Everything I've Ever Mentioned, At Least This Week (part 1)

[James Kibo Parry]

As part of my eternal quest to understand my own writings, and to make
things easier for those of you who aren't super-geniuses like Drew Barry Morse,
commander of Moonbase Bomb Pop, I spent all last night reading the posts
of mine which are current on my server (that's one week's worth, 56) and
annotating some of the more difficult passages. Because I was around 6:30am
when I finished this, please forgive the millions of typos I didn't have
time to put in. Asterisks' wives at the end.

And now, the alternative introduction from The Other Universe:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Someone, I think it was me, asked if I would explain all the Big Words
and cultural obscurities in my recent posts.

So I'm gonna pull out the good parts, if any, and attempt to gloss 'em all.

It should also illustrate how memes show up in four or five posts
at a time because I like to create the illusion of continuity.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Subject: Re: The Durn Tirades

Someone else's subject line, was making fun of The Turner Diaries.
It's a thing called an anagram. Or an acronym. I forget which.
Ted Turner did NOT write The Turner Diaries -- I doubt he's smart
enough to be such a racist.

> X-Battlestar-Galactica-Date: 7812 centons, 64 microns, .03 lenorts

One of my standard nonstandard* headers. On "Battlestar Galactica"
they always used made-up units (centon, metron, kilon, megon, micron, etc.)
and so on. The part that says "lenorts" was a tribute to Dean Lenort's
anagrammatic-seeming name. It changes every few weeks. My favorite was
"nokia" (a tribute to the maker of cell phones and wetsuits) because it
made Kia Mennie cry.

> Twenty years after the nuclear war in the distant future year of 1959
> destroyed the world, leading to hideous genetic mutants and stranding
> the first twenty-seven astronauts on the moon. Joe Runciter woke up and said,

A reference to Philip K. Dick's "Ubik", which was not made into a movie
by John Lennon.

> Olestra

Those of you reading this fifty years from now will not remember Olestra.
It was an artifical lard made out of plastic which was used in potato
chips, despite causing "anal leakage". It was taken off the marker in
1999 when they found out that it also made you gay.

> bad acid that's going around in the Hitler temporary tattoos.

Urban legend re Mickey Mouse lick'n'stick tattoos. Also another
legend says that all the midgets running around Disneyland with
the giant mouse heads are on drugs. In reality, they are all
Teamsters! (I am not making this up.)

> that girl in Goldfinger

I was not referring to Honor Blackman, who was replaced by Diana Rigg
on The Avengers. I was referring to Shirley Eaton, who would make
a great hood ornament for a Chevy Nova.***

> I'm Susan Stamberg,

I was hoping someone would confuse her with Susan Sontag. One is
a National Public Radio intellectual commentator, and one was a PBS
intellectual commentator. At least one has Bride Of Frankenstein hair
on "Alive From Off Center", aka "Off Center", aka "Alive TV".

> Subject: Re: grhhm...

I didn't pick that subject and I don't know who did or why. I don't care.

> Battlestars fly OVER the tundra.
> This is because they have rocket engines AND Lorne Greene's hairpiece.

Another "Battlestar Galactica" reference. Note that on "Galactica 1980"
he had a hairpiece on his chin as well as his main one. Also he only
appeared in film clips. Also there was an imitation of his Galactica 1980
beard and hairpiece and costume in "Space Mutiny", a science-fiction
film made by actual Nazis.****

> Subject: Re: INTERGALACTIC MASTER CLOCK. RELATIVITY OF TIME WIPED OUT
> COMPLETELY. TIME IS ANOTHER MANIFESTATION OF MASS T = Am^2

Alexander Abian's latest doctrine of rantism.

> Please turn in your TV set at next month's Annual Convention Of All
> The Scientists In The World, or be exiled to that secret island where
> they put all the ones who discover how to power cars with water.

Urban legend #584: Oil companies snuff anyone who makes a car that
runs on water.

> Except in Atlanta where WTBS-17 will be five minutes behind all the others.

The "Superstation" (TBS on cable, WTBS-17 in Atlanta) always starts its
programs five minutes late because they show "The Beastmaster" twice
a week and so they know their viewers can't read TV Guide very fast.

> By the way, you can come to the
> office any time and pet our fish.
> He's very friendly. He smiles a lot.

His name is "Rambo" and he has a tilde in his species, according
to Speed Racer's pronunciation, "piranya".*****

> Subject: Re: Hard a'Lee! Make Westing!

Another subject line I didn't write. Something about Lee Bumgarner
and Bugs Bunny living in a Westinghouse refrigerator, I think.

> but now you had to go and order me to search-engine bomb him.

Archimedes Plutonium used to insist that people were "search-engine bombing"
him, and the closest we've been able to get as to the meaning of his
vanity phrase is "please respond to all my posts but never mention my name."
He has yet to take the extra step of claiming his name is copyrighted.

> Subject: Re: Complaints to Dartmouth about Archimedes Plutonium

A related thread. Again, not my subject line.

> I NOMINATE ARCHIMEDES PLUTONIUM FOR PRESIDENT OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE!

Needs no explanation if you read the context:

[someone said]
> > Archimedes Plutonium: One day he'll kill the president of Dartmouth College.

> Subject: Re: Arnold Stang??

A subject I picked up in alt.obituaries.

> Stang was the best. I loved that movie he did with Arnold Schwarzenegger
> where they dubbed each other's voices. However, in his later years,
> he fell into disrepute after he created that "wacky" parody religion.

The movie in question, "Hercules Goes Bananas", aka "Hercules In New York",
starred beloved character actor Arnold Stang (subject of the alt.obit
discussion) and some bodybuilder credited as "Arnold Strong". He looked
just like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he talked like a member of the
McLaughlin Group, very poorly dubbed to remove his cute accent.

The point was that I was trying to troll "Church of the Subgenius" fanboys
into pointing out that Rev. Ivan Stang created the Church,****** not the
guy who did voices on "Top Cat".

> Subject: Re: Roman numeral calculator in COBOL

Nick Bensema's subject line, showing off his super-nerdy homework.

On sci.*, you see "PLEASE DO MY HOMEWORK FOR ME SCIENCE PEOPLE!!!"

On a.r.k, you see Nick Bensema doing his OWN homework.

> I spent all afternoon explaining that roman numerals
> in HTML are case-sensitive

<OL TYPE="i"> vs. <OL TYPE="I">. I was writing a tutorial on HTML
for a private concern.*******

> So how come nobody ever spells the name of the Devil
> IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
> IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
> IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
> IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
> IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
> IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
> IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
> IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
> IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
> IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII?
>
> Except that robot on "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers".

"Alpha", a midget with a glowing frisbee for a head, shouts
"AY YI YI YI YI YI YI YI YI YI YI YI YI YI" every five seconds.
One of the many reasons to love "Power Rangers".

I think all the kids of the world have forgotten about that crummy show now.

[re COBOL]
> or of the other planets on Battlestar Galactica. I hear voices

COBOL was Grace Hopper's "Common Business-Oriented Language".
On Battlestar Galactica, Lorne Green worshipped The Lords Of Cobol.

There was also a level named "COBOL" in the first "Tron" video game.

> That's why you can tell Ayn Rand worked hard writing those
> erotic vampire books.

Ayn Rand******** -- "Atlas Shrugged"
Ann Rice -- "erotic" vampire novels

> Little Anthony,

Billy Mumy on "The Twilight Zone", *not* the Price Spagetti kid.

> than to have never loved Bikini Atoll.

Site of a nukular bomb test, and responsible for the name of the
bathing suit with the middle left out.

> (Zowie zoom on Barbara Bain's gigantic asymmetrical hair. She pulls
> it off to reveal that she is Martin Landau. We see a pair of tin snips
> cutting a golf ball in half. A gas station price sign decreases from
> point nine cents to point eight. We see two left shoes lying on a
> Twister mat. Peter Graves opens his mouth and bees come out. Then
> he strikes a match on his wooden forehead.)

I really hope I don't have to explain that this is the "Mission: Impossible"
montage, which of course inspired the "Space: 1999" "THIS EPISODE! THIS
EPISODE! THIS EPISODE!" montage, both of which featured Martin Landau and
his future ex-wife Barbara Bain.*********

> Land of Dairy Queen, with a Brazier Burger

Reference to the curious terminology of an American hamburger chain
advertised by Dennis The Menace.

> A pencil checks a box marked "LaRouche".

Lyndon LaRouche, the insane Presidential candidate (in federal prison
for stealing credit cards) whos platform is something about forcing
everyone to use Beehoven's musical "A" rather than 440 Hertz, and
of unifying Europe by building a rail network based in Germany, and
other stuff about how German culture is right for America. Oh, yeah,
and he says that Queen Elizabeth controls the world drug trade.

> Picasso's pink period meant blobs and his blue period meant squiggles.

I can't remember if it was Matisse or Picasso who had the blue
period and the pink period. Like it matters. Len Cella**********
could draw better!

> Hitler enjoyed watching "Teletubbies",

"Teletubbies" is a British TV show for BABIES.

> Curious George

Never paid me.

> The pie disappears completely into her [Bain's] hair blob,

I was thinking of the scene from the episode of "The Simpsons" where
Marge becomes a cop... the one where she rolls the shopping cart down
the aisle and it dissapears into the giant cheese wheel.

> (Martin Landau pretends a gopher ate his thumb.

World's second-worst magic trick***********, as performed by
Dick Van Dyke to show he has entered The Twylo Zone. The gopher
reference is from an early "Dennis The Menace" strip where he
says "Look, Joey, a gopher ate my thumb!" and Joey cries, end of strip.

> A crane lowers a crate labelled "SEKRITO OJBETOS".
and
> A monkey's paw presses abutton marked "ABORTEZ".

"Mission: Impossible" always featured unnamed foreign countries where
everyone spoke English with a funny accent, but they wrote in nonsense language.

> Peter Graves puts a lava lamp on the roof
> of his car and peels out intro traffic.

I keep a lava lamp next to my computer for inspiration.

> "Mmmmmmm!BACON!BACON!BACON!BACON!BACON!BACON!BACON!BACON!BACON!BACON!"
> "Dogs don't know it's an empty bag!"
>
> "The inside of your mouth is a steamy ninety-eight point six degrees."
> "EWW, GROSSOLA!" (sound of gunshot followed by silence)

Two TV commercials I am extremely tired of seeing.

> "Time for Teletubbies! Time for Teletubbies! Time for Teletubbies!"
> (three Teletubbies, and former President Jimmy Carter, enter. They
> point at him and giggle. He begins to cry.)

Teletubbies are controlled by loudspeakers that give orders in triplicate.

> (Admiral Grace Hopper

Crator of COBOL, as above.

> Mr. Bensema. Please stop posting AppleScript For Windows to this newsgroup.

AppleScript is one of the world's dopiest-looking languages, even more
so than COBOL. It looks like this (actual example:)

on MakeAppleAliases(theList)
set NoItemsSelectedFlag to true -- initialize the flag
tell application "Finder"
repeat with x in theList
set NoItemsSelectedFlag to false
try
make new alias file at apple menu items folder to x
on error
error "There was an error making the alias."
end try
end repeat
end tell

> Jesus L. Ron Christ!

Reference to L. Ron Hubbard (Church of Scientology) and the expletive
"Jesus H. Christ", etymology unknown.

> I wrote a one-line COBOL program that
> beat Fermat's Last Theorem at chess.

I still say Fermat was a master troller.

> Subject: Re: 2001

AGAIN, not my choice of subject line.

> Normy (no...@aardvark.apana.org.au) wrote:
> >
> > I'm getting really worried that they won't find the "Kibolisk" on the
> > moon in 2001. It would change the future as we don't know it!
>
> Okay, so the lunar basolith looks at the kibolisk and one of them turns
> the other to stone, and the other one turns the first one to a refreshing
> sparkly beverage that tastes like chicken. Heywood Floyd falls asleep on
> a plane and spills his bottle of chicken sparkle juice all over his lap.
> A stewardess completely covered in Velcro mops it up before suffocating.

basilisk -- mythical animal that turns you to stone with its gaze.
monolith -- a big rock. For some reason the door-shaped slab in "2001"
is called one.
regolith -- crumbly Lunar dust.
Heywood Floyd -- William Sylverster's "2001" character. Inspired half
of Whit Bissell's character name************ on "The Time Tunnel".

> Then Frank Bowman and Garrison Poole go to Jupiter, the only planet to
> have rings, and there's a big cardboard box. And they get in it and
> start playing house and they turn into babies. Then they eat lunch and
> then they eat dinner and then they go to bed and then they eat breakfast
> and then they eat lunch and then they turn into chimpanzees. They don't
> like this so they go home. But now the Earth has turned into the
> Planet Of The Apes and there are Statues Of Liberty everywhere and
> they cry. So they get back into the space cardboard box and go to
> the planet Cardbordia where the laws of physics make it impossible to
> cry so they're happy THE END.

This is just me insinuating that Arthur C. Clarke is senile.
The planet Cardbordia is a private reference for Matt McIrvin.

> So who would win in a fight
> between Arthur Clarke and Bob Hope?

The world of culture.

> Subject: Re: Operation Nougat

Someone else's subject, referring to the code name of a 1961 nuclear test.

> "AAAAIIIEEEE!!! RUN, KOMRADE!! THE KAPITALISTS ARE KOVERING THE KREMLIN IN
> KREMEY NOUGAT KANDY!"

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's book on the Soviet space program (yes, I have a
lot of books of all sorts) talks about the Soviet goal of putting
satellites that would constantly rain fertilizer in orbit above Moscow.
I AM NOT! MAKING THIS UP!!!! REALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I mean, Archimedes Plutonium has saner, less stinky, ideas!

> Point of order: If there could only be one word used in typeface specimen
> books, I would not choose "hamburgerfonts", nor "Quosque", but "nougat".
> I have *always* used "nougat" to test new fonts, providing they have those
> six letters and not any of the hard ones.

"Quosque tandem abutere, Catilina?" was the opening line a Cicero work
used by William Caslon, and many other typefounders after him, to show
text typefaces because Caslon was pround of his goofy italic "Q" with
a super-huge curly tail.

> Hard ones would be s, w, and especially 8.

That and "nougat" are true. Drawing a good "8" is REALLY HARD.

Subject: How Q*bert Got His Name

I picked that subject! Yay! I spend most of this article referring
to a Web interview with the programmer of the Q*Bert video game (1983ish).

[re the game being called, originally, "Snots 'N Boogers"]
> You know, I've never heard the word "snots" before. I mean, what's the
> OTHER snot?
>
> And snews.

Reference to "I knew a fellow who had snew in his blood," a favorite
joke with the slow kids in your elementary school. Not a reference to
gnews.*************

> > Also, in Klingon, "Q'Bert"
> > means "Won't Go".

See above re the name of the Chevy Nova automobile and/or
Mard Okrand's "The Klingon Dictionary", which, if you own a copy,
makes you A BOZO.

> Subject: Blow Up Your Neck!

Me dissecting a piece of spam advertising an inflatable rubber collar
to aid in autoerotic asphyxia, one of the most dangerous fetishes other
than getting to know Madonna.

> Also I absolve L. Ron Hubbard of all blame for any crimes committed in
> any century.

See above re L. Ron Hubbard.

Scientologist disciples used to (and still might) sign contracts for
a trillion years of servitude to L. Ron throughout future lives.

> "Mr. Phelps, youcondom will self-destruct in five seconds."

a couple keystrokes got dropped because my computer was busy for a second,
ruining yet another "Mission: Impossible" reference. Or at least making it
more entertainingly surreal.

> Yep, now you can cut off your oxygen supply completely for WEEKS with
> no ill effects! Celebrities who have done this include Cat Stevens,
> Ray Stevens, Kirstie Alley, Keanu Reeves, and Farrah Fawcett!

Celebrities who are considered stupid, even for celebrities.

> Even chick sexers? I've never herd of a chick sexer dying.

Chick sexers are people paid to sort the boy chicks from the girl chicks
after hatching. Really. Someday they'll invent a robot for this.

> Now you just risk the life of a person of your choosing! Oprah! Jim Carrey!
> Tipper Gore! Manly Bannister! Cousin Oliver!

Manly Bannister is/was a very bad Sci-Fi writer who mostly wrote werewolf
stories (lots of them) and the classic novel "Conquest of Earth", which
I own about six copies of (hey, they're five cents each in the priciest
used book stores, because this book makes "The Eye Of Argon"**************
look like "Childhood's End".**************)

Cousin Oliver was in about two and a half episode of "The Brady Bunch"
because the real kids were getting too old. He later went on to play
superhuman mutant "Dr. Zee" in the first episode of "Galactica: 1980".
****************

> This will be the first first edition. Next year we will release the
> real first edition, followed by the first edition of version 1.0,
> followed by the final version of version 1.0. Then we'll change the
> product's name to Rhapsody, but perhaps I've said too much.

Reference to Apple being confused about whether Rhapsody DR2 came
before or after CR1, shortly before they announced that the
project would be cancelled after 1.0 was released, thus guaranteeing
that nobody would EVER use their new ore-cancelled operating system.

> Or his son Billy, who draws it on every fourth Sunday.

"The Family Circus".

> THIS POINT SHOWS THAT YOU CANNOT HAVE AN ORGASM BECAUSE THERE IS
> TOO MUCH OXYGEN IN YOUR BRAIN! SCIENTOLOGY IS HERE TO RESCUE YOU!

The interrogation you get when your Scientology "Free Personality And IQ Test"
("The Oxford Standard Capacity Analysis (C) L. Ron Hubbard") is graded.
The guy inspecting me jabbed at a dot and said firmly,
"THIS POINT SHOWS YOU HAVE A DRUG PROBLEM."
I emphasized that I didn't use any. He said it included tobacco and caffeine.
I said I didn't use those. He said, "OR ONE OF YOUR PARENTS DIED."
I assured him that wasn't true. He jabbed at the dot again and
said very loudly, "THIS POINT SHOWS YOU CAN'T COMMUNICATE!"
I was told I would go insane within a month if I didn't read "Dianetics".
And I didn't read it and I did go insane.

> MOISTEN NEEDLE
> BEFORE INSERTING
> TAIWAN
>
> (loudspeakers rise out of the ground)
>
> Time for Tounge Of Frog repost!
>
> Time for Tounge Of Frog repost!
>
> Time for Tounge Of Frog repost!

The "TAIWAN" is a quote from a rubber playground ball. "Tounge of Frog"
is a beloved ceremonial reposting (from many years ago) of the instructions
on a sticky toy frog. And see above re "Teletubbies" triplicate directives.

> Dear Judi Dench --
>
> Loved you in that James Bond movie. Glad to see you're getting ready
> for the Batman auditions. Cape does not enable wearer to fly.

Here I was insinuating that "J.D." was Dame Judi Dench, who is the
current "M" in the Bond films. She may have an Oscar. I can't remember.
I don't watch British movies.*****************

> I will refrain from mocking the
> "Contact" page because I would
> keep trying to slip in jokes about
> how they pried open the big chrome
> dodecahedron and found Carl Sagan's
> naked body inside with a plastic
> bag over his head.

Here I'm just nailing together a Web page, the rumors that I caused
Carl Sagan's death, my "Seinfeld" final-episode script in which Kramer
is found dead of autoerotic asphyxia, and Sagan's "Contact".

> Dear Stefan Kapusniak,
>
> Thank you for mentioning my name in your .signature, which means you
> secretly want me to repost this 14,000-line collection of twenty copies
> of my "HARVEST THE LOONY MOON-GOON" post.
>
> -- Anaximander Boron

See the above definition of Archimedes Plutonium's "search-engine bombing".
Archie once posted something about "HAVEST THE LOON-GOON: ARC TORCHES A.R.K"
containing a movie script in which the generals at the Pentagon assign
him to shoot me.

Anaximander was to Anaximenes as Euripides was to Eumenides, only
without the silly pun.

> P.S. I am listening to the theme
> song from "Match Game '77" to test
> these stereo headphones to see if
> they contain good tweeters, woofers,
> and bwampers.

True, and if that tune had lyrics, they would all be "BWAMP".
It's on the "Game Show Network" compilation CD.

> Subject: Re: Nicole Kidman story (NC, hanging, snuff)

A repost of me making fun of someone else's non-auto yet erotic
asphyxia story in which Tom Cruise uses a Macintosh to slowly
strangle his wife, with extensive descriptions of the graphical
user interface of the strangulation program.

And Tom Cruise is... a Scientologist!

> "Moof!" said Clarus, the dogcow.

The animal of no particular species in the Cairo (1984) bitmap font on
Macs, and the icon that shows which way your page is facing in Page Setup
(for some printers), drawn by Susan Kare. The dogcow is female, named
Clarus, and says "Moof!", which is a trademark of Apple.

> Can Nicole be said to be alive if she can
> neither give nor receive Ericksonian strokes? (Psychologists: I'm talking
> about the OTHER Erickson.)

Look up Milton Erickson and Eric Erickson in psychology books.

> Suddenly, Bob Saget popped up and got into a fistfight with William Shatner
> over the video rights!

Bob Saget is the bland white guy who hosts "America's Funniest Home Videos".

> Subject: Re: THE DEAD MOON CAN'T INFLUENCE THE MOTIONS OF THE OCEANS

A rant of a newly-discovered mad scientist in sci.*.

> In sci.astro, Eric Graetz (Gl...@erols.com) wrote:
> >
> > DATE: SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 1998
>
>
> STARRING MARTIN LANDAU
>
> STARRING BARBARA BAIN
>
> GERRY & SYLVIA ANDERSON'S
>
> S P A C E : 1 9 9 8

The "Space: 1999" title sequence not only contained "This Episode!"
flashing on the screen over the montage, it also showed "September!
13! 1999!" over a montage of the Moon blowing up. Gerry & Sylvia
were the producers. (The Mole Men assistants to the mad scientists
in very early "Mystery Science Theater 3000" episodes were also named
Gerry & Sylvia.)

> Say, did you know that Erols is owned by RCN, which is owned by Boston Edison?

True.

> (soap suds come out of Barry Morse's vacuum cleaner)

My favorite "1999" episode is the one where the Moonbase fills
with soap suds for no reason, then they go away, then Martin Landau
makes a speech about The Space Brain.

> (The camera goes into Catherine von Schell's eyeball, and pulls
> back to reveal that she had turned into a giant eyeball)

I could never figure out how she turned into different creatures
just by staring into the camera.

> -- MOON CITY COSTUMES DESIGNED BY RUDI GERNREICH --

In one episode, this line of the opening credits was in Monotype Braggadocio,
a distant relative of the Futura Black normally used for "1999" titles.
Someone goofed. Anyway, Gernreich was a big name in fashion in the late 60s.

"1999" was made in the mid-70s, filmed in England with money from Italy.
In Italy it was released as "Spazio: 1999". I have an Ennio Morricone CD
which contains his extremely rarely-heard theme for "Spazio: 1999", which
is just random notes played for five minutes -- the only bad piece of
music he ever composed.

> "Buzz! Buzz! Why do you say I'm going around in circles?"
>
> "Shut up, Neil, or I'll nail your other foot to the crumbly regolith!"

See above definition of "regolith". This is a reference to a "Mommy, Mommy"
joke you may have heard in kindergarten.

> Can I be an honorary lunatic? Would that entail wearing one of those
> special magician's straitjackets made out of stretchy lycra with
> all the buckles that pop open if you breathe on them and most of the
> buckles are missing and there's a zipper on the inside that is controlled
> by a radio signal from your assistant?

Except for the radio signal, yeah, magicians escape from special
straight jackets that fall right off when you let go of the thing
inside the sleeve which holds the jacket together.

> Are you saying that Buzz Aldrin, thirty-ninth degree Mason,
> may have been gullible? Say it ain't so!

He wore his Masonic apron****************** under his spacesuit on the Moon.

> But we know how to USE gravity, even as children, for practical
> applications such as making penny-shaped holes in the heads of
> bald men walking past the Empire State Building.

Urban legend you may have heard in kindergarten about dropping pennies
from the Empire State Building to kill people.

> Subject: BLOATED DEAD DOG

Repost of my classic story about the worst possible movie, written after
a conversation with Dr. Matt McIrvin while we were circling everything
stupid on my TV screen while watching Rock Hudson and Dr. Joyce Brothers
in "Embryo".

> But it's wrong! ZERO GRAVITY doesn't come from the Sun, it comes
> from a mad scientist named Mike Bent!

Mike Bent, "Boy Scientist", is the magician who invented the famous
Zero Gravity illusion where you rise off the floor a few inches and
stay there, with no wires or forklift needed. (You can walk into
a room and do it.) I took sitcom-writing classes under him in college.

> his theories could not POSSIBLY fit in a .signature
> or on a bumper sticker, even in tiny Bronneresque type.

The late Dr. Bronner was the blind German mad scientist who sold
the natural soap with the crazed rants in tiny type all over the labels.

> I like how your Soviet Constructivist-style GIF (it's positively
> Rodchenkonian) says in FIVE places that you drew it in 1998.

This sci.* wacko (the "DEAD MOON" guy) posted a GIF explaining his theory
that was black and white with a big red wedge in the middle, like
El Lissitsky's "Beat The Whites With The Red Wedge". That and Rodchenko's
rubber baby nipple advertising poster (for Rezinotrest) are, in my opinion,
the two coolest pieces of Soviet Constructivist poster art.

Not related to Yuri Gagarin spreading fertilizer all over Moscow.

> Yes, but I own the copyright on the phrase "intellectual property".
> I suggest you use a different phrase, such as "phlezofiglic beable",

I called Alxander Abian a phlezofigler several times when he was
in a period where he picked up phrases and used them ten times per
post ("you are covered with 200 tons of cosmetic lava", "stop mother
superioring me") to see if he'd start shouting "you're a phlezofigler!"

"beable" has been explained too many times elsewhere.

> for your page to avoid being sued by my virtual lawyers who know
> quantum physics.

Virtual lawyers are the source of all the threatened lawsuits which
show up in long-running flamewars. Nobody ever actually gets sued on Usenet.

> Didn't Monty Python once make a five-sized planet?

Another popular topic of discussion in the urban legends newsgroup,
like the Chevy Nova. Monty Python once made a three-sided record --
it had two interleaved grooves on one side so that once in a while
it would play the secret other track. Didn't work too well.

> Say, have you ever met my good friend, Robert McElwaine, and his
> theory of $EXY P$YCHIC PLANT$?

Reference to a mad scientist on Usenet circa 1992-1994 or so.
"CAU$E$ OF WAR$" (anti-Semitic rant) and "SEXY PSYCHIC PLANTS"
were his biggies. Apparently he believed EVERYTHING he heard,
not just the stuff on Art Bell's radio show.*******************

> Say, have you ever met my good friend Archimedes Plutonium, and his
> theory of PRIMARY PLUTONIUM NUCLEUS TOTALITY?

Mad scientist Archimedes thinks the Universe is inside a plutonium atom,
hence his legal change of name.

> Say, have you ever met my
> good friend Alexander Abian,
> and his theory of EARTH'S
> AXIAL TILT CAUSES GONORRHEA?

He never said gonnorhea, but mad scientist Alexander Abian ("TIME HAS
INERTIA") insists that the "decadent cosmic parameters of our solar system"
cause AIDS and cancer and that they can be prevented by moving the Moon
and/or "re-orbiting Venus". He insists we must "blow up the moon"
by... 1999.

SUDDENLY EVERYTHING DOVETAILS! SCIENTOLOGY, "SPACE: 1999", CRACKPOTS, ETC!

But wait, there's more!

> Tides are actually caused the Tide Fairy, who makes colors brighter
> even in cold salt water.

Detergent reference, and I was thinking of something Mike
Jittlov******************** said that I can't repeat here.

> Yes, but nothing tastes like a hay sandwich!

"Alice In Wonderland"'s discussion of "there's nothing like a hay sandwich".

[continued in Part 2]

[James Kibo Parry]

The Grand Exposition continues.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Didn't Maxwell come up with equations defining electromagnetic fields
> and the field of physics, but he abandoned the last one because it
> had a nabla in it and he got confused between "nabla" and "NAMBLA"?

This reference contains its own explanation. "nabla" is an upside-down
capital delta, and "NAMBLA" is a bunch of perverts.

> Assume three dots.
>
> Zippy: THREE dots?
>
> Ernie Bushmiller: Yes, three dots.
>
> Nancy: I dropped my geometric ice cream cone! BAW-W-W!

The "Nancy" (comic strip) formula by Ernie Bushmiller, as explained
a few times by "Zippy" (other comic strip). Nancy's world always featured
a specific group of three rocks, drawn from geometric principles in
Chinese landscape art. (I said, I've got a LOT of books. I have the
Nancy books, I have Chinese landscape art books, I have Zippy books.)

> To ASSUME is to compute AS a SUM of E!

Boring old aphorism ("you make an ASS out of U and ME") once featured
on "The Odd Couple".

> Your Friend With A 1700 On The SATs,
> Kibo

The assertion which made rec.org.mensa and alt.religion.kibology unreadable
for a few months.

> Subject: Re: HELP LINE FOR UFO ABDUCTEES

Not my subject line.

> Whereas I'm still looking to the Space People for help regarding
> Bible Abductions! How come the Gideons are powerful enough to beam
> a Bible into every hotel room in the world simultaneously and yet
> the Bibles keep disappearing just like socks in the laundry?
> And how come the CIA, led by Tom Cruise, can't even get ahold of
> Bibles except via the Gideons? And why didn't the rats in the large
> and easy-to-crawl-through ventilation duct in the super-secure CIA room
> set off the laser beam alarm system that would make the whole building
> explode to keep Tom Cruise from using the world's most oversized Mac?

See above re Tom Cruise being stupid and a Scientologist and using
a Mac to kill Nicole Kidman. But this wasn't a reference to that.
It was to the "Mission: Impossible" movie (see above "Mission: Impossible"
references) in which all the computers in the world are Macs, and
Tom Cruise saves the world by reading a Gideon Bible from a hotel room.

> Remember, a Revelation is when the Moon goes around the Sun WITHOUT
> first going around the Earth, and a Stalacmite is one that gets
> blown up by Alfred Nobel, who invented the Dewey Decibel System.

Nobel created his prize because everyone hated him because he invented
dynamite and blew up his lab. You probably heard that factoid every
six weeks when you were a kid.

> This was right after the devil with the motorcycle and eight combs in
> his pocket said "Ayyyyyy, SIT ON IT, puny Earthling!"

"Happy Days", with Henry Winkler as Fonzie. Henry is now the producer
of the "Everything you read in the tabloids is true" show, "Sightings".

> And of COURSE he thought fast and said it was because of space demons.
> I gotta remember than the next time my wife, the lovely Barbara Bain,
> wakes up just because I'm jumping up and down on the bed in my Batman suit.

(a) see above re "Mission:Impossible"/"Space:1999" star Barbara Bain,
(b) urban legend about guy jumping onto wife in Batman suit and breaking
his neck.

> And how about that episode
> where Mork comes to Milwaukee
> to abduct Ritchie Cunningham?

"Mork & Mindy" was a spin-off of that "Happy Days" episode. Later when
"Happy Days" was dying they did a "spin-on" where Mork came back.

> Subject: The Plethora Of Discussion.

A post much like this one, only much shorter, where I analyzed my
recent posts. A plethora is not a cross between a remora and a plecostamus,
not like there's any difference between the two kinds of suction fish.

> a.r.k readers NEED to know that I ate some White Castle burgers
> that came from Dick Van Dyke's fictional hometown.

New Rochelle, New York. After Harry Mandel's wedding.

> This was in no way connected to the "Death Race 2000" reference in
> one of the Archimees Plutonium-derived topics, or the "Space: 1999"
> references I keep dropping just 'cause I'm married to one of its co-stars,
> or to the movie "20:01" which featured its other co-star, Martin Landau,
> with his whole body exploding twice in slow motion at the end to
> prevent the deadly Time Bounce.

The "feature film" of "12:01" with Landau's body exploding twice at the
end was so bad that they couldn't release it to theaters, they had to
show it on the Fox network. It's based on an Oscar-winning short of
the same name which was NOT a "Groundhog Day" rip-off; "Groundhog Day"
took a little inspiration from the "12:01" short, then the "12:01" movie
did an EXACT COPY of "Groundhog Day", practically scene-for-scene except
they added an exploding Martin Landau.

> You misspelled "nutria".

Nutria are giant rats.

> How do you say "Fruit Loops" in other languages, such as COBOL?

See? We're back to COBOL. Everything in my posts is a hyperlink to
everything else.

> Although really I mostly drink the unflavored ninteenth-century version
> of Ovaltine, the "malt" flavor that comes in the yellow jar. Dry Ovaltine
> clumps have a fascinating surface texture halfway between vermiculite and
> a Mandelbrot set. If you enlarged an Ovaltine crumb by a factor of
> a thousand, you would have an asteroid a foot across, covered with
> mountains that were two feet tall. Ovaltine pellets are the only substance
> bumpier than, say, the stalactites growing on Bob Hope.

All true. Ovaltine is made by the same people as Gold Bond Medicated Powder
and Bromo-Seltzer, and they apparently believe that build 500 incredibly
cheap late-night TV and radio ads (usually on minor local stations)
is better than buying one ad that someone might actually see.

> > Didn't Lucasfilm do a cartoon about this once?
>
> That was the one where Kibo, the evil space pirate, was in a flying motorcycle
> drag race against C-3PO and Boba Fett inside a giant plastic Habitrail,
> and this somehow saved the Universe from being destroyed by the cosmetic
> lava coming out of the Universal TV Time Signal Station, right?

I was referring to a "Star Wars: Droids" cartoon featuring the evil
space pirate named after me (don't believe me? rent it), which was
actually a few episodes after the one with the car race with Boba Fett
inside some plastic hamster tubes. Mad scientist Alexander Abian insists
we must set up a TV station in outer space so that we can ban clocks so
that he can make it the same time everywhere.

> -- Kibo, Evil Space Pirate,
> Spokesman For Earth,
> And King Of Terror

Reference to that cartoon, to an election held long ago in alt.alien.visitors
(I won by a landslide!) and to the Project Raptor codenames (see far below).

> Subject: Re: Drew will you go out with me?

M. Otis Beard's subject line where he tries to annoy The Leading Drew
Barrymore Webmasters Of The Internet (their title for themselves, not mine.)

> Has a.r.k turned into a hardcore pornography newsgroup so slowly
> that nobody noticed, or so quickly that nobody noticed?

"The Simpsons" (see above) reference to the Fox network (see above).

> That's why whenever I get a new girlfriend first I try holding down her
> shift, option, control, and command keys while selecting "About This Gal"
> from the drop menus. If that doesn't work I try setting her wristwatch
> ahead ten years. And if nothing else works, I scribble "SECRET ABOUT BOX
> ANTLER ALANJEF BLUE MEANIES" in her note pad and throw it on the floor to
> see if my apartment turns into a game of Breakout, which it usually does
> for one reason or another.

References to Macintosh "easter eggs" (secret wacky features). One
made a game of "Breakout", the Atari arcade video game written around
1978 by... Steve Jobs, when he worked for Atari.

> The weirdest magazine I have ever seen is one I bought at Tower Records
> a week ago. (It cost about as much as dinner for two at Bob Hope's
> favorite restaurant, the one with the weird green negative painting of
> the founder on the wall.) It's called "S.M.H.",

The extended discussion of "S.M.H."'s weird perversion is all true.

> Now, see, here's your problem. You wanted a Jackie Garland movie,
> where she would do backflips over a rainbow while beating up people and
> singing a song about gumdrops, and you were supposed to buy a Judy Chan
> CD, which was Judy Jetson doing her hilarious impression of Charlie Chan.
>
> "ME RIKEE FLIED LICE, ASTRO!" "REY RUDY, RAT'S ROT RUNNY!"

Astro ("The Jetsons" dog) and Scooby-Doo ("Scooby-Doo") both had the
same speech impediment that caused them to begin every word with the
letter "R", which allowed me to the "The Jetsons" to "Charlie Chan"
via the unfunny stereotype accent that only Bucky Lewis still performs.
*********************

> Honestly? Every time you post one of those, I get several dollars
> in a Federal Express envelope. More if you mention Archimedes Plutonium.

Archimedes claims I get paid to mock his theories.

> Oh, come on, Don, you know as well as I do that carrying your own
> door into the doorless bathroom stalls

The Boston Public Library has no bathroom stall doors. Don Saklad is
a person who has some wacky obsession with said library.

> Whoops, sorry, that last one was from the library's Unabashed Dictionary,
> which they keep next to their Gutenburp Bible.

(a) reference to lame Playboy joke formula; (b) Dick deBartolo/Bill Gaines-
style "Mad" magazine wordplay (making a sort of quasi-pun-like-nonjoke
by changing the fewest number of letters in a name, with the emphasis
on making the words "blecch", "burp", "barf", and "wee-wee".)

> > inventive library users/customers/consumers' approaches
> > to our collections and services.
>
> Okay, here's a breakdown of library users/customers/consumers.
>
> library user -- is connected to the library intravenously
>
> library customer -- tries to buy the library
>
> library consumer -- eats the library

When I write documentation, I'm told that I *must* refer to the people
sharing the computer as "customers" and *never* "users" because the older
ones will freak out and think we're doing drugs.

> Subject: Re: Urban public library personnel who gossip or shun.

Subject line chosen by Don Saklad (see above).

> 7.) Notice that this post
> has a P in it.

VERY obvious reference to a sign EVERYONE knows, "Welcome to our OOL.
Notice there is no P in it. Keep it that way." THREE people followed up
to explain the joke to everyone else under the assumption that they
were the only ones on the whole Internet who knew that "P" meant "pee".

> Subject: Re: Board room lavatory at city of Boston Public Library department

Don Saklad again.

> I hear there was a guy who was trapped in the BosPubLib's board room
> library during that lunch hour that they moved the whole building from
> 666 Boylston to 700 Boylston and the experience was so horrifying that
> he went TEMPORARILY INSANE PERMANENTLY.

The BPL renumbered its address from 666 to 700 because I kept making
fun of it.

> However, if you can't stand the fact that lots of crazy people
> hang out at the Dunkin' Donuts all day just to talk to you about
> politics --

LONG before I encountered Mr. Saklad I had been aware that the
Dunkin' Donuts across from the library was always inhabited by crazy
people who wanted to be your friend while you ate your doughnut.

> Also do they still have that 10% discount if you wear your
> Battlestar Galactica costume? (Don, I expect an answer.)

SEE? SEE? BATTLESTAR GALACTICA IS OUR PRICELESS CULTURAL LINCHPIN!

> NOTE: ACE DOUBLES COUNT AS TWO BOOKS.

Fifties science-fiction novels (including one by Phil Dick [see above]
but not any I know of by Manly Bannister [above] or Harlan Ellison [below])
where they stuck two undersized "books" together to make one real book
with a different cover on each side. Throwaway pulp fiction at its
lamest.

> Subject: Re: Australian Foundation Garments

Subject line from a spam.

> And the extra half cent goes to Richard Pryor's secret bank account at
> Atari corporate headquarters!

"Superman III" reference. The movie was underwritten by Atari, Inc.,
which never released their "Superman III" game. (They did some animation
for the game sequence in the movie, though.) See above for the Steve Jobs/
Atari connection.

> Crocodile-skin banana hangers.

"banana hangers" are objects sold at lame local drugstores and gift shops --
big wooden hooks from which you can... hang bananas. In the kitchen.
"banana hanger" is also slang for "thong underwear".

>
> I hear Isaac Asimov wore
> three Foundation Garments.

Sci-fi writer of the "Foundation" books. I think he may have done
an Ace Double.

> Subject: Re: As promised

I don't remember who picked that.

> Etienne Rouette (etienne...@sympatico.ca) wrote:
> >
> > As promised a while back, this photo taken on Rideau Street,
>
> Hey, one of my bosses is a Rideau. Only I think there's another letter
> in it somewhere.

Okay, Etienne picked it. One of my employers is named Riendeau,
or something with a similar too-many-French-diphthongs spelling,
like 'Etienne' and 'Rouette'.

> MICHAEL ANSARA (to time-travelling scientists): "His name, O.T.T.A.W.A.,
> stands for Official Time Traveller And Wombat Abuser."

Irwin Allen's "The Time Tunnel". Michael Ansara's henchman was
"O.T.T.", "Official Time Traveller". He wore a toy space helmet
that was open at the front.

> HITLER: "Oui, I weel crush yiew, liek buggg!"

Band brothers's movie "Robot Jox", with which Joe Haldeman (who walked
through an a.r.k party once) was associated. The evil Russian guy says,
"I weeeeel crush yiew, liek buggggg!" and it's one of my favorite movie
quotes, right after Jack Palance in "Solar Crisis", "I forget what my
name is... but I know it began with... an AHRRRRRRRRR!!!!"

> MICHAEL ANSARA: "We are not on what your primitive Earth calls a planet.
> We have evolved to the point where we no longer need planets. Our
> Church Of Scientology is built on the surface of the Sun!"

See, Bad science fiction leads to Scientology EVERY TIME!

> One 1024pt Futura Bold capital K in white paper coming right up.
> More or less above the head of a creepy mannequin who looks like Barbara Bain.

A Marvel No-Prize will go to the first person who spots it in
Coolidge Corner.**********************

> Yeal, well, you're just you because it could have been jealous,
> Mr. Shemelmehay from Schenectady! LAAAAAAAAADYYYYYY!!!! (falls out of
> shiny vinyl chair 500 times. Cut to reaction shot of butler's shocked
> expression at these hilarious antics.)

Standard Jerry Lewis Pastiche No. 1.

And I *am* from Schenectady. Schenectady SUCKS.

> AND TO SAVE BIG, DIAL 10-10-10-10-3-2-1-3-5-M-P-H FOLLOWED BY
> LEE BUMGARNER'S MESSAGE-ID!

About two weeks ago, the "10-3-2-1" long distance prefix (is that MCI
or Sprint? I can't remember) became "10-10-3-2-1". I still can't find
the "10" button.

> Robot: Am. Under. Charlie's. Control. Crush. Kill. Sue.

"I.D.A.K.", a silver android ("Instant Destroyer And Killer") on
Irwin Allen's "Lost In Space": "Crush. Kill. Destroy." Often quoted
by Conan O'Brien. Compare above description of Irwin Allen's silver
"O.T.T." android on "The The Tunnel".

> L. Ron Hubbard: Oh no, Charlie Brown has seized control of my robot lawyer!
>
> Charlie Brown: Hahahahaha! Take that, you mean kite-eating religion!

Gluing Scientology to a "Peanuts" stock situation.

> Robot: Smash. Destroy. L. Ron. Is. Fair. Game.

"Fair Game" was the Scientology policy which said, basically, if they
don't like Scientology, you MUST do as much evil to them as humanly possible.

> Snoopy: Charlie Brown is such an engramhead.

"engrams" are the things in your head that mess you up if you're not
a "clear" Scientologist. The term comes from earlier speculation about
the nature of memory in which an "engram" was any remembered event.
In Scientology engrams are _bad_ memories.

> MYANMAR SHAVE

The country of Burma changed its name to Myanmar. I have no idea if the
old shaving soap with the highway limericks was named after it.

> It's like having a Goudy Heavy letter made of foam rubber, or an
> ITC Garamond Condensed letter with water added. Or a Geometric Lemon
> letter that tastes like beef, or a Fupper Fono letter on a CD.

Actual typeface names, even Fupper Fono and Geometric Lemon.

> Good thing, too. Tom Cruise was just about to pull off his rubber mask
> to reveal an expensive digital morph by Industrial Light & Magic to
> make it look like he was actually pretending to be someone else, something
> Tom Cruise can't really do in movies.

Bad to the bad "Mission: Impossible" acting by Cruise. Martin Landau
would actually _act_ while in disguise. Tom Cruise needed a _morph_
to impersonate someone else.

> Subject: Re: the Biggest Usenet Post EVER

Dumb subject.

> Punch that into your pocket calculator, turn it upside down, and
> it spells SHILOH, SHELL OIL, HAIL SATAN!

HELL, SHILOH, and SHELL OIL are about the only things you can
make on upside-down calculator displays.

> Lee sells butane. And butane accessories.
>
> Well, no, he doesn't sell butane, he DEALS it.

(a) "King Of The Hill" reference. (b) "He who smelt it, dealt it."

> Lee tried to plug is S-VHS camcorder into his Mac's keyboard port and
> now Windows 95 won't run right on it.

S-VHS cables and Mac keyboards use the same mini-DIN-4 plugs.

> > 3C8
>
> It's a smiley representing Mr. Weatherbee unhappy that his lymph nodes
> are hanging in front of his bow tie.

"Archie" comics. Principal Mr. Weatherbee always had a little sideways
"3" floating above his head, a precursor of Homer Simpson hair.

> Also fudgsicles are funnier than popsicles, and green M&M's are funnier
> than nondescript M&Ms. So please eat a green fudgsicle.

The sort of stupid advice you get in writing workshops when you do comedy,
because everyone feels they have to make some pointless contributions.

> And the librarian is Harlan Ellison, and when you ask why Kibo's .signature
> is under "The World's Greatest Literature Selected By Bennett Cerf, Whose
> IQ Is 503" but Harlan Ellison's "Angry Candy" is in the dumpster behind
> Arby's, he'll beat you over the head with Kibo's .signature and to escape
> you'll have to get into one of those barber chairs that goes up through
> the ceiling except that wasn't real, it was a Bugs Bunny cartoon, so then
> you'll just wake up screaming. Also please don't call Don Saklad a
> chickenhead. I think he's more of a trog, or maybe eye-morg or even a deeve.

(a) Harlan Ellison, famous sci-fi writer, frequently referenced in a.r.k
for his flamboyantly argumentative nature. (b) Bennett Cerf edited
a compendium of all the greatest works of philosophy and literature...
and many books of knock-knock jokes and lame campfire ghost stories.
(c) Several years ago (this has been documented several times since
1992 or so) I dreamed I was Harlan Ellison beating up a librarian.
(d) "chickenhead" = devolved stupid people in "Do Androids Dream Of
Electric Sheep?" (aka "Blade Runner") by Phil Dick (see above).
(e) "trog" = Joan Crawford's funniest film, "Trog", has her falling
in love with an unfrozen caveman. (f) "eye-morg" = "Spock's Brain",
one of the funniest "Star Trek" episodes, contains the great line,
"You are not morg. You are not eye-morg." as well as "Brain and brain!
What is brain?" (g) "deeve" = another synonym, this one showing up
in lots of sci-fi (particularly British.)

If I were Forrest Ackerman*********************** I'd make up one
portmanteau************************ word from all of these.

*********************** Collector of sci-fi memorabilia, literary agent
to sci-fi writers in the forties, and publisher of about a hundred
translated "Perry Rodan" pulp serial "books", fond of making up words
by sticking together two other ones, like "Ackermansion", "Rhofans", etc.
*************************

> Wife Mistook Him For A Hat, and whose hat's wife's best friend's
> doctor's dog's

Reference to TWO well-known books. You know the Oliver Sacks one.
The other is "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog", the most commercial book of all time.

> brain's position becomes uncertain, due to the Tiny Brain Principle Thing. My

Quantum physics joke. See Maxwell's equations above.

> the sound of the tone, you will be deaf. (Long silence) Don't eat at Fatbuckle
>
> > > Arby's,

Fatty Arbuckle, silent film comedian, whose career was destroyed
by Hollywood's sleaziest sex scandal. (He was found not guilty,
but fat lot of good that did.) It involved a woman dying when a Coke
bottle broke because he was so heavy, according to the legends.

> syndication on channel 50, sandwiched between Al Karprelian's wacky weather

Remember Bucky Lewis (not to be confused with Pucky and Gucky), above?
Channel 50's big star is "wacky" (obnoxious) weatherman Al Karprielian,
whose name I misspelled, whose shtick consists of squealing out
the weather in a Jerry Lewis voice (see above). Two memorable phrases
from one speech about a gulf stream bending back on itself:
"IT'S A DOUBLLLLE OOOOMEGAAAAA!" and "IT'S PHAAAAAASINGGGGG!"

> Then the Earth blew up and we all died, except for Isaac Asimov, who

In a sci-fi-writing class, my teacher always said we could not end a
story with "And then the spaceship exploded and we all died." so I always
did. I also worked in as many tomato surprises as possible.

> MMM, TASTES LIKE TOUNGE OF CHICKEN.

For some reason people think anything they would never in a million years
eat (like frog eyeballs) tastes like delicious chicken. See
"Tounge of Frog" above.

> Subject: Re: Time for a meta-post.

Not my line.

I gave up the meta- thing a week after reading
Hofstadter.**************************

[re "tweener"]
> What a bad portmanteau, short for "You're so twee, you weener."

See "portmanteau" definition attached to some asterisks above.
"twee" is one of many British words meaning "sissy".

"weener" is the a.r.k preferred spelling of "weiner"/"weinie"/"weenie",
which I coined because it's the missing one of that cluster, and because
you can buy cans of "Beanee Weenee" (apparently there's never more than
one weenee.)

Words best as a BIFFism, as in "Y0U WEENERBRANE !!!!!!11"

> Why not just call yourself an "Olestrange" person or a "chimapanazi"?
>
> "colossal boretard"? "communistinker"? "Kirstialley"? "Dododo"?

See above re Kirstie Alley being ST00PID. And she's... a Scientologist!

> neologisms

new words.

As in Bacon's compliment for Shakespeare, "He is a man of new words."

> BE Chas Parisher! FEEL your diaphragm! BE a tree! I wanna see more leaves!
>
> Sorry, flashback to acting class. Now let's all lie on the floor with our
> hands pressed to our stomachs and shout "HUH! ... HUH! ... HUH!" for an hour.
>
> -- K.
>
> I got a D. Although he said
> I was pretty good as that
> psychotic kid in "Equus".

All true. Taught by Morris Kaufman.

> It has come to my attention that many of you do not understand the big
> words I've been bouncing off the padded walls of alt.religion.kibology,
> big words like "twee". I am working on an a.r.k dictionary which will
> explain all of them.

YOU ARE HERE! YOU ARE HERE! YOU ARE HERE!

(From "Horton Hears A Kibologist")

> Then call Bill Gates "a randy ginger lad" and say "bum" and "botty"
> and giggle and run around in fast-motion while gels in their knickers
> chase you up a good bit. Then point out that Ginger Spice left
> The Spice Girls to join the cast of "Teletubbies".

See above re Teletubbies. One of the Spice Girls (Ginger) just quit.
Interestingly, "Ginger" is Cockney slang whose meaning derives like so:

queer --> ginger beer --> ginger i.e. ginger is a stage beyond twee.

As in gay, gay, gay.

Whereas in England a "fag" is a cigarette and a "faggot" is a croquette
or a bundle of kindling, depending on whether you're eating the faggot.

> King Jas The Terrible

Reference to the phone company's abbreviation of my name, and
the "King of Terror" code name (see below).

> Someday in the future, beams of coherent posts will be used to melt
> all the solder that holds Army tanks together, and then war will be POINTLESS!

Common bad sci-fi cliche: "Our society is more advanced than yours.
We have OUTLAWED war."

> I can think of ten thousand ways to respond to this. I will post
> three of them and do one of the others in a large open field surrounded
> by dancing elves wearing bright red.

No explanation available.

> Except there should also be a name for naming things after Kibo.
> (Incidentally, things named after people, like sandwiches, pantaloons,
> Orange Julius, and plutonium, are called "eponyms".)

See the most recent OED supplement under "Kibo" for more on eponymous words.

> In environments where apostrophes are not available, such as cheap
> press-on lettering that only includes commas but not apostrophes or
> single quote marks,

See, the point is, in most fonts, the comma IS the apostrophe just
moved vertically.

> Omission of the apostrophe will be punished -- death by press-on lettering.

I was probably thinking of Zippy (see above) saying "Hello Kitty gang
terrorizes town, family stickered to death!"

> But then we'd have to remove the 2% REAL PEAR JUICE from Mandarin Orange
> Splice in secret to see if anyone notices, and nobody would.

Mandarin Orange Slice used to contain a tiny amount of pear and apple juice.

> -- K., King of Terror
>
> OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED BY ALT.ALIEN.VISITORS
> AND DREW BARRYMORE, WEBMASTER OF THE INTERNET

See below, see above, see much above.

> Subject: Re: Erotic Crystalized Inertia

Subject line I found on alt.satanism, and they can't seem to understand
why I'm making fun of it. See Alexander Abian ("Time Has Inertia") above.

> We've secretly replaced Dr. Abian's
> inertia with Satanic crystals...

Folger's coffee crystals commercial.

> Subject: Re: Something I was wondering about...

Somebody's subject.

> Yo, dude, your name's so fat your mom has to tie Lee Bumgarner's Message-ID
> around your neck so the dog will play with you!

Frank Sinatra's favorite putdown transformed into the stereotypical inner-city
insult, "Yo, you so ugly yo mama has to tie a pork chop around your neck
so the dog will play with you! You mama so fat..."

Guy to Matt McIrvin: "Are you wearing headphones or is there a hole in
your head?"

> The others are obsessed with Bob Hope and NBC's "seaQuest DSV".

The number of "seaQuest DSV" references on a.r.k has gone down now
that the show's been off the air for a few years. But I feel it is
every bit as good as "Battlestar Galactica", "The Time Tunnel",
and "Space: 1999".

> Did you stand on a chair and scream at them, "TELETUBBIES ARE FOR
> BABIES! IT'S A BABY SHOW! LET YOUR CONSCIENCE BE YOUR GUIDE!
> LET YOUR CONSCIENCE BE YOUR GUIDE! LET YOUR CONSCIENCE BE YOUR GUIDE!"
> until the nice men in the shiny white coats dragged you away,
> so that one of the kids would grow up to be a school psychiatrist
> and give birth to Matt McIrvin? If not, you should do this.

Matt's mother, a school psychiatrist, witnessed one of her teachers
being dragged off by the men in white when she was a kid. Apparently
she wanted everyone to let their conscience be their guide.

> Also, if I ever have an exgenesis, I'm NOT going to create you.

Lee Bumgarner wanted to mention my exegesis (an annotation of the
meaning of text, much like this) buy he spelled it in a way which
made another perfectly good two-dollar Latin word that I could
use to hit him with.

> I won't talk to you
> again until you cease
> being so proxigean.
>
> I hear the Oort Cloud's
> lovely this epoch.

Me wondering how many people would bother getting out the dictionary.

> Your logic's so impeccable that you have to wear socks over your shoes
> when you're on the roof with Inspector Detector!

Carrying the concept past the extremes of absurdity. Inspector Detector
was a "Speed Racer" character with a beard that stuck up in front of his
left eye. Or right eye, depending on which way his head turned.

> DEAR ALEXANDER ABIAN, YOU'RE A NUT-HEAD ASTRONOMER!

See Alexander Abian, above, and Carl Sagan, above. And Steve Jobs, above.
Carl Sagan threatened to sue Apple over a "Sagan" code-name for a prototype,
so they unofficially changed it to "BHA", for "Butt-Head Astronomer".

Incidentally, one of the key people in this drama, one of the developers
of QuickTime for Apple, and a friend, recently died: Jim Nitchals.
You may know him best as an anti-spam activist. It was from him that
I got the presumably accurate descriptions of the BHA incident, and
the description of the machine in question which prompted my to make
the "BHA" stickers (which can be seen in the 1996 a.r.k anthology.)
The computer never actually had a "BHA" sticker, which is why I made mine.
"BHA" was just a joke name used by Apple employees. (The computer became
the Power Mac 7100/66.)

> Subject: Re: starting a new ng..alt.fan.arnold-stang

Back to the Arnold Stang thread in alt.obituaries.

> > stay tuned as july 4 approaches and at last we are able to express our
> > true feelings about this wonderful man.
>
> Shouldn't that be July 5, 1998?

An Ivan Stang reference (above); July 5, 1998 is X-Day, when the SubGenii
will be taken from the doomed planet Earth.

> "REALDOLL's flesh has no
> noticeable flavor."

Non-sequitur quote I pulled off a Web page selling sex dolls.

> Subject: Re: Btw.

"By The Way", Usenet acronym.

> I'm sorry, that quotation had to be terminated before you got to the part
> about how your silly Web browser took you to the official Orbitz site
> just because you typed "Orbitz".

Orbitz is the "texturally enhanced" beverage (clear with balls of
colored gelatin floating in it) which flopped a couple years ago,
because it tasted like uncarbonated, unflavored sugar water.

> Could be worse. You could have typed "orbitz" into your Web browser and seen:
>
> -> features
> ->
> -> * Elastic - flesh can withstand over 300% elongation
> -> * Heat Resistant - can withstand over 300 degrees heat
> [...]

More Realdoll propaganda.

> Coming soon: Orbeez.
> It's a gaseous beverage with
> yellow and black dots that
> go right for your face!

I like to speculate about consumer goods filled with bees
("Bee In A Balloon") or my favorite form of fictional toxic waste,
liquid bees. This was just the latest evolution of the bee idea.

[continued in Part 3]

[James Kibo Parry]

After the thrilling conclusion of this exploration of my glossolalia,
stay tuned for exciting scenes from Andy Warhol's "Chair, Asleep".

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Subject: Re: FBI Puts Bizarre Cases on Internet

Associated Press headline.

> That cheapskate Hitler, trying to ride for free in a woman's lap!

Can't mention Hitler enough on Usenet!

> Ah! That would be that country we're always at was with on "Mission:
> Impossible", where all the signs say things like "PUBLEEK LIB[backwards R]ARIUM"
> and my personal favorite, "STOPPO". And they all speak English only with
> goofy mad scientist accents. And nobody ever has a character story,
> at least the good people.

Again. Can you tell I started watching "Mission: Impossible" reruns
(I'd never seen the original ones) every day recently?

> MY TAXES PAY YOUR SALARY.

Said to cops, librarians, etc. by large numbers of idiots, one at a time.

> "Dear [name of father of guy who wrote in asking for his records],
> The FBI has no files on you, especially concerning the year you
> asked about. During that year the FBI was on sabbatical."
>
> or
>
> "Dear [name as it appeared on the form], we cannot process your
> Freedom of Information request because you forgot to put your
> name on your form."

Experiences I had filing Freedom of Information requests.

> Eh, MacGuyver could have made a raft, two oars, AND three rubber
> raincoats from a rubber band and a grain of salt.

Bad TV show about a guy who was like "Mission: Impossible" only
just one guy.

> I liked all those "Blake's 7" novels by Clude Barrow.

That was supposed to say "Clyde" but I didn't catch the typo.
I was nailing Bonnie & Clyde's male half to Paul Darrow from
"Blake's 7", who wrote one novel about it. Not to be confused
with famous lawyer Darrow.

> I believe it was burned to fluffy marshmallow Peeps!

Easter marshmallow treat. Pink chicks squirted out of an
industrial machine.

> (INSERT MONTY PYTHON REFERENCE HERE. THEN TERRY GILLIAM WILL THINK
> OF SOME SEGUE TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH.)

Those Gilliam animations were in "Monty Python's Flying Circus"
for that reason: the script would say "TERRY, MAKE SOME CARTOON THAT
GETS US FROM THIS SCENE TO THIS SCENE" and he had to think of something fast.

> Subject: Re: Levay id an idolistc man

Alt.satanism subject line, typed by a moron.

> In alt.satanism, DONALD G. VASSAR (don...@calinet.com) wrote:
> >
> > Anton Levey isnt an saitanisit he is and egoistic bastard. He wants
> > everyone to think saitanisim is about him yet alone. Saitanisim is a form
> > if majik.not idolizing some man if you idolize anton then you must call
> > your self a chirstian because thats what it is is idolizing some one. He
> > wants you to think this that he is a god and all. Yet its just his ego
> > talking .
>
> I think we all know who the REAL saitainaisait bastaird is:
> Gairraiy Shaindlaing. But not his friend Rip Torn, 'cause he's
> got a cool name. You know, like Rip Taylor only not stupid.
>
> By the way, you spelled "magick" wrong.
>
> -- K.
>
> Rex Torn and Rip Hudson
> meet Manly Bannister in --
>
> Brock Rockwell's
> "The Memnosyne Rhizome!"

See above for Manly Bannister explanation. Garry Shandling and Rip Torn
were on "The Larry Sanders Show" until two weeks ago. Rip Taylor is
the annoying prop comedian that nobody likes. "The Memnosyne Rhizome"
is an attempt at a Robert Ludlum title. (Look up "Memnosyne", as it
relates to some other big words coming up. Assuming I spelled it right.)

> Subject: Re: Human Sex causing a Salmon-type-deterioration

Archimedes Plutonium (see above) has another bad idea.

> Or in your case, they spit out their word salad Salad Shooter-style.

(a) "word salad" = psychotic ravings. With an elastic melon squirrel
on Tuesday clouds nougat inside diaper maximum. (b) Salad Shooter =
product sold through TV commercials, for slicing vegetables and throwing
them onto your plate from up to six inches away. Not to be confused with
The Tater Twister, from the same people, a gadget which JUST makes
curly fries (remember them? They were popular for about a week in the
early 1990s)

> DIANA MULDAR: BRING ME THE DINK EXTRACT!

One of the three pilots of Gene Roddenberry's "Planet Earth" with John Saxon.
Exact quote.

> Well, you know what they say about hormones. "Your body can't make a
> vitamin."

Old, old joke.

> You're thinking of the Level 9 "Wish" spell in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

It ages you a year whenever you do it.

> Or in your case, The Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set Jr.: The Board Game.

NOBODY plays the baby versions of Dungeons & Dragons (of which several
exist, all different and incompatible with the Advanced one.)

> Never kiss a salmon on the lips.

"Never kiss a chicken on the lips." Vaudeville-era non-sequitur.

> MR. PHELPS, YOUR BODY WILL DETERIORATE IN FIVE SECONDS!

"Mission: Impossible" again.

> So if birds are so stupid how come they never come up with ridiculous
> theories about the Universe being a giant plutonium atom? How come
> none of them ever legally changed their name to something stupid like
> "Copernicus Molybdenum"? And furthermore, how come none of them are
> Scientologists?

Here's where Archie Plutonium gets nailed to L. Ron Hubbard.
Now everything mentioned here is tightly intertwined, part of the great plan.

> Speaking of such, I want to buy you a blow-up doll filled with
> uranium hexafluoride gas.

Lovedoll, perhaps?

> I'd rather look into peep shows.
> Scientifically, I mean.

I can't believe I didn't nail this to Peeps.

> HIP! THIGHS! BUTTOCKS!
> SPEED BOTTY!
>
> I'm sorry, that's from a
> "Hill-Barbera" cartoon.

See british slang like "botty" above and Benny Hill. "Wheels! Axles!
Transmission! Chassis! SPEED BUGGY!" was the opening of a really bad
Hanna-Barbera attempt to clone "Speed Racer" and/or "Scooby-Doo".

> Subject: CHiPs!!!

I wrote that subject line all by myself. Yes, that's the way they
always capitalize it in the California Highway Patrol, at least on TV.

> TNT IS MAKING A CHiPs REUNION TV-MOVIE WITH THE ORIGINAL CAST AND THEIR HAIR!
>
>
> I wonder if they'll have Bruce Jenner in it or just Larry Wilcox.
>
> And whether Harlan Ellison will still play the mechanic.
>
>
> Excuse me, gotta go dress up like Moltar from "Space Ghost" until the
> movie airs this September.
>
> -- K.
>
> Lava soap? Why would they
> ruin perfectly good lava?

okay,

(a) See above for Harlan Ellison explanation. There was a voluble, short
guy named "Harlan" as a character (the mechanic) on "CHiPs" who I've
always assumed was based on Harlan Ellison. Except he liked video games.

(b) Moltar on "Space Ghost Coast To Coast", the lavaman, loves "CHiPs"
for the car crashes (two pile-ups per hour.)

(c) Bruce Jenner was the sidekick on "CHiPs" for the final season.

> Subject: Re: What is the 5th Dimention

Seen in alt.sci.physics.new-theories.

> No, that's anniversary gifts. Dimensions go: rock, scissors, paper, time,
> nougat, Olestra, goldfish water, swirly marble center without the glass part,
> green Kleenex, Panty Cat.
>
> Of course, nobody know what Panty Cat really means.

See the 1996 a.r.k anthology volume for Panty Cat pictures.
Some bafflingly weird videogame character from Japan.

> I suggest we declare Bob Hope to be our Ambassador To The Panty Cat Dimension
> and buy him a half-way, whoops, I mean one-way ticket to visit it.

I haven't been mentioning all the Bob Hope references here because I
assume everyone in the world knows who he is. Anyway, this is one of
about 50000 references I made to his sudden and desired death, this week.

> then, someday, burly gnomes with little mithril pick-axes

Mithril is magical elf (and/or dwarf) metal, seen in things like
Tolkien novels and especial Dungeons & Dragons (above).

> burlap

That's THE WORD! AAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Wait, I haven't posted the 1997 book yet. Never mind.

> Subject: Re: unsubscribe

People who think they are reading mailing lists when they're reading
Usenet say the darndest things. Well, one thing.

> Sorry, Tennessee.
> Let's go see Mister Whoopee!

Financial service tagline for a product that was legal in 49 of 50 states,
plus Don Adams's most famous line as "Tennessee Tuxedo".

> Subject: Re: YOU WILL READ THIS MESSAGE

Spam subject.

> SAVE ALL YOUR MONEY! SEND ME PLASTIC STRIPS FROM ORANGE JUICE CANS INSTEAD!

Why doesn't someone come up with a non-leaky package for semi-frozen O.J.?

> IT'S LIKE THAT O.HENRY STORY, "THE THREE MUSKETEERS".

"Oh! Henry" is a candy bar, "O. Henry" was a writer.
It's like the difference between "Baby Ruth" and "Babe Ruth".

> ARE OBLIGATED TO BY LAW, YOU REALIZE THAT LORETTA SWIT'S NOSE JOB AND HAIRDO

Have you SEEN her lately? NO nose, and her skin is like taut vinyl...

> TO CONTACT THE BATTLESTAR GALACTICA EVERY 5.4 CENT-MINS. LIKE LORNE GREEN,

See? See? All roads lead to the Galactica!

> FIND THE BERT EYSEN REFERENCE!

I'll let you in on a little secret.

I don't know where my Bert Eysen reference is, because I don't know
who Bert Eysen is.

> Subject: Re: project raptor entry

Seen in alt.alien.visitors, where I was elected Spokesman For Earth.

> In alt.alien.visitors, snai...@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> >
> > There Is a prophecie that say's "In the year 1999 in the seventh month a great
> > king of terror will come from the sky." Project Raptor is to stop that.
> > Organized by U.I.P. Highly classafied. Cmdr. Snail320 We are looking for the
> > bravest, brightest,& strongest people.
>
> [then a few days later]
>
> > If you want to be in project raptor pick a callsign,
> > ex. falcon 1
>
> I'm taking "King Of Terror".

I have a hunch this will be a running gag. Anyway, I like "King Of Terror".

I don't know what snail320 is up to, but we seem to be having fun.
I hope I don't have to pay an initiation fee before going through
the spanking machine.

> King Of Terror reporting to Falcon 1 for orders. Should I stock up
> on cream pies, or try to take some more photos of Tony Randall?

Non-sequitur mention of beloved 78-year-old character actor who
just fathered his second child. 78! Wow.

I'm sure he'll outlive Bob Hope. Because there is justice in the Universe.

> -- Kibo, aka Code Name "King of Terror"
> Project Raptor Member Since 1998!
> I WILL NEVER CHANGE THIS .SIGNATURE

I've been figuring I'll drop that cow in a couple days.
***************************

> Subject: Re: M. OTIS BEARD AND FRIENDS

See "Drew Barrymore" topics above.

> By the way, are you a girl?

*THE* most obnoxious thing you can say in a "chat room", and believe me, you do.

> Or having it read to him by his amanuensis.

"amaneunsis" = someone who reads to an illiterate Pope or other stupid person.

> Not to be confused with his anamnesis, which he can't have until

"anamnesis" = recovering from amnesia. Also the act of awakening to the
glory of God, in theology, sometimes.

> we give him amnesia. I suggest a large flowerpot dropped from
> one of those sideways buildings on the old "Batman" show,
> plus some animated stars and chirping birds, will do the trick.

Victor Buono as "King Tut" on "Batman" always go amnesia from flowerpots.
He was also the mad scientist on "Man From Atlantis".

> > Ha hAAA, I have FINALLY finished the damn crossword
> > in the October 1974 issue of TV Guide! Ha HAAAAAA!
>
> Okay, so when you get done pencilling in the word "by", look up
> "amanuensis" just in case it pops up in one of those British Diagramless
> Double Invisible Triple DES-RSA-RZA-Encrypted crossword puzzles
> William Safire writes for the New York Times Sunday Bathroom Magazine.
>
> Also save the other words in at sentence, such as "Or", "having", "it",
> et cetera, in case you need them for the National Enquirer's C*O*L*O*R
> Crossword, where all the spaces for vowels are yellow and all the spaces
> for consonants are blue (I am not making up anything this stupid.)

TV Guide's crossword has never had a word with more than three letters.
British Diagramless crosswords are THE MOST ANNOYING AND POINTLESS things
outside alt.religion.kibology. British ones are the ones where all the
clues are ritualized word games ("Mixed-up bear swallows small chef [7,4]")
that can be understood only by people who know the secret rules, and
diagramless crosswords are ones where they don't tell you where all the
numbers or black squares go -- they just give you the clues and you have
to figure out how the words interlock on your own. Yuk.

William Safire does NOT draw the crossword puzzle. Does Eugene T. Maleska
still do it?

> I've often wondered why elementary school isn't called "low school",
> or why high school isn't called "molecular compound school".

See, "elementary" is the opposite of "molecular com--aw, heck with it.

> Subject: Re: Laa Laa excercise question

From alt.tv.teletubbies (see above re "Teletubbies".)

> and the two are as rigid as Peter Graves doing the Macarena.

I feel that Peter Graves ruined "Mission: Impossible" when he replaced
Steven Hill. Remember the Macarena?

I'm going to keep mentioning it every six months so you'll never forget.

MACARENA!!!!

Subject: Re: Shatner to replace Hartman on NewsRadio

Someone reporting something that may or may not be true, depending
on whether it happens.

> I'm still worried about the fact that Leonard Nimoy is replacing
> Martin Landau in the "Space: 1999" movie. I don't think Leonard Nimoy has
> ever before been chosen for a role that Martin Landau had.

See, when Landau didn't want the role of Spock on "Star Trek", Nimoy took
it. Landau did "Mission: Impossible" instead, then got sick of it and
quit... so they, too, hired Leonard Nimoy. So it stands to reason
that Nimoy will be in the nonexistent "Space:1999" movie.

> King of seaQuest Science

Archimedes Plutonium declared himself "King of Science" (also
"Emperor of Science"), and of course this is a variant of
"King of Terror".

> Subject: Re: Can't get a star named 'Archimedes Plutonium'

Stupid "buy your own star or lunar crater" scam.

> That's cause the nerd you gave your five dollars to read through every
> document in the Library Of Congress

They always say they'll register your name buy putting it in a document
in the Library of Congress. I.e. they'll type it onto a piece of paper
and submit a copyright application.

> King of Terra

Terra = Earth.

In bad science fiction, humans are "Terrans", except in really bad
sci-fi, where they are "Ter-rans" (and the moon's surface is "lu-nar".)

> Subject: Re: Abolishing Ig'in'nince

Some other guy's subject.

> In Japan they call David Hasselhoff "The Spice Girls
> Of The United States."
>
> I'm still wondering what Bruce Boxleitner and David Hasselhoff will name
> their baby. I say if it's a boy they should call him Screaming Blue Frisbee
> Hasselleitner, and if it's a talking car they should call him KRIT
> (Komputer Robot Identicant Toddler).

Okay, go all the way to the top of this document and you should see
something about "Tron" and the killer frisbee. Bruce Boxleitner is
also the star of "Babylon 5". Anyway, the Spice Girls just broke up,
and everyone loves David Hasselhoff's name, so... well, I can't think
of any reason these people are together.

> Yes, I meant to use the non-word
> "Identicant" in a sentence, marking the
> first use of this bozo word-like entity
> outside "Small Wonder" ("Vicki" got her
> name, in early episodes, from her model
> "VK-1" but in later episodes they said
> she was "VICI: Voice Input Child Identicant".
> I still say it was in bad taste for the
> final episode to show Harrison Ford
> shooting her in the back while she goes
> through a hundred plate glass windows while
> wearing only a transparent raincoat filled
> with a mixture of stage blood and smoke
> from big yellow unfiltered French cigarettes.)

You can actually read some essays by "Small Wonder"'s technical advisor
(TECHNICAL ADVISOR?) on the Web. This was the show about the sassy little
girl robot who always wore the same dress and talked in a robot voice
and nobody knew she was a robot and they had an all-toddler laugh track.

> Subject: Re: I swear I'm not making this up

Another report of a William Shatner media appearance with the Spice Girls!

> I always liked him so much better than that other guy,
> the imitable Captain Kirk. He looked a lot like that Henry Polic guy
> only he kept saying "Judy, Judy, Judy" and "Play it again, Sam!"
> and "Billions and billions".

Henry Polic has made a career out of playing Shatner. Or was that
Kevin Polic? Anyhow, "Judy, Judy, Judy" and the other two are
things people say in impressions, but do not correspond to anything
the famous person ever said.

> Felix: "It's not spaghetti, it's Bob Hope!"
>
> Oscar: "Now it's DEAD!"

The spaghetti/linguini debate from the original "Odd Couple" play.
The only memorable or interesting line in the whole thing.
"Now it's GARBAGE!"

> Subject: Re: Ha ha Etienne

Dean Lenort trying to make fun of Etienne Rouette's name, or vice versa.

> IT'S RICHARD SIMMONS'S DEAL A-NELORT! LOSE WEIGHT AND GAIN SOME CARDS!

Needs no explanation.

> Dear Deanna Lenort,
>
> Please learn to spell the name of your half-human son, Spoc.
>
> Your Pal, Majel Rouette-Roddenberry.

Deanna was the half-Betazoid woman on "Star Trek".
Mrs. Roddenberry (widow of the show's owner) played her mother on the show.
Spock was also a half-breed. Never mind. This is getting tiring
and increasingly pointless.

> > Don't believe me? Check the headers from one of Kibo's recent posts. I
> > win again Lews Therin.
>
> Didn't he have some crazy theory that if you froze frame #85689689060
> of episode #4 of "Science Fiction Theatre" you could see the hidden
> wire leading to Truman Bradley's head? Or was the the guy who said you
> could make loud noises just by sticking your hand into a Jacob's Ladder?

Lev Theremin invented the musical instrument where you waved your hand
near two raido antennas. A Jacob's Ladder looks similar but has lightning
bolts going between the two antennae. Truman Bradley hosted
"Science Fiction Theatre", which always opened with ridiculously fake
made-up "science" lessons.

Lewis Stiller's obsession was finding the BEST frame in all of "Alien".

> I think my building, or at least one of the adjacent ones, got hit
> by lightning today; I saw the flash and heard the BANG (and it was
> really loud, and echoed for a long time) simultaneously, but also
> heard the preceding "crackle-crackle-crackle" sound of bees crushing walnuts
> wrapped in wax paper for a few seconds before the strike.
>
> A sound quite recognizable from the Museum Of Science... where, incidentally,
> all the exhibits are completely wrong given what I learned from Truman Bradley.

True, including the part about Truman Bradley being a lying bastard.

> King of Science Fiction Terrore

"The Truman Show", now in theaters, has nothing to do with
"Science Fiction Theatre", which is spelled -re.

* Imagine David Warner shouting this while holding a glowing Frisbee.**

** "Tron", the first "Babylon 5" movie.

*** Another urban legend says that, in Spanish, this means "Skin Suffocation".

**** South Africa.

***** Which may be right even though it's not spelled that way.

****** Actually Philo Drummond wrote much of the early doctrine with
Stang. Stang's real name is not "Ivan Stang", it's "David Potter".

******* You can't see it at http://world.std.com/help/web/index.shtml.
Partly because it's not done and partly because you'll get a 403 error if
you try to learn anything without first paying The World's low membership fee.

******** She spelled her name that way so as not to be confused
with men named "Ann".

********* After that they did Steven Spielberg's TV-movie "Savage"
and "The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island" and then they
divorced because he was holding her career back.

********** About 1/4 of the 20,000,000 comedy skits he made in his
Philadelphia basement are about him insulting scribbles signed "Picasso".
"IF MY KID DREW DIS IT'D BE INNA DUMPER WHERE IT BELONGS!"

*********** After "Wanna see a picture of my pride and joy?"

************ General Heywood Kirk. Not making this up. Whit met the
REAL Kirk in "The Trouble With Tribbles".

************* A Usenet news program which is the reason that gnus
is pronounced "guh-nuhz", because there was already a "gnews".

************** Supposedly the world's worst sci-fi story, but I think
it's been, um, "retouched" to make it funnier.

*************** This is the one science fiction novel I have read the
most times, probably. Inspired a lot of "2001" and/or parts of
"Babylon 5".

**************** Robbie "Oliver" Rist, after the first episode, was
replaced by Patrick "No Relation" Stuart. Both "Dr. Zee"'s were spliced
together in the "movie" version, "Conquest Of The Earth", except that
Patrick Stuart was "Dr. Zee's twin brother Dr. Zed" there.

***************** There is NOTHING British about James Bond movies except
for some of the actors.

****************** Like a diaper with an eyeball on it.

******************* Not to be confused with John Bell, who either
used a typeface (later to become Monotype Bell) in 1788 which looked
very nice, or was the production designer for Gerry & Sylvia Anderson's
"Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons".

******************** "The Wizard Of Speed And Time".

********************* Bucky Lewis: unfunny local TV comedy skit person
who has (or had) a crummy little show on channel 50 in New Hampshire.
Some bozo who thinks he's Benny Hill. Even Len Cella (see above) is
funnier. (And of course neither comes close to the late Benny Hill.)

********************** I once actually got a Marvel No-Prize from
"Crazy" magazine, Marvel's imitation of "Mad"! Yay!

************************ Lewis Carroll's term for sticking together
two words. "portmanteau" is a collapsing suitcase. He used many
portmanteau words in "Jabberwocky", e.g. "slithy" = "slimy" + "lithe".

************************* The "Perry Rhodan" stories featured "Pucky The
Mouse-Beaver", who was, in the original German, "Gucky". I am not making
this up.

************************** Douglas, not Richard.

*************************** "Dropping the cow" is when you terminate
the horse that you're beating to death because it's not worth keeping
it alive to reach closure.

THE END!

-- K.

My lava lamp just drew an
exclamation point.

[Nick S Bensema]

In article <kibo-19069...@ppp0a008.std.com>,

James "Kibo" Parry <ki...@world.std.com> wrote:
>> Subject: Re: Roman numeral calculator in COBOL
>
>Nick Bensema's subject line, showing off his super-nerdy homework.
>
>On sci.*, you see "PLEASE DO MY HOMEWORK FOR ME SCIENCE PEOPLE!!!"
>
>On a.r.k, you see Nick Bensema doing his OWN homework.

You got me. A few months from now everyone will use my program as their
COBOL homework. The sad thing is, I really did program it myself. And
it really does work.

>> "The inside of your mouth is a steamy ninety-eight point six degrees."
>

>Two TV commercials I am extremely tired of seeing.

That doesn't air much in Phoenix, because ninety-eight point six degrees
is actually colder than the air outside.

>AppleScript is one of the world's dopiest-looking languages, even more
>so than COBOL. It looks like this (actual example:)
>
>on MakeAppleAliases(theList)
> set NoItemsSelectedFlag to true -- initialize the flag
> tell application "Finder"
> repeat with x in theList
> set NoItemsSelectedFlag to false
> try
> make new alias file at apple menu items folder to x
> on error
> error "There was an error making the alias."
> end try
> end repeat
> end tell

It looks exactly like what COBOL would look like if it couldn't do anything
useful to anyone at any time.

The only reason so many people put up with COBOL is because it allows the
crunching and printing of important stuff like payroll and subscriptions
and orders and sales. You take that away and all you have is a really
really verbose language that makes mortals pull their hair out.

If it were up to me, PC's sold today would boot to BASIC.

--
Nick Bensema <ni...@primenet.com> 98-KUPD Red Card #710563 UIN: 2135445
~~~~ ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Alex Suter]

Thus spake ni...@primenet.com (Nick S Bensema):

>The only reason so many people put up with COBOL is because it allows the
>crunching and printing of important stuff like payroll and subscriptions
>and orders and sales. You take that away and all you have is a really
>really verbose language that makes mortals pull their hair out.

Having recently learned AWK, I say COBOL should be
reorbited to become a born again AWK. AWK is like
C, except you don't have to declare variables and
the use of the semicolon is even more mysterious.

DO NOT QUESTION THE PLACEMENT OF THE SEMICOLON!

Who you calling Aho?
Alex

P.S. ULMAN. OF COURSE.
--
Alex Suter
"Unknown Banker Buys Atlantic"
http://world.std.com/~asuter

[Stefan Kapusniak]

In alt.religion.kibology, asu...@world.std.com (Alex Suter) wrote:

>Having recently learned AWK, I say COBOL should be
>reorbited to become a born again AWK. AWK is like
>C, except you don't have to declare variables and
>the use of the semicolon is even more mysterious.

My method for working out where the semi-colons
go in any given programming language...

1. Put the semi-colons in where you have a vague
suspicion that they should go. Attempt to
compile the program.

2. If the program compiles, or you're not working
in a compiled language goto step 4.

3. Move the semi-colons somewhere else that looks
like it might be right. Attempt to compile the
program, then go back to step 2

4. Run the program.

5. If the program does what you want it to up to
a point after the blocks where you were unsure
about where to put the semi-colons, then you are
done with that bit, otherwise go back to step 3

6. Slowly you learn the reflex of putting the
semi-colons in the right place. Of course you'll
never be able to _explain_ why you have to put
the semi-colons in those places, but this isn't
usually a problem. Users would probably get
scared and confused if you started explaining that
sort of technical stuff to them.

7. If you're really desperate you could try finding
some sort of documentation and try to work out
where the fuck to put the semi-colons in your
code from that. However drinking yourself to
death is probably a more interesting method of
committing suicide.

I once posted a variant of this strategy to an online
conference on a bbs, it was full of teachers, just
like the monolith. They were discussing the right place
to put semicolons in some st0pid snippet of Pascal code
they had.

They said they found my suggestion 'interesting'.

Of course the punch card, and switch flipping guys
out there, would probably describe it as 'fucking
horrifying'. But then I grew up corrupted by the
riches of machine cycles available on a personal
computer and thus didn't have their advantages.

-- Kapusniak, Stefan m

[The Sebastians]

Nick S Bensema wrote:
>
> In article <kibo-19069...@ppp0a008.std.com>,
> James "Kibo" Parry <ki...@world.std.com> wrote:

> >> Subject: Re: Roman numeral calculator in COBOL
> >

> If it were up to me, PC's sold today would boot to BASIC.
>

Dear me, I miss BASIC a lot. You could do real neat things with
it like make programs that insulted your friends and real crude
animated pictures (moving ASCII). It's because of BASIC that I
learned that the answer to secret of life is not 42, as previously
mentioned by Terry Pratchett, but SYNTAX ERROR. Say it with me,
fellas:

SYNNNNNTAXXXXX ERRRRORRRRRR

Don't you feel better now?

> --
> Nick Bensema <ni...@primenet.com> 98-KUPD Red Card #710563 UIN: 2135445
> ~~~~ ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Trisha L. Sebastian
[.sig file available when pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete
on a TI-85 calculator]

[Jorn Barger]

James "Kibo" Parry <ki...@world.std.com> wrote:

> British ones are the ones where all the
> clues are ritualized word games ("Mixed-up bear swallows small chef [7,4]")
> that can be understood only by people who know the secret rules

Back in the late 60s, Stephen Sondheim composed these for New York
Magazine, apparently during a dry spell between West Side Story (which
is on tv at the moment, colorised and dubbed into Spanish) and his later
string of classic Broadway hits.

His last one was a special New Years competition (Dec 1969) which was
won by... me!

My winning clue said "The math teacher can take two pens and
joint-hektograph parallel lines." which was a secret code for "monastic"
("...and join theM ON A STICk to graph...")

The prize was a $30 bookstore gift certificate (Brentano's), with which
I bought my first books about James Joyce.

And now you know, the rest of zzzzzzzzzzzzz....

j
--
I EDIT THE NET: <URL:http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblogs/weblog.html>
"In human stupidity, when it is not malicious, there is something very
touching, even beautiful... There always is." --Leo Tolstoy

[Nick S Bensema]

In article <Euv47...@world.std.com>, Alex Suter <asu...@world.std.com> wrote:
>Thus spake ni...@primenet.com (Nick S Bensema):
>>The only reason so many people put up with COBOL is because it allows the
>>crunching and printing of important stuff like payroll and subscriptions
>>and orders and sales. You take that away and all you have is a really
>>really verbose language that makes mortals pull their hair out.
>

>Having recently learned AWK, I say COBOL should be
>reorbited to become a born again AWK. AWK is like
>C, except you don't have to declare variables and
>the use of the semicolon is even more mysterious.

I once almost wrote an entire almost-newsreader in AWK. Maybe I"ll
post that too. I also used a combination of awk and sh to aud ne ub
the study of kanji... in color. I'll post that too.

[Dag ]gren FYSI]

Alex Suter (asu...@world.std.com) wrote:
> Who you calling Aho?

Stop trollering me into pretending that I'm a really patriotic Finnish
Citizen again.

--
I)/\(, - Dag Agren - dag...@abo.fi - Goaway on IRC
Please don't go to http://www.abo.fi/~dagren/
-> Legalize oregano! <-

[James Kibo Parry]

Jorn Barger (jo...@mcs.com) wrote:
>
> James "Kibo" Parry (ki...@world.std.com) wrote:
> >
> > British [crossword puzzles] are the ones where all the

> > clues are ritualized word games ("Mixed-up bear swallows small chef [7,4]")

> > that can be understood only by people who know the secret rules
>
> Back in the late 60s, Stephen Sondheim composed these for New York
> Magazine, apparently during a dry spell between West Side Story (which
> is on tv at the moment, colorised and dubbed into Spanish) and his later
> string of classic Broadway hits.
>
> His last one was a special New Years competition (Dec 1969) which was
> won by... me!
>
> My winning clue said "The math teacher can take two pens and
> joint-hektograph parallel lines." which was a secret code for "monastic"
> ("...and join theM ON A STICk to graph...")
>
> The prize was a $30 bookstore gift certificate (Brentano's), with which
> I bought my first books about James Joyce.

TEN REASONS THERE IS SOMETHING DEEPLY WRONG WITH JORN BARGER

1.) He does British-style crossword puzzles.

2.) Which aren't even from Britain.

3.) He remembers who wrote every crossword puzzle he ever did.

4.) He can use "joint-hektograph" in a sentence.

5.) He didn't turn it into a cool "pot" joke. BOB DENVER, DUDE, WOOOOO!!!!!

6.) He won a British-style crossword contest.

7.) He gave Jorn Barger a Special Prize.

8.) Jorn Barger used it to buy books not BY but ABOUT James Joyce.

9.) His FIRST books about James Joyce, implying that he has since
amassed a huge library of nearly identical books.

10.) He felt he had to explain "...and join theM ON A STICk..." to us.
Next he'll post "When is a door not a door? When it is ajar (A JAR)!"

JORN BARGER, GO BACK TO ALT DOT MENSA!!!!

-- K.

pseudo-anti-intellectual,
not anti-pseudo-intellectual

[TarlaStar]

tw...@whatsthepoint.net (Jahweh D. Lynch) wrote:

>Thus spake James "Kibo" Parry:

>>Easter marshmallow treat. Pink chicks squirted out of an
>>industrial machine.

>I always wondered where Pink chicks came from. Where do Pinkboys come
>from?

Pink Snatch

[Alex Suter]

Thus spake ni...@primenet.com (Nick S Bensema):

>Alex Suter <asu...@world.std.com> wrote:
>>Having recently learned AWK, I say COBOL should be
>>reorbited to become a born again AWK. AWK is like
>>C, except you don't have to declare variables and
>>the use of the semicolon is even more mysterious.
>
>I once almost wrote an entire almost-newsreader in AWK. Maybe I"ll
>post that too. I also used a combination of awk and sh to aud ne ub
>the study of kanji... in color. I'll post that too.

alt.nick.bensema.does.my-homework.

I see a great need.

I once wrote a functional word processor in BASIC. I
used it to write a paper for 10th grade history, but I
spent so much time getting the damn thing to work I
didn't have time to actually write a good paper.

Needless to say, I got the job.

--
Alex Suter
"Hmrmf rghr phphot my son sjde wine mmfrfr hrmmd ds fjgifkill Gallo!"
http://world.std.com/~asuter

[TheW...@mindless.com]

In article <kibo-19069...@ppp0a008.std.com>,

ki...@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) wrote:
>

> > Yes, I meant to use the non-word
> > "Identicant" in a sentence, marking the
> > first use of this bozo word-like entity
> > outside "Small Wonder" ("Vicki" got her
> > name, in early episodes, from her model
> > "VK-1" but in later episodes they said
> > she was "VICI: Voice Input Child Identicant".
> > I still say it was in bad taste for the
> > final episode to show Harrison Ford
> > shooting her in the back while she goes
> > through a hundred plate glass windows while
> > wearing only a transparent raincoat filled
> > with a mixture of stage blood and smoke
> > from big yellow unfiltered French cigarettes.)
>
> You can actually read some essays by "Small Wonder"'s technical advisor
> (TECHNICAL ADVISOR?) on the Web. This was the show about the sassy little
> girl robot who always wore the same dress and talked in a robot voice
> and nobody knew she was a robot and they had an all-toddler laugh track.
>

First off, Small Wonder had a live mixed adult studio audience, not a laugh
track...
You know, you can knock this show all you want but the fact (Sci-Fi Channel's)
remains that more sci-fi fans saw it than Earth-2 and ALF and it's one of the
more memorable shows from the eighties.
Sure, I'm a Vicki fan (I'm also a de>
<input type=

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
http://www.dejanews.com/ Now offering spam-free web-based newsreading

[Felix Ze Cat]

Kibo, you warp space and time like "Event Horizon." Or perhaps
that big brainy thing in "Dune."

Frack!

--
The Pink Files --> http://www.goodnet.com/~jontomas

Riding the short bus to the school of life.

[Felix Ze Cat]

Hitler and sex shall be the staple of our conversation. Let no
post pass through the proper channels without flavour.

Hitler and sex are the virii of any topic. They infest the
lowest to the highest of "man's" thoughts until one day inner
and outer spaces become one. Then you can stick your finger in
my pudding.

[Joseph Michael Bay]

asu...@world.std.com (Alex Suter) writes:

>alt.nick.bensema.does.my-homework.

>I see a great need.

Sounds like a winner.

>I once wrote a functional word processor in BASIC. I
>used it to write a paper for 10th grade history, but I
>spent so much time getting the damn thing to work I
>didn't have time to actually write a good paper.

I did that, except instead of writing a word processor in BASIC
I wrote my paper as a series of PRINT statements. Unfortunately
the computer was one of those Timex-Sinclair things with the
little tiny printer that uses toilet paper.

Well, "appropriately" is more fitting than "unfortunately".

210 END

--
"Never mind if it's impossible. Joe Bay
What else can we hope to attain Stanford University
but the impossible?" Department of Forensic
-- Hakim Bey, Imaginary Shi'i Proctology

[Teg Pipes]

asu...@world.std.com (Alex Suter) writes:
> Thus spake ni...@primenet.com (Nick S Bensema):

> >I once almost wrote an entire almost-newsreader in AWK. Maybe I"ll

> >post that too. I also used a combination of awk and sh to aud ne ub
> >the study of kanji... in color. I'll post that too.
>

> alt.nick.bensema.does.my-homework.
>
> I see a great need.

This proposal is rejected for the following reasons:

[x] Creates orphan hierarchies

i.e., this should be alt.do-my-homework.nick.bensema.
Then we could simultaneously newgroup
alt.do-my-homework.Archimedes.Plutonium and alt.do-my-homework.Serdar-Argic.

Unless the new hierarchy would involve stuff for Nick Bensema to do, like
alt.nick.bensema.does-your-mom or alt.nick.bensema.does-donkeys.

-alt.Teg.does-everyone

[TheW...@mindless.com]

First off, Small Wonder had a live mixed adult studio audience not any laugh
track. . . You know, you can knock this show all ya want but the fact is
(Sci-Fi Channel's) remains that more sci-fi fans watched it than Earth-2 and
ALF and it's one of the more memorable shows from the eighties. Sure. I'm a
Vicki fan (I'm also a deep ER and NYPD Blue fan too) and like lots of sci-fi
fans coming out of the closet to admit they watched Small Wonder I mas
disappointed that they didn't seriously follow through with the great sci-fi
potential that the show's unique premise had. In that point it was usually
pretty juvenile, I agree, but that didn't make it bad or the least thought
provoking at times. It's a very hard sci-fi concept to do. In fact there's
very few sci-fi books into the ramifications of domestic androids in the
house and affecting a family even though every indicator says they'll be in
there when the technology happens. Small Wonder at least tried to pose the
question of what it'd be like. If you read the stuff in the Small Wonder home
page you'll see how lots of top sci-fi writers on the Small Wonder moved on
The Twilight Zone and Amazing Stories and ST:TNG and how some of Commander
Data's technical terms come from Small Wonder.For all it's faults I'm glad
Small Wonder happened because maybe someone will try it again and do it right
this time. You don't have be an Einstein to knom it's a very tough show to do
and most actor or actress playing robots risk being stereotyped out of a
career just like Tiffany Brissette was, and she was listed as a Variety mag
hot new child talent, and that's also why Robert Foxworth and Julie Newmar
had misgivings of starring as robots too.

The Wraith

[mar...@kinekom.com]

In article
<xd9vhpt...@fruitfly.i-have-a-misconfigured-system-so-shoot-me>, Teg
Pipes <t...@fruitfly.berkeley.edu> wrote:

>

>
> -alt.Teg.does-everyone
>

Including, apparently, the neighbor's car.

YHBW

Mark McKenzie
or someone like him

[Etienne Rouette]

In article <6mme8q$p...@amy2.Stanford.EDU>, jm...@leland.Stanford.EDU
says...

>
> I did that, except instead of writing a word processor in BASIC
> I wrote my paper as a series of PRINT statements. Unfortunately
> the computer was one of those Timex-Sinclair things with the
> little tiny printer that uses toilet paper.
>

I used to play bowling and Frogger on one of these, requiring only about
20 minutes of loading time. Cool!

I don't remember having seen the toilet paper, though.

But now that I think about it, those painful on-the-bowl memories . . .
Nah! Can't be.

E. Rouette

[David J. Crowe]

In article <kibo-19069...@ppp0a008.std.com>, ki...@world.std.com
(James "Kibo" Parry) wrote:

[stuff snipped]

> William Safire does NOT draw the crossword puzzle. Does Eugene T. Maleska

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> still do it?

Dead. Very anti-Bob Hope.

Now for some unrelated garbage. Yesterday, I woke up from my afternoon
nap just in time to catch the new BIG K-Mart commercial. There at the end
of the ad was Bob Hope. Predictably, they had him say something wacky
which I can't remember. Looked like they had him stuffed in the corner
booth at [pick one:] Shoney's/Perkins/IHOP/Village Inn/Bob Evans/Country
Kitchen. I assume the folks at ILM created this spot since you could
tell it wasn't Disney's animatronic version of BH they use in all the
parades.

- DAve "now with added terror!" C.
--
Remove the SPAMMY thing if you really want to reply.

[James Kibo Parry]

Teg Pipes (t...@fruitfly.berkeley.edu) wrote:
>
> Alex Suter (asu...@world.std.com) writes:
> >
> > Thus spake Nick S Bensema (ni...@primenet.com):

> > >
> > > I once almost wrote an entire almost-newsreader in AWK. Maybe I"ll
> > > post that too. I also used a combination of awk and sh to aud ne ub
> > > the study of kanji... in color. I'll post that too.
> >
> > alt.nick.bensema.does.my-homework.
> >
> > I see a great need.
>
> This proposal is rejected for the following reasons:
>
> [x] Creates orphan hierarchies
>
> i.e., this should be alt.do-my-homework.nick.bensema.

Also:

[x] I don't want him to do YOUR homework, I want

alt.nick.bensema.does.kibo's-homework.

> Then we could simultaneously newgroup
> alt.do-my-homework.Archimedes.Plutonium and alt.do-my-homework.Serdar-Argic.

I sense a sequel to Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" coming on,
with Harrison Ford as Harrison Bergeron and George Harrison as
Diana Moon Glampers, ghostwritten by Harry Harrison.

IN THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE, EVERYONE IS EQUAL. STUDENTS WHO ARE ABOVE
AVERAGE IN SCHOOL ARE FORCED TO ALLOW ARCHIMEDES PLUTONIUM TO DO THEIR
HOMEWORK FOR THEM. PEOPLE WHO ARE TOO SANE ARE FORCED TO LISTEN TO
ARCHIMEDES PLUTONIUM 24 HOURS A DAY VIA TINY RADIOS IMPLANTED IN THEIR
EARDRUMS. PEOPLE WHO ENJOY READING THE INTERNET WILL BE FORCED TO
READ ARCHIMEDES PLUTONIUM'S RANTS.

"SON OF HARRISON BERGERON" -- Coming soon to a literary magazine near you!

> Unless the new hierarchy would involve stuff for Nick Bensema to do, like
> alt.nick.bensema.does-your-mom or alt.nick.bensema.does-donkeys.

That could be a new cheapo Fox "reality" show, "YOU THE VIEWER CAN THINK
OF STUFF YOU WANT NICK BENSEMA TO DO!"

"I want to see him blow up a balloon larger than the Solar System."

"I want to see him sleeping curled up in a giant rotting pumpkin."

"I want to see him eat a box of dried tapioca pearls and then drink Zima."

"I want to see him go down an infinitely long slide made of blackboard
material while wearing pants made of chalk."

"I want to see him wear so much makeup that it becomes self-aware and
develops an dangerous intelligence that seizes control of his skin."

"I want to see him try to balance an egg on end."

(That last one's for the second half of the season when the budget runs out
and the show has to be come STUPID.)

-- K.

Anyone want to see ME curled
up in a giant rotting pumpkin?

[James Kibo Parry]

David J. Crowe (cr...@radiks.net) wrote:
>
> James "Kibo" Parry (ki...@world.std.com) wrote:
> >

> > William Safire does NOT draw the crossword puzzle. Does Eugene T. Maleska

> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > still do it?
>
> Dead. Very anti-Bob Hope.

Are you saying I'm dead? YOU ANTI-ANTI-HOPE-ITE!

> Now for some unrelated garbage. Yesterday, I woke up from my afternoon
> nap just in time to catch the new BIG K-Mart commercial. There at the end
> of the ad was Bob Hope. Predictably, they had him say something wacky
> which I can't remember. Looked like they had him stuffed in the corner
> booth at [pick one:] Shoney's/Perkins/IHOP/Village Inn/Bob Evans/Country
> Kitchen. I assume the folks at ILM created this spot since you could
> tell it wasn't Disney's animatronic version of BH they use in all the
> parades.

It was actually at a Denny's, except they changed back to the original
"Sambo's" sign just for Bob's cameo. I believe the commercial in question
showed him blinking his eyes, or trying to, played back at one-tenth speed
to get the most mileage out of the footage, while Rich Little did a
voiceover in his trademark "Rich Little Generic Celebrity Voice":

PENNY MARSHALL: "Look, guys, we're in K-Mart!"

REAL BOB HOPE: (looks befuddled in slow motion)

RICH LITTLE (voice-over): "I am Bob Hope!"

PENNY MARSHALL (on a different soundstage a thousand miles away):
"I love K-Mart and you too Bob!"

RON HOWARD (wearing an oil drum on his head to cover up his bald spot):
"Golly gee, K-Mart is swell! It's so swelly!"

ROSIE O'DONNELL: "WATCH MY TV SHOW, YOU [BLEEEEEEEEEEEEP] BASTARDS!!!!"

> - DAve "now with added terror!" C.

-- King of Added Terror

[Stephen Will Tanner]

On Mon, 22 Jun 1998 22:25:44 GMT, TheW...@mindless.com wrote:

[ nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd nerd ]

>For all it's faults I'm glad Small Wonder happened because maybe someone will

>try it again and do it right this time.

I don't know what he wants, but I know how to get it.

So come on, baby, let's do it again!

The Sci-Fi Channel Presents
SMALL WONDER 2000
THE MOVIE!
"The Sci-Fi Channel: You'll lap up anything we serve you (tm)"

[ The scene: An all-American basement. Two all-American teenage boys,
Jason and Rick, are playing all-American rock and roll. Badly. ]

Jason: Oooh, and you're running.
Running on a serious wire.
Oooh, and you're running.
Running on a chalice of fire.

[ Rick stops tapping a tupperware tub with his drumsticks ]

Jason: There's a shot on the water and a bolt in the heart
Mind over matter is the dangerous part
And the line in the mirror is a sliver of steel
Now she remembers how the innocent feel

Rebecca: [ From upstairs ] Jason, Mom wants to know if Rick's staying
for dinner!

Jason: [sings louder, pretending not to hear]
SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING WIRE!
SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING FIRE!
SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING DEATH!

Rebecca: Jason, come uuuuup! It's time to eat!

Jason: In a MINute! JEEZ! USS! [ He glares at RICK, who has lost
interest in his tupperware drumming and is leafing through a copy of
The Collected Poetry of Robert Frost ]

Rick: [realizes he's being stared at] What?

Jason: C'mon!

Rick: Come on what?

Jason: [points at book] Come ON!

Rick: Come on Eileen! Yeah, yeah, come on Eileen! [stops as he
remembers he's forgotten the words]

Jason: Dude. We're supposed to be a ROCK BAND here. You know, rock
and roll! We're rebels! We don't read frikkin' literature! We don't
take crap from anybody! We don't cross at the crosswalk!

Rick: What DO we do?

Jason: You know. Play guitar. And...hang out on TV. And...uh...play
guitar while leaning way back and looking cool! [he strums his guitar
while leaning way back]

Rick: Dude, XYZ PDQ!

[Jason falls over, knocking over some boxes. A large teddy bear falls
on him. Rick laughs an annoying, made-for-TV laugh]

Jason: Dude, you suck lots.

[Jason takes a big swig of Surge]

Rick: Anyway, you just want to impress Jennifer.

[Jason spit-takes all over Rick]

[from upstairs] Rebecca: Come ON, Jason! It's six thirty, time for
dinner!

Rick: Six thirty? I gotta get to soccer practice! [He wipes his
hands on Jason's shoulder and runs up the stairs. The camera follows
him up, then pulls back as he runs through the kitchen, almost bumping
into DAD. Rick scurries out the door and out of the movie]

[Dad is a forever-chipper, hey-there-how's-it-going, weekend-camping
kind of guy. He is carrying a big lumpy sleeping bag containing...
SOMETHING]

Dad: Jason! Rebecca! Honey! Look what I got!

[MOM, REBECCA, and JASON enter]

Mom: [brushing hands on apron] Oh, honey, not another garage sale?

Dad: [oblivious] I got a great deal. It's a robot!

Jason: Sounds better than the diet shampoo you got last time.

Dad: [still oblivious] It's a Voice Indemnifying Child Replicant, or
something like that.

Mom: Honey, you still haven't cleaned up after the exploding
combination-ant-farm-and-lava-lamp.

Dad: [less oblivious] It can help out around the house. Leave us more
time to go fishing, huh Jason?

Rebecca: Sounds better than the disco-ball-hat with the 10-pound
flashlight on it.

Dad: That came with a free scratch-pad!

[ Suddenly, an arm sticks its way out of the bag. They all stare at
it for several seconds ]

Rebecca: So, did Mr. Daumer also give you a great deal on knives?

<< Commercial break >>

[ In the kitchen, the family is eating--except for Dad, who is
prodding at Vici with a screwdriver. Vici is looking a bit
bedraggled, with some bare metal showing where skin has been scraped
away. She also has several Hello Kitty stickers attached to her. ]

Mom: Honey, you've been working on that thing all week.

Dad: [tinkering] The observicator connects to the cognization unit...

Rebecca: And the cognization unit's connected to the...thigh bone!

Mom: Pass the rolls, sweetie.

Dad: [tinker tinker tinker]

Mom: So, Jason, what are you doing for New Year's?

Rebecca: He's not going to the dance, because Jennifer broke her--

Jason: Oww!

Rebecca: Ha ha, Jason kicked the table leg instead of me!

Jason: That's not funny, you smart-assed little--

Mom: Kids! Kids! Hon?

Dad: [abstracted] Don't talk with your mouth full, Jason.

Jason: Yeah, whatever. Ow.

Vici: *beep*

Dad: [triumphant] Did you hear that? Did you hear that!?

Mom: Honey, come on now, your tuna casserole is getting cold.

Dad: [speaking slowly and loudly, as if to a foreigner] Hello Vici!
We're your new family! I'm your father! This is Jason! And here is
Rebecca!

Jason: [mimicking Dad's voice] But you can call her Wench-queen!

Rebecca: Hey!

Dad: And over here...is your mother.

Vici: *whirr* *click* I'LL TELL YOU ABOUT MY MOTHER!

[ Vici begins stagger around the room, jerking erratically, scattering
kitchen utinsels hither and yon. It becomes horribly clear that she
is dancing the Macarena ]

Dad: Ha ha! This is great!

Rebecca: Jason, remember when you used to tell me I was adopted?

Jason: Sorry babe. I was lying.

<< Commercial break >>

[ Back in the kitchen. Mom is clearing away some broken dishes from
the floor. A panel on Vici's back is open. Dad is poking at it with
a screwdriver. He cranes his head around to Vici's front to attempt a
conversation ]

Dad: Ok, I think everything's fixed up. Vici, do you hear me?

Vici: HELLO...MISTER...PATTERSON.

Dad: "Peterson", not "Patterson".

[laugh track]

Jason: But you can call him Doctor Frankenstein. Frankie for short!

[laugh track]

Vici: GOOD...MOR...NING...MISTER...PATTERSON...WOULD...
YOU...LIKE...TO...PLAY...A...GAME?

[laugh track]

Vici: HOW...ARE...YOU...TO...DAY?

Dad: I'm fine, Vici, how are you?

Vici: I...FEEL...KIND...OF...FUN...NY.

[laugh track]

Rebecca: Maybe she needs some Robo-tussin.

[several seconds of dead silence]

[a couple of the characters glance at the camera]

[another few seconds of uncomfortable silence]

Mom: Honey, that thing is a walking disaster area.

Dad: Oh honey, don't be a gloomy Gus! Let's go to the movies, and let
Vici take care of the dishes.

Mom: [holding up broken disk] She's "taken care" of half of them
already!

Jason: Don't worry, mom. She'll be fine. I'll keep an eye on her.

Rebecca: [mutters] And your butt turned WHAT color?

Dad: Come on, honey! Movie night! I read that this one's an
"achievement in film-making". And this will be our last movie night
before the next millenium, ha ha!

[ Dad continues sweet-talking as Jason herds the parental units out.
Rebecca watches Vici cleaning dishes. Vici makes random cartoony
noises as she moves around, as if she's suffering from
Hanna-Barbara-Tourette's syndrome ]

Vici: [Singing in a monotone] LA...LA...LA...LA...

[Jason returns]

Jason: So, you need a ride to Julie's Party-like-it's-1999-Party?

Rebecca: Uh, yeah. Can I have a ride?

Jason: Sure, no problemo!

Rebecca: Why are you being so nice all of a...waaaaaaaaait a second.

Jason: What? Is it so wrong to want to help my kid sister have a fun
time on this fine holiday evening?

Rebecca: You just want to be alone here so you can invite Jennifer
over!

Vici: LA...LA...LA...DIAGNOSTICS ARRAY TRUNCATED...LA...LA...LA...

[ Rebecca and Jason, startled, stare at Vici for a long moment. Then
they return to their conversation ]

Rebecca: You know how much trouble you'll be in if Mom and Dad find
out?

Jason: You know how far it is to Julie's house?

Rebecca: Huh. Give me a ride home too?

Jason: Sheesh! Ok.

Rebecca: K! Let me get ready. [She runs upstairs]

Jason: [calls after her] Make schnell, frow-line!

[A pause. Vici continues washing dishes]

Jason: What was your name? Vici?

Vici: THAT...IS...MY...NAME...DO...NOT...WEAR...IT...OUT. *boing*

Jason: Vici, if anyone calls while I'm gone, can you take a message?
And if it's Jennifer, tell her I'll be right over.

Vici: O...KAY...JASON...PATTERSON...I...WILL...TAKE...A...MESSAGE.

Jason: Peterson! Not Patterson!

Rebecca: [from off-camera] Okay, let's go!

Jason: Okay! [exits]

[Pause a couple of seconds]

[Vici turns on the radio to some Kraftwerk, and does the Sprockets
dance for a minute as she dries dishes]

[The phone rings. Vici runs over to it and answers]

Vici: HELLO...THIS...IS...THE...PATTERSONS...

[Girl's voice on phone] Oh, not the machine again. Jason, are you
there? Pick up!

Vici: PLEASE...LEAVE...A...MESSAGE...

*click*

<< Commercial break >>

[ Scene: The LIVING ROOM. Jason is sitting with Jennifer, who has a
cast on her leg. Jason is clearly twitterpated.]

Jennifer: It's too bad we can't be at the dance.

Jason: Hey, no problem. We can still watch Dick Clark and Bob Hope
ring in the new year.

Jennifer: I though he was dead. Hey, you still haven't signed my
cast!

Jason: Oh yeah! I'll go get a pen.

Vici: [lurching in] HERE...IS...A...PEN...JASON...PATTERSON.

Jason: Peterson!

Jennifer: ...the hell?

Jason: Umm...Jennifer, meet Vici. Vici, meet Jennifer.

Vici: HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! OH NO!

Jennifer: Uh...hello. Nice Hello Kitty sticker.

[Vici wanders off, dusting random objects with a feather duster]

Jennifer: Your Dad hit another garage sale?

Jason: Yeah.

[They flip around channels for a little while. They pause for a few
moments on some footage from Aliens. Then they turn to CNN]

TV: ...Despite last-minute, round-the-clock efforts by teams of
programmers, the Year 2000 bug will be paying many of us a visit in
the coming days.

[Lightning strikes outside. Thunder thunders. Suddenly it is a dark
and stormy night]

TV: The bug, found in existing software, could have many consequences.
Delayed flights...scrambled insurance records...deleted billing
records...mixed-up interest payments...redundancy...lost
mail...farming...redundancy...

Jennifer: [nervously] Turn it back to Dick Clark.

TV: Ladies and Gentlemen...BOB HOPE!

Jason: [hits mute] Do you think that...

Jennifer: What?

Jason: ...Naaah...

Jennifer: ...Well, if it was on CNN...

Jason: ...She HAS been acting weird...

Vici: [from next room] LA...LA...LA...LA...

Jennifer: Do you think she could have a Year 2000 bug in her?

Jason: So, when the new year starts, the bug will come bursting out of
her chest? [Makes enthusiastic but vague hand gesture to signify
"bugs bursting out of chest"]

Jennifer: If that's true...then we should make sure that she can't get
into any trouble!

Jason: Okay!

[Wipe cut to: Living room, later. Jennifer and Jason are watching the
New Years Eve festivities from Times Square. Pan across the room to
reveal Vici, strapped to the wall by many rolls of duct tape, in a
cheap Aliens rip-off]

Vici: [faintly struggling against the duct tape] KILL...ME...

[Lightning strikes nearby. Thunder BOOMs!]

TV: Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six!

Jason: Five!

Jennifer: Four!

Vici: FIVE!

Jason: Fou...I mean, TWO!

Everyone: ONE!

[ Suddenly, lightning arcs through the ceiling, into Vici. The duct
tape melts in a cloud of evil dead-Zork-villain-smoke. Vici zips
around the room in fast motion while sped-up Jack-in-the-box music
plays, along with a techno remix of the Microsoft sound ]

[ Long pause. Wisps of smoke rise to the ceiling ]

Jason: Uh...Vici?

Vici: [voice of James Earl Jones] Ha ha ha ha! Now I can stop the
stock market crash, rescue Amelia Airheart, and assassinate Hitler!
[looks at watch] Damn! I'm two years too late to go get me some sweet
lovin' from Lewis Carroll.

[ Rick jumps through the living room window with a guitar. He leans
way back as he strums it. All the dramatis personae run in, and they
sing ]

ALL: She's a small wonder, pretty and bright with soft curls.
She's a small wonder, a girl unlike other girls.
She's a miracle, and I grant you
She'll enchant you with her sight
She's a small wonder, and she'll make your heart beat twice.
She's fantastic, made of plastic,
Microchips here and there.
She's a small wonder, brings love and laughter everywhere.

Vici: Thank you, goodnight!

[ Pan slowly back, to reveal that everything you have seen is on the
belly of a cloying clay creature...a Teletubby! ]

Teletubby: Again!

[ Zoom back into the teletubby's stomach ]

ALL: She's a small wonder, pretty and bright with soft curls.
She's a small wonder, a girl unlike other girls.
She's a miracle, and I grant you
She'll enchant you with her sight
She's a small wonder, and she'll make your heart beat twice.
She's fantastic, made of plastic,
Microchips here and there.
She's a small wonder, brings love and laughter everywhere.

Vici: Thank you, goodnight!

[ Zoom back out of the teletubby's stomach ]

Teletubby: Again again again!

[ Mr. T. walks on camera, shoots the Teletubby in the head at
point-blank range, then walks off again ]

[ Roll credits ]

[Tim Meehan]

TheW...@mindless.com banged away at the keys in alt.religion.kibology on
Mon, 22 Jun 1998 22:25:44 GMT and came up with:

>First off, Small Wonder had a live mixed adult studio audience

Racially or gender mixed?

>not any laugh track. . .

Yeah. Those "APPLAUSE" signs they have in studios are just there for
decoration.

>You know, you can knock this show all ya want but the fact is
>(Sci-Fi Channel's) remains that more sci-fi fans watched it than Earth-2 and
>ALF

Which isn't saying much.

>and it's one of the more memorable shows from the eighties.

The only time I ever heard of this show was when CFMT was running it as
filler between the Greek religious show and the Cantonese news. As reruns.

>Sure. I'm a Vicki fan

So am I. Mama's Family is one of Ms. Lawrence's best works, aside from her
appearances on the Carol Burnett show.

>(I'm also a deep ER and NYPD Blue fan too)

Feh. Shows with initials are *so* pretentious. I never watch that british
PBS crap.

>and like lots of sci-fi fans coming out of the closet

I have a few friends who love sci-fi and happen to be gay, but I never
noticed a trend.

>to admit they watched Small Wonder I mas disappointed that they didn't seriously
>follow through with the great sci-fi potential that the show's unique premise had.

Yes. Imagine the listings:

7:30
[2] SMALL WONDER :30 [CC] "A Very Special Small Wonder"
After Vicki GPFs while taking her driving lessons and crashes (literally
and figuratively), Mom and Dad wrestle with the decision to install Linux
or upgrade Vicki's OS to Windows 98. Special guest Bill Gates as
Professor Goldstein.

>Small Wonder at least tried to pose the question of what it'd be like.

As Vicki got older, one has to wonder if she would be "fully functional,
and programmed in multiple techniques."

>If you read the stuff in the Small Wonder home page you'll see how lots of top
>sci-fi writers on the Small Wonder moved on The Twilight Zone and Amazing Stories
>and ST:TNG and how some of Commander Data's technical terms come from Small Wonder.

"Captain, I am detecting spacial anomalies off the starboard bow. Sensors
indicate that my writers were likely trying to get any work they could."

-Tim
--
Tim Meehan * tim.m...@utoronto.ca * http://th9.simplenet.com/tmeehan
"There should be a TV game show like 'Win, Lose, Or Draw' only with
ASCII art. And AOL users would compete against WebTV users. In the
bonus round they'd be given live hand grenades. And Bob Hope would
be the host." -- Kibo

[Jaffo]

SUBSCRIBE!

--
"The theory of relativity worked out by Mr. Albert Einstein, which is in the
domain of natural science, I believe can also be applied to the political
field. Both democracy and human rights are relative concepts and not
absolute and general." -- Chinese President Jiang Zemin

http://rampages.onramp.net/~noogie/

[Felix Ze Cat]

Kibo writes for the X-Files. Didn't you know?

[Dean Lenort]

The Sebastians <sebas...@earthlink.net> wrote:

>Nick S Bensema wrote:
>>
>> In article <kibo-19069...@ppp0a008.std.com>,

>> James "Kibo" Parry <ki...@world.std.com> wrote:

>> >> Subject: Re: Roman numeral calculator in COBOL
>> >
>
>> If it were up to me, PC's sold today would boot to BASIC.
>>
>Dear me, I miss BASIC a lot. You could do real neat things with
>it like make programs that insulted your friends and real crude
>animated pictures (moving ASCII). It's because of BASIC that I
>learned that the answer to secret of life is not 42, as previously
>mentioned by Terry Pratchett, but SYNTAX ERROR. Say it with me,
>fellas:
>
>SYNNNNNTAXXXXX ERRRRORRRRRR

Having already been through the horrors of a very old nickname I can skip
right over Syntax Error and ask if anyone else ever did anything with shape
tables. I had a little animated man (a very very crude animated man) that
would walk to the center of the screen, stop, his circular head would float
up to the top and back down, and then he would walk off other side of the
screen.

I don't recall how many weeks this took. Bah!

And of course Peek, and Poke were my friends. IYKWIM, AITYD.
--
Dean Lenort | Communism's a lot like using DOS,
dean....@att.net | only it's a political system and
| it doesn't have subdirectories. -Kibo

[Dean Lenort]

dum...@execpc.com (Stephen Will Tanner) wrote:

>
> The Sci-Fi Channel Presents
> SMALL WONDER 2000
> THE MOVIE!
> "The Sci-Fi Channel: You'll lap up anything we serve you (tm)"

[...]

>[ Suddenly, lightning arcs through the ceiling, into Vici. The duct
>tape melts in a cloud of evil dead-Zork-villain-smoke. Vici zips
>around the room in fast motion while sped-up Jack-in-the-box music
>plays, along with a techno remix of the Microsoft sound ]
>
>[ Long pause. Wisps of smoke rise to the ceiling ]
>
>Jason: Uh...Vici?
>
>Vici: [voice of James Earl Jones] Ha ha ha ha! Now I can stop the
>stock market crash, rescue Amelia Airheart, and assassinate Hitler!
>[looks at watch] Damn! I'm two years too late to go get me some sweet
>lovin' from Lewis Carroll.

It was at this point that I expected Vici to change into a Shrike and sew
death and mayhem amongst the unsuspecting villagers.

Could you please rewrite the ending in this way? Oh, and don't forget the
Keats.
--
Dean Lenort | Nature's lazy. It's like a teamster, but with
dean....@att.net | less body hair. - Ben Flieger

[Stephen Will Tanner]

On Wed, 24 Jun 1998 00:36:43 GMT, dean....@att.net (Dean Lenort)
wrote:

>>SYNNNNNTAXXXXX ERRRRORRRRRR
>
>Having already been through the horrors of a very old nickname I can skip

down the street without caring about being called "duck butt". I turn

>right over Syntax Error and ask if anyone else ever did anything with shape

shifters--they are a pretty neat idea, just look at their to-hit

>tables. I had a little animated man (a very very crude animated man) that

would yell "You will re-spect mah authoritaahh!" and hit me. Then he

>would walk to the center of the screen, stop, his circular head would float

back and forth, back and forth, and then I would try to hypnotize you.

You are reading this post, and I am writing this post. You notice
that the interlacing has stopped. You are amused by the abrupt
transition. You are watching the fourth wall break down. You are
annoyed at the meta-banality of this digression. You are irritated at
how many be-verbs this paragraph contains. But you are continuing to
read, because you are interested to see what will happen next, and
whether this post contains any free pornography.

This post contains no free pornography.

Still, you continue to read, because the last line was almost
quotable, and because you think to yourself, "If he's not giving us
porn, what DO we get?"

And I am noticing that I'm running low on time. And I am switching to
higher speed.

Right! Listen up! When I give the word, I want you to clear your
mind of all distracting WAIT FOR IT, BRAD! clear your mind of all
distracting thoughts. Allow your eyes to close, and let the tension
flow out of you as you SPIT THAT OUT, SARAH. NO, I DON'T THINK YOU
CAN CHEW GUM AND *WALK* AT THE SAME TIME, LET ALONE GET HYPNOTIZED as
you breathe out through your nose YES, HUMANS BREATHE THROUGH THEIR
NOSES, MILES, YOU SHEET-STAINING LITTLE TROGLODYTE and let yourself go
limp. Just go limp. Relaxed, and limp. NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT "GOING
LIMP", RICK, I HAVE YOUR MOTHER ON SPEED DIAL THANKYOUSOVERYMUCH.

Now, let's I SAW THAT let's begin. Visualize yourself walking down a
beach. You walk down the beach, and you rest on the sand. The sun
shines on you, and you feel more relaxed. Relaxing all over. NO,
LISA, YOU *DON'T* NEED TO GO TO THE BATHROOM. WELL, OK RELAX ALL OVER
*EXCEPT* THERE. And as I count down from ten, you will become more
and more relaxed, and when I reach zero, you will be in hypnosis.

Ten.

Nine.

Will someone wake Ryan up? NO, RYAN, YOU DO NOT GET EXTRA CREDIT FOR
FALLING ASLEEP.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

GIVE ME *STRENGTH*, SARAH, I TOLD YOU TO SPIT OUT YOUR GUM. NO. NO.
IF IT *ISN'T* GUM, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT IS.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

Four.

SO HELP ME, TRACE, IF YOU *DO* YELL "BLASTOFF" I'M GOING TO LEAVE A
SCAR. YOU ARE THE MOST OBNOXIOUS JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT I HAVE
EVER HAD THE MISFORTUNE TO--YES, YOU *ARE* MORE OBNOXIOUS THAN ALICIA.
NO, I DON'T KNOW WHERE ALICIA IS. I HAVEN'T SEEN HER SINCE SHE LOST
HER ENGAGEMENT RING WHEN WE WERE MAKING POPCORN BALLS.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

NO, MICHAEL, YOU ARE NOT GOING TO MAKE ME LOSE TRACK.

Seventy-three!

HA, HA! HA HA HA ha ha...

WELL, *NOW* YOU'RE QUIET ALL OF A SUDDEN.

FINE THEN.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

THAT'S THE BELL, KIDS. REMEMBER TO GET THOSE REPORT CARDS SIGNED AND
BRING THEM BACK TOMORROW. YES, RYAN, "TOMORROW" MEANS "MONDAY" WHEN I
SAY IT ON A FRIDAY. NO, I DON'T KNOW WHY ALL TEACHERS DO IT, PROBABLY
BECAUSE WE'RE ALL INSANE. YES. MICHAEL, PUT YOUR DESK BACK IN THE--I
DON'T CARE HOW IT WAS WHEN YOU GOT HERE--NO, SARAH, YOUR TEST ISN'T
GRADED YET. JASON, STOP CALLING BRAD A HETEROSEXUAL.

This story was fiction. It could not happen. But...did it happen?

P.S. I lied about the free pornography.

http://www.mcstories.com/MindSnatchers/

The best part about the site is how all the story synopses look like
rejected captions from The Far Side:

Peter gives a CD containing powerful subliminal messages to an
uptight coworker.

A hypnotists replaces Laura's need to smoke with other needs.

Katrina uses pheromones to recruit a new woman to her special
family.

P.P.S. This should have been three posts.
P.P.P.S. I coulda been a contendah.