity. Installed By Masochists. Institute of Broken Minds. Black Magic. Integrated Bad Manners. Intelligent Bull Meter. Intensely Boring Machines. Interactive Boot Machines. Intercourse Beats Masturbation. Intergalactic Brotherhood of Muthaf**kas. Internal Bowel Movement. International Ballistic Missiles. Big Mother. Mouth. Brotherhood of Magicians. Buraeucracy Merchants. Business Machines. Manipulators. Intrepid Bureaucratic Madness. Involuntary Bowel Movement. Iron Brain Masters. Italian Branch of the Mafia. Business Men. It Beats Mattel. It's a Big Machine. a Blue Monolith. Better Manually. Big Money. Black Magic. Blue Magic. Boring Me. Broken, Mommy. Busted, Man. Itty Bitty Machines. Manuals. Minds. Monopoly. Morons. I've Been Misled. Molested. Moved. Mugged. IBM PC: I've Blown My Power Circuits. IMHO: Idiots Manage High Office. Individual Maintenance Health Organization. Iowa: Idiots Out Wandering Around. I Owe the World an Apology. IROC: I'm Really Out of Cash. I Race Other Cars. Run Over Children. It's Really Only a Camaro. IRS: Income Reduction Service. Japan: Jump And Pump All Night. Jeep: Just Eats Every Part. Mac: Malformed Apple Computer. Monstrously Aggravating Coding. Mouse Activated Computer. Mazda: Most Always Zipping Dangerously Along. MG: Money Guzzler. MIG: Missed It, Gadaffi. Missed It, Goddammit. Mopar: Miscellaneous Oddball Parts Assembled Ridiculously. Mostly Old Parts (Paint) And Rust. Most Often Passed At Races. My Old Pig Ain't Running. Olds: One Leak, Dead Starter. Oldsmobile: Oh, Look, Dammit! Some Massive Oil Burning Idiot's Leaking Everything. Old Ladies Driving Slowly Make Others Behind Infuriatingly Late Everyday Old Loose Dented Sheet Metal Out-dated By Infamies Like Edsel. OS: Oh, Sh**. PC: Piece 'a Chit. Primitive Calculator. Pseudo-Computer. Pinto: Put In Nickel To Operate. Plymouth: Please Let Your Mother Out from Under The Hood. Pussy Lips in Your MOUTH. Pontiac: Poor Old Nigger Thinks It's A Cadillac. Porsche: Piece Of Retired Scrap, Continually High Expense. Procrastinate: People Rarely Obtain Coveted Rewards After Scheduling Tasks Into Never- Attainable Time Elements. Russia: Rape Until She Screams In Agony. Saab: Send Another Auto Back. Stupid Arrogant Asshole Babies. Such An Arrogant Bastard. Swedish Auto Always Broken. s Are Best. Shoot to kill: Seriously High-strung On-road Off-road Totally Torn On Keeping Incandescent Lasers Lighted. SPSF (Southern Pacific Santa Fe railroad [never merged]): Shouldn't Paint So Fast. ST: Senseless Turbidity. Silly Toy. Sixteen Thirtytwo. Slow Technology. Thing. Still Trying. Stupid Terminal. Superior Technology. Toyota: Too Often Yankees Overprice This Auto. UCI (Univ. of Calif. Irvine): Under Construction Indefinitely. UP (railroad): Union (like onion) Pathetic. USC (Univ. of Southern Calif.): University of Spoiled Children. VW: Virtually Worthless. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 ALICE in DIGITALand "Where am I?" asked Alice, as she peered at the large 7-lettered sign with the standard blue letters. "You're in Digitaland," replied the security guard, "May I see your badge?" "I don't have a badge." "Did you lose it?" "No." answered Alice in a puzzled tone. "How could I lose something I never had?" "If it's not lost then you must show it to me." "I can't. I don't have one." "Then you'll have to have a temporary." "A temporary what?" asked Alice, more confused then ever. "A temporary Badge. What's your badge number?" requested the guard. "I don't have one" "Of course not, Ken Olsen has 1. Give me your badge number, and your cost center" "I'm so confused. I can't do this. I've already said 3 times why. Do I have to tell you 4?" "Ahhh. 3XY, badge number 4. You must be very important to have such a low badge number. I should have immediately recognized how low by your state of extreme confusion. Here's your temporary. Go right on in." Alice pasted the sticky paper to her dress and headed down the hall. Not 10 feet ahead she saw a rather distressed looking rabbit coming toward her. He was dressed in a pair of torn, faded jeans, and a dirty tee shirt. "What's wrong?" Alice asked. "I'm late! I'm late!" exclaimed the rabbit as he peered at the pert chart dangling from his pocket protector. "Late for what?" asked Alice. "My date. I'm going to miss my date. I've got a deadline to meet and I'm not going to make it." "Well, if it's already dead, it probably won't mind. In fact it isn't likely to be going too far in such a state. I'm sure that however long you take will be just fine." "You obviously don't understand. Everything takes longer than it really does. It doesn't matter what you are doing, only that you meet your date, and that's always impossible." "Well if its impossible, why would anyone expect you to meet it?" Almost at once regretting that she had asked. Was this was going to be as confusing as badges? "Its really very simple. In order to move forward, you need a goal. Any goal will do. It just has to be impossible to do. To motivate the troops, you have to make goals very challenging. Its really only there to get a stake in the ground, you know. After that we march in step until we reach our objective. The date really doesn't mean anything. You simple have to understand that we are going to do the right thing." "But the if the goal is impossible, and really doesn't mean anything why are you trying to go there. Wouldn't it be simpler to first figure out what you are really going to do, then figure out how to get there?" "You obviously don't understand the process. And as I said before I'm late so there is obviously only one thing to do." "Hurry up and rush off?" Alice asked, hoping it would sound more like a suggestion than a question. "No. No. No. A meeting. Let find the Mad Manager and a number of involved, interested, or warm bodies." "That will obviously take a lot of time. I don't think you have any to waste. "No it won't. All we have to do is find a conference room. There are lots of them right over here." "But," started Alice, "those rooms are all full of people. Don't we need an empty conference room?" "Silly thought. If we want to find the Mad Manager and some meeting attendees, why would we look in an empty conference room? Anyway, its impossible to ever find an empty conference room." The rabbit took Alice by the hand, and promptly lead her into the largest, fullest conference room. Alice immediately noticed that the wastebasket was quite full of foam cups, and overhead projector bulbs. These people had obviously been here for a long time. At the head of the table sat a man with a rather funny suit wearing a large hat. "Why" whispered Alice to the rabbit, "is that man wearing that funny hat? Who is he?" "I'm the Mad Manager," answered the man at the end of the table, obviously overhearing the question, " And I'll be happy to tell you why I'm wearing this Hat, but that topic is not on the agenda." "Why don't we change the agenda?" asked a person in the corner. "Is that a topic for another meeting?" replied the manager. "Is what a topic for another meeting?" voiced a third. "The reason for the hat, or why we don't change the agenda?" "Why don't we take this off line?" queried another. "Does everyone agree that these are all topics we should address?" asked the mad manager. "Possibly so. " injected the person in the corner. "Could it be that we have a hidden agenda?" "Oh no!" the Mad Manager began, the dismay obvious on his face, "someone has hidden the agenda again! Let me put on my process hat and we'll see if we can work this issue." With that, he removed his rather amusing top hat, and place a big green fedora on his head. "Now, with my process hat on, I'd like to address the issue of the hidden agenda. Since we can't have a productive meeting without an agenda, it is up to all of us to find it." "But, " a voice from the corner piped in, "who is going to drive this issue?" "Do we have an action item here?" asked another attendee. "Does anyone here want to work this?" asked the mad manager. "Who originally brought this up?" asked another. "I believe that the woman who came in with the rabbit proposed this. Shouldn't she own it?" "Well" the Manager stated, pointing to Alice. "I'd say that this is your issue." "What issue. I don't have any issues. " retorted Alice, nervously fingering her temporary badge. "I only posed a simple question." "I'm not sure we can accept that," the manager declared. "We need a date." "But, " Alice began, remembering what the rabbit told her about dates, "a date is impossible." >From the back of the room another voice asked, "How about a date for a date?" "The least we can ask it that you give us a date when you will be able to give us the date for the date." stated the person in the corner. "I'm not sure I can do that," Alice opened, "since I don't know what I'm supposed to give you a date for. I'm having a problem trying to figure out what you want me to do." "We don't have any problems here, only opportunities!" Piped a chorus of voices. "It's really quite obvious," the mad manager declared as he reached behind him for a striped blue and gray beret, "let me put on my Digital hat for a moment," he continued doffing the fedora and flipping on his latest selection, "You must do the right thing." "Yes. yes. " chimed the chorus of attendees, "Do the right thing. "Now, who is keeping the minutes?" the manager asked as he pitched the beret and placed the fedora back on his head. "We need to record this action item so we can come back to it later." "We obviously can't deal with this issue until we can determine whose meeting this is?" "Should we schedule some time to cover that topic?" asked one of the attendees. "Whose going to drive this?" asked another. Just at the Mad Manager was pulling out a rather worn pith helmet, a voice in the back suggested "Let's take a break and work some of this 1x1 off line" Being closest to the door Alice was the first to leave. She quickly dashed down the hall, and ran up the first flight of stairs she encountered, relieved to be free of the madness. When she opened the door the scene that confronted her made her wonder if returning to the meeting wasn't a bad idea. Seated around a large oval table were what appeared to be playing cards, each dressed in a gray or navy blue three piece suit. Around each neck was a rather oddly shaped handle (or were they nooses?) made of silk, or polyester. "Off with her head!" screamed the queen of hearts who was sitting at the head of the table. Alice noticed that her tie was silk, and each card seated near her was dressed in a suit and noose combination similar to the queen's. "Why would you want to remove my head?" Alice asked. By now she was feeling beyond confused. "It's not a modern, iconic, user friendly, menu driven, color, PC compatible user interface," replied the queen, in a tone that would need to come up two notches to be vaguely considered condescending. "It happens to suit me just fine," retorted Alice. "What are you an engineer or something?" asked the 7 of spades. "No, I'm Alice. Who are you?" "Marketing." they replied in perfect fifty-two part harmony. "And what is that?" asked Alice. There was a brief interlude of silence as each of the cards fidgeted with their ties, checked their watches and scribbled notes on the pads of paper contained in a handsome genuine imitation leather folder embossed with the company logo. Then one by one, as dominoes would do, they turned to the person on the left until they all stared at the queen of hearts. The queen cleared her throat, adjusted her tie a second time and stared directly at Alice. "We provide the strategic thinking necessary to grow the business." "Oh," said Alice, "you figure out what products to build!" "Heavens, no!" exclaimed the Queen, "That's too tactical. We feel its our job to develop the vision for the long term." "You develop things," began Alice, "so you build the products?" In unison each member of the table made a face reminiscent of the look a small child gets upon tasting spoiled dead roaches for the first time. "Uggggh, that's even more tactical," jeered the chorus. "No! No!" shouted the Queen. "You still do not understand. We take the pulse of the key market leaders demand curve." "I see now." said Alice, "You sell the products." By now the chorus of cards chanting "Tac-ti-cal! Tac-ti-cal!" was becoming too much. The queen was furious and repeated her original greeting. "Off with her head! Off With her head" "WAIT!" demanded Alice. "I believe I understand. You are all responsible for driving the solution opportunities for the key client supply perceptions through strategic vision management!" Alice wondered if she should add something about the claws catching, and frumious bandersnatches and thought that she'd best leave it at that before she became ill. "Yes," screamed the cards, "That's exactly right!" "And how, might I ask, do you accomplish these lofty and important goals?" "By calling a BOD," the queen responded. "And what, pray tell, might that be?" inquired Alice as she looked for the quickest escape route, hoping that this jabber would keep her head attached long enough to get out. "A Board of Directors", began the queen, just as Alice noticed the door to the left of the table. "Its a type of high level meeting." "A meeting????!!!!" exclaimed Alice. "Not another meeting!" With that she bolted for the door, no longer fearing for her head. Her only hope was that she make it through before the agenda hit the overhead. In a dead run, she passed through the door just as the projector lamp flicked on. The sound of the fan was the last sound to fade as the door closed. Breathlessly she looked up to see a large open area. Directly in front of her was an enclosed area lined on one side with triple chrome table. A stack of plastic trays was at the foyer. As she wandered through an assortment of sandwiches, prepared foods, soft drinks and salad began their daily spiel. "Eat Me! Drink Me! Eat Me!" "Oh no," answered Alice, "I may know nothing about dates, and problems and meetings and agendas, and marketing and badges, but I do know food. I'm not gonna touch any of you. After the morning I've had I deserve a nice cheese steak (no lettuce)!" With that, Alice opened the nearest exit door and left. A resounding high pitched whine sang its midday good-byes as Alice returned to the real world. 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 Two guys are approaching one another while walking down a street. They are both dragging a foot. Man #1 is dragging his left, man #2, the right. As the get closer, man #1 says, "Hey, how you doing?", points at his limping left leg and adds "Vietnam 1968". Man #2 lokked up and replied "Hi, I'm fine, but there is some dog shit about two houses back !" Jay: Did you hear the one about the Polish athelete who was so proud of his gold medal that he had it bronzed? Banacek: No, how does it go? 컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 ANSWERING MACHINE MESSAGES AND PRANKS: ------------------------------------- Noisy pick-up of phone Uh... Hello? Hi, I 'm a burgular and I was just about to steal Troy's answering machine. If you give me your name and number I'll..uh, I'll post it on the 'fridge where he'll see it. Uh.. by the way, where did you say you live? ---------------------------------------------------- But right now I'm using "This is a boring answering machine message. Leave a message anyway." because I'm sick of people ringing the phone at 10am just so they can hear the clever messages I usually have, and then hanging up without even leaving a "like your message" message. Feh! ---------------------------------------------------- [Must have good Australian accent] G'day mate. Can't come to the phone now because I'm a bit tied up with this crocodile. Just leave a message, and I'll get back to you. ---------------------------------------------------- This is the Literacy Self Test Hotline. After the tone, leave your name and number and recite a sentence using today's vocabulary word. Today's word is supercilious ...} ---------------------------------------------------- The President is not in his office at this time. Please leave your name, phone number, the name of the country you wish to invade, and the secret password. ---------------------------------------------------- Kemosabe no in tipi now. You leave'um message after little smoke signal, and Kemosabe get back for pow-wow real fast. ---------------------------------------------------- Also, on the subject of answering machins, my favorite tape was: "This is Jeff, you're not in now so I'll leave a message." Really confused people. ---------------------------------------------------- A bubble in the space-time continuum has connected your line to a channeler in the 23rd Century. Any message you leave will be broadcast into the future.... ------------------------------------------------ Hello. I can't come to the phone now because--HEY, GEORGE! DON'T STAND ON THAT--goddam. ...because I've invited George and Barbara Bush over ...BARBARA! HEY! DON'T FUCK WITH THAT!...over for dinner. After the tone...BARBARA, CALL YOUR DOG...MILLIE! DOWN GIRL! ....shit...Leave a message after the tone...HEY, FUCKHEAD... ------------------------------------------------ Hello. Lindsey's not home now--this is his domestic droid speaking. I'm not programmed to answer the phone, so just leave a message, and Lindsey will get back to you as soon as possible. ------------------------------------------------ "Hi! You have reached 579-7599. This is an answering machine. This is the Eighties. You know what to do." ------------------------------------------------ My wife and I can't come to the phone right now, but if you'll leave your name and number we'll get back to you as soon as we're finished. ------------------------------------------------ Ring, Ring: The number you have xxx-xxxx (your number) has been changed, the new number is xxx-xxxx (again, your number). CULATA! ------------------------------------------------ "Hello, and welcome to Answering Machines of the Rich and Famous! (your name here) can't come to the phone right now, because he's spending the week in his beautiful summer home on the French Riviera..." ------------------------------------------------ One day I had a borrowed Casio sampler toy and used it to create a rather interesting one: Hello. You have reached Tooooommmmmm Tom Tm! Tom and MaMaMaMarMMMMaark's room. Tom is studying ssttuuddyyiinngg sssssssssssss and MaMark isn'isn'isn'isn't here. isn't here. P-P-Pleas! leave a messssssssage. Goodbye. 'bye! bye!bbyebybyyeyeyebbye {byes repeating at all different pitches} ------------------------------------------------ Last year my roommate had a machine but he hated to make the outgoing message. Stage fright, I guess. So I usually made them. One that we usually used during exam time was: {background music: Billy Joel's _Pressure_ very loud} Hello. You have reached Tom and Mark's room. We're a little busy now... { BJ screams PRESSURE!!! } So, leave a message and we'll get back to you someday after (exam end date) { BJ: ONE TWO THREE FOUR PRESSURE!!! followed by a very out-of-tune BEEP! } ------------------------------------------------ My favorite message that I ever had was the *real* message I recorded off 1-800-CALL-SPY, the U.S. army snitching network. Try it, its a great recording (call after 5 pm for the message). [Give it try! -pZ] ------------------------------------------------ In the background can be heard springs creaking and various moans. Hi,... You've just reached {name} pleasure palace. We're all busy as I'm sure you can tell but when we're done... we'll get back to you in whatever way we can. You wouldn't believe how much explaining my mother wanted on that one... ------------------------------------------------ [b.g. music is frantic, violin oriented] "hello. you have reached xxx-xxxx. we are currently unable to answer because we are either chasing, or being chased by, bats. please leave a message..." etc. ------------------------------------------------ [the quiet, eerie vocal part of 'hello, earth' by kate bush] (after about 30 seconds): "hello. you have reached xxx-xxxx. we can't come to the phone right now because we're at vespers. please leave a message..." etc. (30 more seconds of music before the beep.) ------------------------------------------------ (Spoken in a granny voice) "Way back inna winner of fifty-two, we didn' have fanshy gadjets like no ansherin' machine. You jusht had to call and call until shummbody got home. Now, shum people, dey shay dey don' like 'em, but I shay it'll shave you a lotta trouble if you jusht leave a meshage. Thanksh a lot." Must be spoken in a drawl. ------------------------------------------------ Well, this isn't strictly from an answering machine, but... >From Calvin and Hobbes: (phone rings) (you answer) Hello, this is <...> speaking. I'd like a large pizza with extra anchovies. (other person) What? (you reply) Oh, sorry, I must have a wrong number. (hang up) Make everyone's day a little more surreal. ------------------------------------------------ "I'm home right now . . . I'm just screening my calls. So just start talking and if you're someone I want to speak to I'll pick up the phone. Otherwise, well, what can I say? ------------------------------------------------ In Japan, the hand can be used like a knife. [sound effect: Heeeeee-YAH!, smashing box of kleenex] But this method doesn't work with a telephone call... [sound effect: dial tone] Introducing the all-new GINSU answering machine! It cuts, it chops, it slices, it dices your incoming calls! How much would you pay? Don't answer, because if you leave your name and number when you hear the tone, we'll throw in a return phone call ABSOLUTELY FREE! ------------------------------------------------ "Hi, you have reached .... Please leave your name, phone number and a message and if we like it we will return your call". ------------------------------------------------ However, the most effective one I have had so far can be used only one day per year: "This is David. I'm not using the phone over Yom Kippur, so please leave a message or call back after the holiday." No one wants to admit not having realized it was Yom Kippur or not knowing I would pick one holiday from the whole calendar on which to get observant, so everyone hangs up and leaves me no bad news or requests for favors. ------------------------------------------------ "This is David. Talk." ------------------------------------------------ "Hi. This is David. I've shut the ringers off on my phones and taken a sedative. As soon as I finish this recording I'm going to bed indefinitely. When I wake up I'll play my messages. Please leave one." ------------------------------------------------ [with a kazoo band playing "Thus Spake Zarathustra" in the background...] "Thinking you were making an ordinary phone call, you have instead reached..." [YA-DAAAAAAAAA!] "...the ANSWERING MACHINE! Leave your name and number, and we will get back to you as soon as we can." ------------------------------------------------ "Hello, this is Dr. Pangloss. If this were the best of all possible worlds, I could come to the phone right now, but I can't, so if you could leave your name and number..." ------------------------------------------------ "Hello?" "Sorry, he's not here right now, but if you leave a message, he'll get back to you." ------------------------------------------------ (woman taped off a "phone sex" service) WOMAN : (seductively) Hi. I'm Linda. You know, it can be really lonely when you're a fashion model. Sometimes I just have to ... YOU : (interupting) Oh cmon, Linda, give me the damn phone.. (then ask for a message) ------------------------------------------------ Just after the earthquake a friend of mine put on his answering machine: "Hi, this is Jeff. We can't get to the phone right now because we were killed in the Earthquake. Tragic, isn't it? But, leave a message anyway, someone is sure to get it eventually." BEEP My favorite post quake message: "Hi, we're not in cause we're out LOOTING! Leave a message and we'll call you back and tell you what we got." ------------------------------------------------ "Hello, I'm not hear right now. In fact, I'm out getting a new parakeet. If you leave a message after the beep, I'll be sure to get back to you. Oh, and by the way, a word of advice; never try to clean a parakeet cage with a vacuum cleaner." ------------------------------------------------ Ring...click....(sound of loud music in background)...Hello? - just a second while I turn the stereo off (sound of person running to click off music, which gets quiet. sound of person running back to phone) OK, sorry about that, hi there, who's this...well hi!... uh huh...yeah...well listen you're talking to a machine, so please leave a message and I'll call you back. (this ran for a while until a friend threatened to kill us after she said she had a 2 minute conversation with the machine.) ------------------------------------------------ I worked for a bit in the coastguard in Wales and I used to send weather reports to other bases, using a sort of antique FAX machine. I would call first on a special telephone and then send the data. They used to answer the phone with: " Epicentre of the Universe, God speaking." " Hartland home for lost whores." (that was Hartland CG) " Da, zis iz Ivan: do you have zee secret information, Boris?" " Pentagon command: transmit destruct sequence (pause) sequence correct: T minus one minute and counting" And then there was one phone we didn't use, with a number one off that of the local take-out. With my, non-British, accent I had some great fun with that phone. "Starship Enterprise, Uhura here, can you hold please? -- Captain, there is a transmission coming in on hailing frequency seven, do you want it on screen?" (silence...click) "Van couver coastguard, may I help you." British long distance rates are phenomenonal and I had this poor dude sputtering with horror that he had managed to make a long distance call by dialing five digits. ------------------------------------------------ A friend was at a mutal friend's sister's house, and when she went out for beer, he changed her answering machine message. In a loud, deep, gravely, horror-film voice he recorded, "HI, THIS IS KATHY, I'M NOT MYSELF RIGHT NOW. IF YOU LEAVE YOUR NAME AND NUMBER, I'LL GET BACK TO YOU WHEN I'M FEELING BETTER." ------------------------------------------------ Hi this is . I'm sorry I can't answer the phone right now. Leave a message and then wait by the phone until I call you back. ------------------------------------------------ In the background can be heard Gregorian Chant or some other church music Good Day My child, you have reached {name} dial a confession. At the tone if you will leave your name, number and short confession I will get back to you with your pennance. Thank you and may God go with you. ------------------------------------------------ "Steve has been captured by a flying saucer and can't come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name, phone number, and a message I'll have him call you back as soon as he gets away. Read all about it in next week's National Enquirer." ------------------------------------------------ "Steve is reassembling Elvis' brain and can't come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name ...", etc. ------------------------------------------------ (Annoying flute music in background) Good day, Jim. Your contact, [insert name], is not available right now. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to leave your name, number, and a brief message at the tone. This tape will self-destruct in thirty seconds. Good Luck, Jim. ------------------------------------------------ A friend of mine at school has this message, read by three people while the STAR TREK theme plays in the background. 1: Room 17, the final frontier. 2: These are the messages of Chad's answering machine. Its 2 semester mission: to seek out your name and your telepohne number. 3: To boldly inform you to wait for the tone. ------------------------------------------------ "Finally get an answering machine. Now how does this thing work? Hmmm. Press record button, I did that, and the light should be on. I wonder why it's not working right. Hmmmm, I wonder what this button does......" ------------------------------------------------ "This is (#include phone.addr). We are not ... excuse me a moment, please. Put your sister down. PUT YOUR SISTER DOWN! (sound of window breaking) Great! What a mess. I'll have to get back to you later." ------------------------------------------------ "Hello. I'm David's answering machine. What are you?" ------------------------------------------------ Steve: Hello. Steve and Matt aren't here right now but if... Matt: Steve, what are you doing? Steve: I'm leaving a phone message since we aren't here. Matt: But you left the last one -- it's my turn. Steve: No, I'm sure it's my turn. Matt: No, you're incorrect. It's definitely my turn. Steve: You fool. I know it's ... wait ... Matt ... what are you doing with that frying pan?!? BONK [really loud thud] Matt: Steve is out right now, so please leave your name and number. ------------------------------------------------ [imitating Mr. Rogers] "Hello. I'm in the Magic Kingdom right now, so I can't come to the phone. Can you leave your name and number when you hear the sound of the tone? Sure...I knew you could." ------------------------------------------------ [imitating Ensign Chekov] "Oh, sair...it was *Khan*! He made us say things...do things...he kept us from answering the phone! But Keptin was strong, and if you leave your name and number, Keptin will get back to you as soon as he can!" ------------------------------------------------ "You have reached the , Strategic Air Command Nuclear Missle Storage Facility. We are unable to come to the phone right now. At the tone, please leave you name, number and target or list of targets and we'll launch as soon as we can. And have a nice day." ------------------------------------------------ "We are unable to come to the phone right now. At the tone, please leave your name, number, and Master Card, Visa, or American Express account number and we'll get back to, pending credit approval." ------------------------------------------------ "Hello, this is Jim. Unfortunately I can't answer the phone right now because I've just come back from the Mirror Worlds and I'm still made up of antimatter, so if I were to pick up the phone right now, the resulting energy release would make Hiroshima look like a wet firecracker. So leave a message at the tone and I'll get back to you as soon as my component particles have been restored to their normal charges." ------------------------------------------------ "Speak, worm!" Works best if done in a Darth Vader voice. ------------------------------------------------ "You know what to do at the tone." ------------------------------------------------ "Hello?" This confuses anyone who doesn't know you. ------------------------------------------------ "Hello, I'm not here." A friend of mine used this one last summer. I always answered it with "Okay, that's all I wanted to know." ------------------------------------------------ Hi!! You've reached Janet and Chris's room. We're not in right now. If this is our parents, we're at the library studying. Yeah, yeah, that's it, that's the ticket. If this is John (Chris's boyfriend), Chris is out with the girls at the party. Yeah, that's it. If this is any one else, we're at a party and you're not. Yeah, a party with the president. Yeah and the .... pope. Yeah that's it. ------------------------------------------------ One voice: I didn't expect an answering machine. Another voice: Nobody expects an answrering machine. Our chief use is to get your name. And phone number. Our two chief uses are to get your name and phone number. And message. (damn) Our three uses are to get your name, phone number, and message. And time you called. Oh, damn, we'll have to start over. No--no time for that, so just wait for the beep. ------------------------------------------------ (in an Italian mafia-style tone:) "Hello. I can't come to the phone right now. Me and Guido are trying to stuff a body in the trunk. I think we're going to have to size it a little...