T.B DIGEST -- JUN '96

[Dave Polewka]

.From: Swingers <tuna...@tuna.net>
.Subject: My Face
.Date: Thu May 30 02:27:13 1996

My face doesn't do what I want it to do. I find myself talking to
someone, and my face doesn't seem to respond with the appropriate
emotion for the subject we're talking about. It's as if the nerves were
put on ice or something. I'll congratulate someone on their new baby,
and my face will barely show anything, maybe a subtle look of angst or
something unrelated to the subject at hand. Most of the time it does
nothing, just sits there, blankly existing, like somebody slapped a
pancake onto my skull. I feel it's like a big slab of meat that just
happens to be there.

It's one thing for me not to feel anything, but I'd at least like for my
face to pretend that I'm having a good time sometimes. I used to be
able to pull that off, with a wry smile or grimace, and my cheeks would
even rosy up at times. I was really good at playing the interested, fun
person, and my face was with me all the way, a willing partner in the
deceit. But now the thing rebels, won't do what I tell it to, and even
on those rare occasions when I do feel something, it refuses to budge.
I can only get it do extreme things, like a huge cheesy smile, or a
giant pout, or a wide-eyed surprised look, but these are almost never
appropriate.

Is my face paying me back for all those times I made it participate in
fraudulent expressions, the times it had to pretend to be interested?
Is it fed up with all of my bullshit?

.From: al...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Dave Polewka)
.Subject: Re: UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS -- anagrams
.Date: Tue Jun 4 02:14:33 1996

p...@mv.mv.com (Pete Mitchell) says:

>>Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- anagrams
>>***********************************************
>
>How about:
>
> It's inconceivable for us to oil sis up! :-)

Hey! That reminds me of one I did a while back:

Ripley's Believe It or Not -- anagram
********************************
Revel blooper: "Is it in yet?"
********************************

--
=======================
"Endeavor to persevere"
=======================

.From: bmo...@ix.netcom.com (Boy Mozart)
.Subject: Glyn's 19 Plots to Avoid: 4
.Date: Thu May 30 08:45:21 1996

>"The nineteen plots to avoid," by Elinor Glyn (appendix to _Elinor Glyn_
>by Anthony Glyn [London, Hutchinson, 1955]):
>
>4. Stories in which a rich child, usually a cripple, is contrasted with
>a poor child, usually strong and healthy.

Something most people don't know--and now 10 million or so do, whether
they wanted to know or not--is that I have an evil twin brother. Unlike
most good twin/evil twin relationships I've heard about, I actually get
along with him.

I mean, plans for world conquest and the destruction of all humanity
aside, growing up with him wasn't so bad. The usual sibling rivalry
just wasn't present for some reason or other. I couldn't hate him.

First, there was his name: Boy Handel. Right from the start he was
doomed. It's nearly impossible for ordinary mortals to meet him without
a smirk escaping their lips when they hear the name. The scatological
implications alone are almost unlimited. Well, actually, let's face it,
they're extremely limited.

Picture if you will a handsome young lad peacefully striding through the
playground on the way to school, satchel clutched firmly in his arms.
His sandals strike the ground firmly; his cap, red blazer, and grey
shorts round off a charming school uniform. His sandy hair is well
kempt, his eyes sparkle as he looks forward to another fun-filled day of
activity and learning. If you can keep that picture in your mind, then
you can also imagine how my twin brother looked, since we were
identical.

Most days we were together. On several occasions, B.H. was forced to
tramp to St. Oligarch's Boarding School and Bar-B-Q Pit by himself. He
was often cornered by the school bullies who took perverse delight in
holding their arms out, hands cupped, and greeting him with a raucous
"Hey, it's the Boy Handle!" After which, they would grow bored, beat
the shit out of him, then leave.

B.H. eventually gave up hoping for any original taunts from these sad
pathetic schoolmates, which is why he detonated four pounds of C-3 in
the school's basement during lunch period. Unable to prove his
involvement in the affair, the school's authorities nevertheless sent
him home for the day.

That summer we'd sneak out of our Incubation And Propagation unit and
wander around the city, gazing up at the skyscrapers and flinging half-
eaten hot dogs at passerby and running. For hours we would sit in Del
McLiggert Park and point out attractive women to each other. Eventually
we invented an amusing code: a woman would walk by, B.H. would nudge me
in the ribs, and say "Damn, Boy, your momma's cute!" When we became old
enough, we would occasionally substitute the words "sister" or "cousin."
At the end of the day we would sneak back into the unit for a few hours
of speed-learning, nutritional suppliments, and Hormonal Growth
Stimulation.

As the days went by I continued to grow in body and spirit: I grew
taller; my intelligence increased; hair sprouted in certain places.
B.H., on the other hand, continued to grow into himself, retreating from
the world in general. He stooped, he mumbled, he lashed out at any who
tried to interfere with him.

I became quite proud of him.

Eventually, on a certain night when we snuck out of Hibernation, he
confided in me his plan for revenge on a cruel, unkind humanity. He
pointed at the stars and said, "Look up there, my dear Wolfie. Consider
the vast expanse of space. The charlatans and quacksalvers that claim
to be our leaders and scientists are all against the thought of us poor
simple taxpayers ever flying towards those points, or even treading on
the nearest neighbors. But why stop there, Darling Brother? Why not
extend our apathy towards this planet, hm? What's the point of
salvaging this Earth if it is already in its death throes?"

"If you're going to try to argue with me about paving the Earth, you
might as well forget it," I warned him. "I've already spent my entire
allowance this week on stock purchases in major concrete production
firms, per your advice."

B.H. merely smiled, and gazed at the stars. "We're restricting our
space-exploration efforts. Why not maritime, as well? Or for that
matter, closing off ports and borders? Why not seal every state in the
Union in its own impenetrable force shield? Why not lock each citizen
up in his or her or its own environment suit, safe from muggers and
rapists and smokers?"

He jumped onto a crumbling wall and spread his arms wide. "Look upon
me, my brother! I am the culmination of one hundred millenia of human
endeavor and struggle! The Cro-Magnon beasts reside in my cells, the
Egyptian pharoahs live in my blood! Tiny Tim is only six degrees of
separation from me! And yet, in all these aeons of evolving and
creating and fucking, humanity has yet to produce a creature than can
come up with a really great idea without having the desire to strip his
fellow humans of all wealth to exploit it! We couldn't even dredge up a
decent Messiah--He had to be immaculately conceived! God had to INVENT
the Nice Guy for us!"

He leapt from his perch on the wall and grasped me by my shoulders.
"For thousands of years Mankind crossed oceans and deserts and man-
eating snipes just to see what's on the other side. Now we have the
technology to delve into every unexplored territory from Outer Space to
the Inner Child, and we prefer to waste it on better cable reception and
Automatic Teller Machines. We've become bored, Wolfie--we don't want to
go outside to play anymore! And I'm ready, Beloved Sibling, to totally
capitalize on this trend! Virtual reality glasses; air-conditioned
underwear; self-inflating auto-erotic sheep! The new technology for the
21st Century isn't computers or spaceships or medicine; it's a bloomin'
four-device remote control!

"In two decades, my love, the entire world will be sealed in polystyrene
and I'll be standing there with the hose, laughing my ass off."

That night was the last I saw of him. I awoke the next day to find he'd
run off from the Institute, abandoning me and the boarding schools and
the dead-bully campaign. I loved him dearly for his mad crusade to
Coat The Earth--a sadistic plot that kills no-one is a rare thing in
this day and age. Perhaps it is for the best; I'm sure by now we'd be
pointing out attractive young women to each other and saying "Damn, Boy,
your daughter's cute!" That's just too depressing.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Boy Mozart, | Stevens Hall Indecency Taskforce |
| bmo...@ix.netcom.com | still no URL--cope. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

.From: chi...@bbs.sas.ntu.ac.sg (Chia Puay Long)
.Subject: Questions On Garbage
.Date: Tue Jun 4 08:23:10 1996

Dear all,

My fren is currently doing a studies about garbage odour. I would
appreciate if some of you out there can take some time off to answer some
of his questions. Pls send your answers to me via email.

Thank you.

Questions
---------
1. What is the amt of garbage (in terms of tonnes) thrown in countries
such as China, USA and Malaysia.

2. How does the garbage odour in these countries affect the pple?

3. What action is taken to overcome this garbage odour problems?

regds
Jos

--
regards,
Puay Long

.From: Matt Marchese <ma...@cray.com>
.Subject: Radio Heaven
.Date: Wed Jun 5 15:42:23 1996

"...the kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, and the
violent take it by force."
- Matthew 11:12

"So, what you're trying to tell me is, Wilhelm Reich was right?"

I leaned forward across the table and looked intently into her eyes;
the better to avoid staring down the front of her blouse. Karolyn
glanced downwards and shaded her forehead with one hand. She tapped
idly on the side of her coffee cup with the other. Her lacquered nails
made sharp clicking sounds against the white porcelain cup. As the
seconds passed, I became aware of the warm, damp patch under my chin
created by the rising steam from my cappuccino.

She looked up from the tabletop and fixed me with dark, puffy
eyes, "Like most crackpots, he found a version of the truth but
carried it through to the wrong conclusion."

I fiddled with my unlit cigarette, cognizant of the hard glares
from nearby tables. I kept a sidelong lookout for minions of
the Palo Alto Health Patrol. I'd have a difficult time explaining
away the cigarette, even if it wasn't lit.

"Well," I smirked, "Bill will be happy to know that all of those
Sunday mornings spent masturbating inside of his orgone box weren't
for nothing."

She managed a weak smile at that and I wondered what it was that
weighed so heavily on her, obscuring her normal, irritatingly
sunny outlook. She grew serious again. I knew that she was about
to spill the beans.

"Look, here's the skinny; 3 weeks ago we were able to detect a
human soul with standard, electromagnetic spectroscopy."

I spit my cappuccino out.

"What! Next you'll be telling me that you've discovered maggots
being spontaneously generated from rotting meat, or bions!"

She glared at me, "You know me better than that! I'm a scientist
and a damn careful one."

I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth, dabbed a napkin at the
dark spots of coffee on the white plastic tabletop, and reconnoitered.

"Tell me the whole story, from the beginning," I let her have my
sincerest look of rapt attention.

She took a long sip of coffee and examined her sandaled foot as she spoke,
"About 6 months ago we started a new round of design verification tests
using the new electro-magnetic resonance imaging medical scanners that
we co-developed with UCSF medical. We built a special EMI tank to hold
the prototype to comply with FCC emission regs. We conducted a long
series of EMRI scans on animals, cadavers, and live subjects. The tests
were pretty routine until we started pumping out large amounts of EMR
in the 2-3 Gigahertz range."

"What happened then?" I was interested now.

"We finished the animal and cadaver tests without incident and got
permission from the FDA to proceed to human trials. The first live,
human subject started resonating at 2.8 Gigahertz. We started
detecting weird auras on her scan images -- almost Kirlian, surrounding
the pineal gland. We dismissed it at first as an unforseen side effect
or stray harmonics within the equipment itself. But when we got the
subject off the table she reported experiencing intense visions and
OOBEs during the..."

"OOBEs?"

"Out of body experiences. You know -- warm tunnel, bright light,
dead relatives greet you, insert deity here. Anyway, we knew we
were onto something bigger than just a higher-rez medical scanning
system."

Leaning back in my chair, I folded my arms across my chest and
cocked an eyebrow at Karolyn, "You still haven't explained how this
constitutes finding hard, empirical evidence for a human soul, and
I'm waiting to hear how Reich fits into all of this. For all you
know, you simply detected an odd electrical effect that triggers
an unexplained biological response -- albeit, an extremely bizarre
one."

"I'm getting to that," she shot back, clearly irritated by my lack of
faith in her deductive abilities. "We immediately set up several
control groups. The first thing we discovered was that the effect was
greatly attenuated outside of the EMI tank. We analyzed the tank
construction; alternating layers of steel and plastic with an exterior
wooden frame and an interior wire-mesh covering."

"Orgone box," I murmured.

"Exactly. It acted as a passive amplification circuit for the resonance
effect. Secondly, the effect was not present in animals or the dead."

"Guess that answers the old Sunday school question about meeting Rover
and Fluffy in the afterlife."

Ignoring me she continued, "Up to this point, your earlier observation
was correct; we had only some compelling evidence for a very odd
biological effect; nothing that couldn't be explained through standard,
textbook physiology. Every live subject we tested resonated at the
exact, same frequency: 2.8 Gig. It appeared to be a sort of carrier
wave. Once we brought in some more sophisticated RF detectors, we were
able to discern unique frequency modulations riding on the main signal.
No two test subjects had the same modulation patterns.

"FM soul," I cracked, "Were you able to detect whether it was AOR
or Adult contemporary?"

"Do you want me to go on or not?" she snapped back. I tried to appear
contrite and leaned forward, resting my chin on templed fingers.
I was done apologizing at this point. She would tell me the whole
story no matter what, on that breathless roll that accompanied the
thrill of discovery.

"The breakthrough came a few weeks after we rolled-up the first round
of trials. By this time we'd conclusively proven the repeatability
of the experiment and were moving on to confirm the biological mechanics
behind the resonance. We were theorizing an effect involving
magnetite crystals in the pineal gland setting up a sort of harmonic
ringing effect or 'tank circuit of the soul', if you will. Our final
subject of the weekend was a 56 year-old wino from the Tenderloin
who volunteered for 50 bucks and cab fare. We were 5 minutes into the
test when he died on the table from a massive coronary. We worked on
him for over 15 minutes, but he was beyond resuscitation." Her mouth
formed a small moue of disgust recalling the incident. She was a
scientist -- not an angel of mercy.

"During this time, nobody had bothered to shut off the EMRI machine.
His carrier wave, complete with modulation, was still there and he was
stone-dead on a gurney being wheeled down to the morgue. His signal
stayed on the equipment at full strength for more than 3 hours until we
finally shut off the console. After that, we were still picking up
echoes on the RF scanners until we finally packed up and left for the
night."

My earlier skepticism was starting to soften at this revelation. The
metaphysical implications were intriguing. The questions rolled out in
an unstoppable rush, "Was this a fluke? How could you possibly
duplicate this for verification? What happened to the waves?"

"We started bringing in terminally ill transients and emergency room
triage," she stammered, clearly feeling not unlike an eighteenth
century surgeon stealing cadavers from the gallows. "In every instance,
the results were the same; wave echoes remained for as long as 6 hours
after death."

I was starting to come down off of my earlier religious epiphany by
this point, "This still could be some strange amplification phenomenon
of the orgone box," I mused, "A standing wave, nothing supernatural
about it."

"Nope," she shook her head, mouth set in a determined line that I knew
from experience represented several megatons of unmoveable conviction.
"This is not a standing wave; it's a pinpoint broadcast, a transmission."

After several seconds, the thin stream of drool dripping on my hand
alerted me to the fact that my mouth was hanging open in a rather
unattractive manner. I closed it and wiped my hand on my pants leg.

Karolyn allowed herself a triumphant smile, took another sip of what
was by now lukewarm coffee, and continued, "The magnetite crystals
in the pineal gland form a powerful transmission matrix. We don't
fully understand it yet, but our computer models confirm it. At the
moment of death, it broadcasts an intense burst of frequency modulated
RF containing an incredibly complex set of information contained in
harmonics and subharmonics of the main carrier wave. And what's
more, every single subject we tested transmitted this signal towards
the same point in space." She paused -- pregnantly.

"W-where?" I managed to push the word past my quivering lower-lip.

"Galactic center, dead-on." She pulled a small tape recorder from
her purse, plopped it on the table, and pressed the play button.
A hiss of static overlaid with curious cadences of rising and falling
trills and pinging harmonics sputtered from the tiny speaker.

"That's the sound of the galactic center, direct from Arecibo, and
guess what?"

"What?"

"It was riding on a carrier wave. Care to guess what frequency?"

I sat stunned for what seemed like minutes, letting the implications
percolate down through the upper layers of my mind. Part of me felt
like a giant weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Here was proof
that there was something more -- some continuation beyond the final
curtain of the play. On the other hand I felt amused by the
implications: my soul could be merely another hit on the galactic FM
playlist, with God the omnipotent Don Imus of the Universe. I shuddered
at the analogy.

"Karolyn," I asked finally with a dawning awareness of higher purposes
at work, "Why are you telling me all this? You haven't called me in
over a year and you don't need me to validate your findings. I'm
working with high-energy laser optics, not medicine or metaphysics."

She slowly broke into a wide Cheshire cat smile revealing perfect,
white teeth. At that moment a jackbooted cadre of the PAHP rounded
the corner. I tossed the cigarette down a nearby sewer grate.
I didn't need another 3 months of mandatory aversion therapy.

"Silly, I want you to help me break into Heaven!"

[To be Continued]

This story is COPYRIGHT 1996, Matthew J. Marchese. All rights reserved.
Standard USENET distribution is acceptable; other forms of reproduction
or reprinting may be considered in violation of international copyright
law. Contact Matthew J. Marchese with all reproduction requests or
questions at: ma...@cray.com

Matt Marchese <URL http://discover.discover-net.net/~vicvega/>
ma...@cray.com <URL http://home.cray.com/~matt/>
"We drink elixirs that we refine from the juices of the dying" -Shriekback
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

.From: bmo...@ix.netcom.com (Boy Mozart)
.Subject: Glyn's 19 Plots to Avoid: 5
.Date: Sun Jun 2 09:41:50 1996

>"The nineteen plots to avoid," by Elinor Glyn (appendix to _Elinor Glyn_
>by Anthony Glyn [London, Hutchinson, 1955]):
>
>5. The husband jealous of one of his wife's relatives, generally a
>brother who has been in South America since early youth.

I made my home in the eastern foothills of the Cordillera Occidental, so
I could be near the platinum mines. It cuts down on the amount of jolts
people experience as they drive up the road to the house, but I swear I
could hear my brother-in-law yelping as the Jeep came up the drive. I
sighed and stood up, leaving the balcony so I could go meet my family.

Linda was stunning as ever. Tall, lithe, and confident, her chestnut
hair gathered under a pith helmet, she slipped from the Jeep and brushed
dust from her clothes. She smiled as I approached, her emerald eyes
flashing with pleasure from the wild ride she had just taken through the
jungle. Except for the longer hair and light makeup, it was like
looking in a mirror. We embraced, her slender arms gripping me tightly.

Harvey fell out of the passenger side, pretty much spoiling the effect.
"Why can't you live in fucking Bogota, like normal people?" For a
handsome, late-twentyish financial analyst, my brother-in-law was
surprisingly effete. He gazed at the foothills rising behind my home,
took in the blue sky and bright sunshine with a glance, and then
smirked as he pronounced judgment.

"Well, I suppose it's nice living up here, away from it all, but jeeze,
aren't there any _paved_ roads here?"

I wrapped my arm around my sister's waist and led her up the drive.
"C'mon, Harvey, lighten up!" I grinned. "I promise, you won't have to
ride in that Jeep anymore. The repairs to my helicopter were completed
this morning!" Linda laughed.

We became reacquainted over a light lunch of London broil and smoked
carrots. I described my early years to my long-lost sister and her
bored husband, touching lightly on my childish desire to run away and
join a drug cartel. Having actually realized my dream, I pursued my
career diligently, rising from the processing plants to Shipping to
making small trips through the Gulf of Honduras on cargo ships designed
as garbage scows.

"There was no way a white American suburbanite like me was gonna rise
any higher," I explained to my enraptured sibling. "So I decided to
take what little earnings I had and invest them in a platinum mine in
the Atrato basin. In a few years, I had enough saved to buy it, and the
rest is history."

"Amazing," Linda said simply, eyes a-glow with admiration. Harvey's
eyes held little of the same, rolling in his head as they did. "But
surely you didn't limit yourself to a single venture?"

I shrugged. "I dabble in emeralds and environmental research. A few
biotech firms come to me for funds or equipment on occasion. I believe
one of them just recently discovered a cure for minoxidil poisoning in
a selvas on the Caquetá River."

"Fascinating," Linda sighed. Her affection towards me became a heat
that outshone the humid atmosphere of the room. I was almost overcome
by her stare, losing myself in those eyes so reminiscient of those gems
that arose from the earth in my frequent excavations.

"So, when are we gonna see some more of this place? Got any platinum
mines nearby?" Harvey smirked again.

As a matter of fact, I did. My largest mine was directly south of the
house. We 'coptered over in the late afternoon and sauntered through
the place. I pointed out rich deposits of the mineral; I led them into
the on-site processing facility, where we derived several hundred ounces
of platinum sponge and platinum black every season, selling it to
laboratories all over the world. Linda gazed at everything in
astonishment--Harvey yawned several times.

That night we flew into Bogota and toured the city. Harvey was
pacified by the familiar setting of a big city. I led them through
several night clubs where he drank heavily, becoming more and more
inebriated as the night wore on. Eventually he passed out in the car,
while Linda and I danced through the night.

She was clad in a black sleeveless dress, one that barely covered her
hips but still seemed comfortable. In the blaring laser light of the
discos I lost my sister and discovered a neon-blue succubus who melted
into me as we swayed across the dance floors, toasted each other with
endless glasses of wine, and gazed into each other's eyes far into the
night.

The next day, Harvey proved to be stronger than I'd first thought.
Refusing to betray any hint of discomfort from the excesses of the night
before, he eagerly accepted an invitation to join a puma hunt to the
north near Mt. Tolima. At the last minute, I claimed important business
had arisen, but he shrugged it off and stepped lightly into the
helicopter, .30-06 clasped tightly in one hand.

I changed clothes and walked out to the pool. I lay back in a lounge
chair and watched Linda as she swam. Eventually she came out and walked
to where I was sitting, and I admired the curve of her body underneath
her dark blue one-piece swimsuit. Her hair was a thick brown line that
divided her shoulder blades.

"I thought you were going puma-hunting with Harvey?" she asked, as she
dropped casually onto the lounge chair next to mine, resting her head on
her arms. I picked up a towel and started drying her off. "Mmm, that's
nice," she said.

"Harvey needed a distraction," I said, "and it was the only thing
available so soon. Personally, I don't see the fun in blowing holes in
moving targets--I did enough of that when I was younger."

"But why send him away?" she asked. "Surely there's distractions for
him close by?"

I drew the strap off her right shoulder, in order to have better access
while drying it, and said, "I'd prefer that he be away from the house
for a few hours."

Linda turned her head so she could smile over her shoulder at me. "And
why would that be?"

In answer, I leaned forward and kissed her smile, pulling the strap down
from the other shoulder. Suddenly, she was standing, and trotting
lightly back to the pool. She dove in laughing, and surfaced a few
seconds later, waving the dark blue swimsuit in her hands. In two
strides I was in the pool as well. She pretended to try swimming away
from me, but I eventually caught her. Soon her body was melting against
mine again.

Unfortunately I had radically underestimated Harvey. He had suspected
something, so he had hopped off the helicopter at the last minute and
followed me back to the house. He was watching us from a vantage point
behind a lignum vitae, and at the climatic moment he stepped from the
tree and walked up to the edge of the pool, his weapon levelled at us.

"I don't believe it," he assured us. "I don't fucking believe it!"

Linda rested her hands against my chest and closed her eyes, panting
heavily in excitement. I shifted position so she was behind me--I
thought her breasts pressed against my back would be the last sensation
I would ever experience, and I vowed to enjoy it. But seconds later my
house security had Harvey surrounded and disarmed.

"Harvey, my friend," I said, grinning. "Let me tell you a story."

We led him back inside, down to the basement and into a large room built
especially for this purpose. He was strapped into a chair and watched
by two heavy guards. I'd taken a moment to wrap a robe around my body;
Linda was upstairs in her room resting.

"My mother died in childbirth," I began, matching Harvey's hate-filled
stare. "My father died an alcoholic. The orphanage was run by a man
who knew how to make the rosters look full while he sold the excess into
slavery. I found myself in Medellin at the tender age of six working in
a cocaine processing plant in the jungle.

"For a few years, there was a woman there--a beautiful young wife of a
drug-lord who took pity on the children, showed us kindness, fed and
clothed us when the drug-lords would have let us work until we dropped
in place. She was assassinated when I was twelve, but not before her
husband had promised to send me to school. Eventually I even made it to
college, studying chemistry to show him I was a loyal worker eager to
embark on a career in his service.

"Then the early eighties marked a trend towards consolidating the
cartels. My 'boss' lost his franchise and his life--both as a result of
a tip from me to a stronger cartel. I was rewarded with freedom and a
small fortune, which I invested heavily in platinum mining and biotech
research. But I never forgot her--the woman who was more mother to me
than anyone I had ever known. I had worshipped her, Harvey; my young
heart bursting with reawakened love, I was crushed when her husband
sacrificed her for a successful shipment. I was driven with a need to
find someone just like her, that I could love again.

But I was frustrated--no woman I met matched the memory of that beloved
goddess. Eventually, using catalysts processed from my own mines, I
managed to do something no other biologist has ever achieved: I created
a clone of myself."

"So you think it's okay to fuck your sister just because she's your
clone? You think that makes it right? That's totally sick! She's
married--or she was. Ya hear that, Linda? I'm gonna cut you off, you
whore!"

Linda had just entered, wearing a robe identical to mine. "See how well
you make it without me to keep you in those tight fucking clothes. See
how you like living out on the street. Or better still, you can stay
here and play Mommy with your sick little brother, here."

"You don't understand, Harvey," she smiled, turning that glorious
radiance lesser men would call a smile towards him. "I don't need your
money now, I never did. I needed a way to come to Colombia without
being noticed--being your wife was the easiest way. I just had to see
my dear brother again. You never would have found out if you hadn't
been so jealous of him."

"Jealous?" he smirked. "Of that little prick? I don't need you, you
stupid bitch! Plenty of women out there just dying to sleep with me!
What's that little pervert got that I ain't?"

"Your wife, and a very large pistol," I said, shooting him in the mouth
with it. "You were right, my dear," I told her, caressing her, reveling
in the feel of her body beneath the robe. "It never pays to give in to
jealousy." I kissed her, inhaling her scent, drawing her robe away as
the guards left discreetly.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Boy Mozart, | Stevens Hall Indecency Taskforce |
| bmo...@ix.netcom.com | still no URL--cope. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

.From: r...@asuvax.eas.asu.edu (Starcap'n Ra)
.Subject: All time worst thing to post to t.b
.Date: Tue Jun 4 20:49:40 1996

Eric Anderson <er...@as.arizona.edu> writes:

> Instructions for Rodeo Sex:
>
> Mount your partner "doggie" fashion. Reach forward and take a breast
> firmly in each hand. Then whisper in her ear, "This is the way your
> sister likes it."
>
> You must 'stay in the saddle' for 8 seconds.

Instructions for Rodeo Making an Ass of Oneself:

Post a tired joke to talk.bizarre that everyone has heard
or seen posted to Usenet hundreds of times before. Reach
down and take your dick firmly in hand, and then whisper
to yourself, "This is the way I got pledged as a fratboy,
hey, it ought to work here."

You must not get killfiled for 8 seconds.

--Starcap'n Ra, {ames,gatech,husc6,rutgers}!ncar!noao!asuvax!kennedy
"Comin' out of {allegra,decvax,ihnp4,oddjob}--^
chute 5, it's Eric ^---------------The Wrong Choice
Anderson. Oops, internet: ken...@asuvax.eas.asu.edu
there's the horn,
no score for the cowboy from Tucson."

.From: bmo...@ix.netcom.com (Boy Mozart)
.Subject: Glyn's 19 Plots to Avoid: 6
.Date: Thu Jun 6 00:24:24 1996

>"The nineteen plots to avoid," by Elinor Glyn (appendix to _Elinor Glyn_
>by Anthony Glyn [London, Hutchinson, 1955]):
>
>6. The dischargged workman who sets out to injure his former employer,
>but who, instead, performs some heroic task, thus regaining his old job.

It was a cold January evening. It had been snowing. We were standing
on a deserted street across from the Hoosier Dome. He had dragged me
here in the middle of the night, equipped with a bottle of Chivas to
ward off the cold. It wasn't helping for me, but he seemed not to
notice.

"They could've put up a plaque for me, y'know?" he said, in a flat
emotionless voice. "They didn't even want to call it the 'Quayle Dome'.
Isn't that a better name than 'Hoosier'? Who ever came up with a stupid
name like that, anyway--'Hoosier'?"

I felt a little nervous, out in the open like this. "Look, why don't we
go find a nice warm bar somewhere. I'll buy ya a drink, huh?"

"They named a whole plant museum after a cartoon cat, for Pete's sake.
How much trouble would it've been to re-name a stadium? He was only
some guy's cat--I was the freakin' Vice President! AND I wrote two
books!"

"I'm sure they were very nice books, sir...."

"You mean you haven't read either of them?"

Oops. Deep doo-doo city. "Um, I've been busy. Look, c'mon, I think
there's a sports bar up the street that's open late. C'mon, we're
almost out of Chivas."

He pulled another bottle out of his coat and opened it. "They swore in
that one-armed guy today, y'know. Him and that dumb jerk he picked. I
was available, right? Why didn't he pick me? I've always been big on
conservatism--I could'a balanced the ticket, but nooooooo! He had to
have a guy with integrity! The big jerks!"

I knew he had to be leading up to something, standing there on a cold
January night, staring at the darkened Hoosier Dome and whining about
his life. "Sir, I really do think we should get inside...."

A fire blazed in his eyes then. He turned to me and smiled, showing all
his white teeth, and I knew I had done it again. "I totally agree.
Let's go inside!" He held up a key ring, shook the keys a bit, and ran
across the street to the stadium. I charged after him, not sure I
wanted to follow him but not willing to leave him alone in this state.

He ran straight up to the front doors and started trying keys. In his
condition he wasn't quite sure which key was which: his front door key;
his car key; the key to his office; the key to a bathroom in a house he
no longer lived in. Finally, one of the keys miraculously shot home,
unlocking the door, letting him in.

As I followed him in, I could feel my future being swallowed down the
toilet. I glanced nervously about looking for guards, but there were
none, or they were patrolling elsewhere. He gleefully skipped down the
corridor, giggling and waving his arms. "Lookit me! Lookit me! I'm a
politician--I can go anywhere! I can do an-ee-thing I want! Whoopee!"

"Sir!" I said as quietly as I could, but trying for enough volume to get
his attention. "Sir! We really shouldn't be in here this time of
night. We could get in a lot of trouble!"

He turned around, smiled, flipped me the bird, then shot up a stairwell.
Nonplussed at having a minor political figure insult me, I bounded up
the stairs after him.

The Hoosier Dome is big. I suppose other states can whip out their
domes and claim to be bigger, but this place is designed to seat 60,000
Colt fans, which will preserve their anonymity and hide a delirious
statesman. I tried to catch the sound of giggling. I lucked out when I
caught a faint sound coming from a nearby section. I made my way
through the sections until I found him again, fooling with something
next to a Pizza Hut concession.

Several blocks of dun-colored clay sat side by side next to a pizza
oven. He had broken into the unit and removed a timer, and was wiring
it to the blocks. He saw me, was startled, and then relaxed again,
flashing those teeth at me. "This state's gonna regret not standing
behind me!" he snarled. "They can say what they want about it, but I
sure learned a lot in the National Guard."

I consider myself a patriot and a loyal friend--or at least a basic
humanitarian. But C-4 was way too much for me to deal with on a cold
January night in the middle of Indiana. I took off down the corridor
looking for the nearest exit, even if it was a window. Those guards
that I had been looking for caught me before I could reach one.

Even in prison I was allowed to read newspapers. The incredible story
of how he'd followed me into the Hoosier Dome and uncovered my Militia-
inspired plot to destroy it, and how he'd managed to diffuse the timer
using the training he'd gained during the early seventies was plastered
over the front pages of the Herald for two weeks. I was able to pull a
few favors from the FBI and get the charges dropped, but by then it was
too late. On the strength of this story, in four years he would win the
national election and return to Washington for a new triumphal reign.

I'm going to stop accepting invitations to visit former politicians.
It's absolutely ruining my reputation.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Boy Mozart, | Stevens Hall Indecency Taskforce |
| bmo...@ix.netcom.com | still no URL--cope. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

.From: Jamin Stalker <"tlma...@bendnet.com"@dn.bendnet.com>
.Subject: 10 REASONS WHY AMERICA IS THE BEST!!!!
.Date: Sat Jun 8 00:42:51 1996

Tom Martin wrote:

10 reasons why America is the best

Hey Stupid Fucks

I have traveled around the world, and know for a fact the U.S. is by far
the best country.

1. I went to Europe: Belgium, France, England, and Germany and seen more
fucking scam artists in two days than I have in my whole fucking life in
the U.S. Especially in Paris, Those fuckers would do anything to make a
fucking buck.

2. The fucking French and English should shut the Fuck up too, You
fuckers would all be Nazis by now, if we didn't bail your asses out in
WWII (or are your minds so small that you can't learn a little history.)

3. The U.S. has the least discrimination in the world. If you're white,
spend a little time in Asia. They'll treat you like your incomplete. Go
to Europe, watch how they treat Arabs. Go to South Africa watch how
those English and Dutch descendant bastards treat the natives. Go to
Australia and see how the Aboriginies are treated.

4. The U.S. has had more inventors than all other nations combined. Most
of them were intelligent people that left Europe, because Europeans were
too fucking ignorant to accept their ideas. And don't pull that "Well
we had Leonardo Da Vinci Crap on me" Fucking Europeans crucified his
ideas as well, same with Isaac Newton, Jules Verne (wrote about a voyage
to the moon, who'd he say would do it? Good ole' U.S. of A.(I do
however, give my compliments to Russia for their achievements in space
exploration, but the rest of you fuckers are way fucking behind))
Einstein, he left Germany because of the shit going on there. And the
list goes on. You fuckers wouldn't have electricity if it weren't for
the U.S., incandescent lights, internal combustion engines, airplanes,
cheeseburgers, etc...

5. We ARE the Richest country in the world. You may think that we are
the worlds largest debtor country, Not true. It's our government that is
in debt, and most of that is to us, the citizens. In case you're so
stupid that you know nothing about economics, we purchase Bonds from our
government, so that we may earn tax-free income. This way we don't
experience as much inflation as you motherfuckers. I don't mind my
government going in debt if it means that our country will not suffer
inflation. We do have debts outside the U.S., but most of it is helping
socialist motherfuckers like you, which I have no control over.

6. And why are we the Richest country in the world? because we export 25%
of the worlds goods. Don't be fooled by Japan stealing the electronics
market from us, that is just a small percentage of the whole picture.
Besides where does IBM come from? Microsoft? Intel? Apple? AT&T? MCI?
You fuckers couldn't come up with a business like that if you tried.

7. Maybe we have a high pregnancy rate. so what? We like to fuck! To
think about it, our pregnancy rate is pretty fucking low compared to
Asia, India, Africa

8. Maybe we have a high crime rate... wait a minute have you been to
Brazil lately, cops there only get seven bullets a week, think they'll
save your ass? not likely

9. Been to Canada? Fucking Cans can't come up with a unique name for
their own monetary unit. Have to rip off the "Dollar" name from us. They
can't even put their own pictures on their money, have to praise England.
They bitch because they can't tell the difference between American
bills. "They're all green" they say. Those fuckers are too lazy to read
the difference between $10 and $100.

10. Just remember, when you watch T.V., listen to the radio, put your
jeans on, eat a cheeseburger, turn on the light, go for a drive, ride in
an airplane, use a microwave, make a phone call, turn on your computer,
read your E-mail, or enjoy your freedom, it wouldn't have been possible
if it weren't for your good friends, the Americans.

Here's a little addemdum to your list. Ref. #:

1. ...anything to make a (AMERICAN) buck. (they don't mind English
pounds but you can keep that Lire, Ruble, and most other "10 million of
these fucking things makes a dollar" monies.

3. Try being ANYTHING but white in Britain. Everyone is a "Wog" to
them.

4. Queen Victoria refused to buy a functioning submarine from Robert
Fulton (as did the French) because it was so "Unsportsman like".
Unfortunately for them Germany didn't have so many scruples concerning
warfare.

7. We have a high birth rate, true, but it's either that or import more
of you sorry ass Europeans. Just what we need, people who don't like
the US but don't have the balls to stay where they are.

8. At least most states allow us to shoot back. (by the way, that crazy
fuck that killed all of those Scottish kids wasn't American, was he?)

9. What can we say about a country that has no identity and hates
itself. If this country goes to war they need to give out instruction
with the rifles that admonish the user NOT to aim it at someone wearing
the same fucking uniform. What a cluster fuck that must be "A"? All
the orders MUST be written in two languages and no one is required to be
able to read both.

11. At least we don't have to pay most of our income back to the
government to support a wrinkles old crone and a bag of asshole (the
royal family) that don't do a fucking thing for their country. (Hell
the Pope at leasts comes out once a day and waves at the little people)

Keep telling it like it is Tom.
Jerry

If you're American add to this list. If not, FUCK YOU!!!! and get
your socialist, government spoon fed asses off the net!!!

There are those of us who will never conform to a one-world socialist
government.

.From: wi...@habanero.cul.columbia.edu (breck witte)
.Subject: more net.irony
.Date: Sat Jun 8 11:57:36 1996

<tr...@shadow.net> wrote:

>available.com is taken, and taken.com is available.

Also available is command.com

I've considered naming my next unix box something like:

colondottildebackslash.cul.columbia.edu

"Yes, the URL is aitch tee tee pee colon backslash backslash colon dot
tilde backslash dot see you el dot [etc]".

/breck

Think locally, Act globally.

.From: thisain'tKansasDorothy
.Subject: Re: 10 or MORE REASONS WHY AMERICA IS THE WORST!!!!
.Date: Sun Jun 9 23:10:34 1996

And the US is a place where you can speak your mind with relative ease
and without fear of military reprisal. There is good and bad in all
countries, all forms of government but it is common knowledge that if you
were to post your whining comments in China about China, the chances are
that you would lose all rights to your bicycle, have your stir fried dog
ration cut in half and there would probably be a tank at your doorstep
at dawn. If I had to pick between China and the US to live..like DUH!
Yuck Foo!

.From: eme...@aztec.asu.edu (MARK ADKINS)
.Subject: spies and lunatics
.Date: Mon Jun 10 11:44:40 1996

I am a political animal, a kind of apparatchik of the U.S. national
security state created during the Cold War and still running strong. My
career goal is to serve as the Special Assistant to the President for
National Security Affairs, through several administrations if possible,
both Democratic and Republican. In pursuit of this goal I have always
been willing to engage in the kind of pragmatic toadying necessary to
survive and advance inside the bureaucratic machine. Often this has
has required me to indulge the whims of those superiors who are in a
position to advance my career.

There was, for instance, the time I served as a staff member of a
Restricted Interagency Group whose purpose was to review covert
paramilitary operations in Central America during the 1980s. Bill
Casey (then CIA Director) would especially get on my nerves. As
he drafted plans to sabotage Sandinista health clinics and public works
in order to prevent impoverished peasants from developing a debilitating
dependency on Big Government, he had the habit of whistling melodies from
the soundtrack of Mary Poppins -- "A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine
Go Down" in particular.

But undoubtedly the most severe test of my resolve came in 1993 when I
served as assistant to C., an Arizona district judge who had just begun
his term on the FISA court, a kind of Star Chamber operating under the
terms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and several subsequent
presidential orders. More of an ad hoc group than an actual court, its
members take turns rubber-stamping secret requests by the FBI and other
intelligence agencies to perform physical searches and conduct open-ended
electronic surveillance.

C. had friends in high-places in the national security establishment,
and I knew that if I could make an impression it would advance my career
interests immeasurably. Little did I know that it was I upon whom an
indelible impression would be made.

I can recall driving to work the first day, listening to Debussy's
impressionist piano work La Cathedrale engloutie on the local classical
station. Mystical and serene, the piece assisted me in reaching that
state of sangfroid which has always been so invaluable to me in the
political world upon which my career ambitions depend.

As I walked through the doorway of the judge's chamber, the foundations
of the universe trembled violently. The judge was in the middle of the
room, stark naked, performing a kind of handstand, only he did it with
just two fingers, each one inserted into an empty champagne bottle.
Looking at his flabby, aged body, one would never have guessed that he
had either the upper body strength or the perfect balance necessary,
but he did. Attached to his head by a thin piece of elastic tucked
under the chin, was a pointed, cone-shaped hat, like a dunce-cap only
much, much shorter. On his legs were strapped a pair of plasterer's
stilts at the ends of which were affixed a pair of high-heeled women's
shoes, which made direct contact with the ceiling. Worst of all, his
hideous old man's testicles sagged down over his diseased looking
dark green-brown member, like a pair of primitive, bottom feeding oceanic
invertebrates locked in mortal combat.

Although I had always prided myself on my ability to go along and get
along, everyone has a line which they draw somewhere, and I drew my
line at *that*. Fortunately, my fears proved to be unwarranted. Over
time I came to the reluctant conclusion, against my initial judgment,
that Judge C. had *no* deviant sexual component to his personality
whatsoever. Strange as it sounds, he was merely a recreational nudist
with eccentric habits.

Still, I must confess that I never quite overcame the shock and distaste
of seeing C. pace back and forth across the room while considering the
technical merits of an application, his stiletto heels clicking across
the ceiling in counterpoint to the pum-pum-pum of the bottles as they
moved across the carpet.

Like many of my superiors, he invited me to share trivial aspects of
his personal life, and I obliged him in order to gain favor. He liked
to watch Rumpole of the Bailey on PBS, and so we spent one evening a
week. C. always hated the Rumpole character, feeling that he
unfairly persecuted the primly responsible head of chambers, Sam "Soapy"
Ballard. After each episode, he would have me remove from his desk drawer
a small, hand-made rag doll, which, though it looked to me more like the
Pillsbury Dough Boy than Leo McKern, served the function of the latter.
Jabbing the doll with wooden cocktail toothpicks, the judge would shout
"Nyaaah! Yah! Take that, Rumpole!" in tones of childish pique. Anger
always caused his sinuses to flow, so he would pause periodically for me
to hold a tissue to his nose. This was probably the most offensive work
required of me -- and what a blessed relief that this was so!

The last day I saw him (the judge had by then become familiar with the
routine of the FISA reviews, and I had accepted reassignment elsewhere),
he refused to speak except to mutter something under his breath which
sounded like syllables of rhyming gibberish, occasionally interjected
with words whose form more nearly approached English yet retained their
nonsensical character: "duh-buh, shnibbledy-shnoo...gimblesnap!...
quippy-quippy kwoo-kwah..." That was the last time I had knowledge of
him, until last February, when I read a paragraph in National Law
Journal noting that he had fallen through the window of his high-rise
condominium, "apparently while attempting some sort of amateur home
repairs."
--
Mark Adkins (eme...@aztec.asu.edu)

.From: ehr...@mail.ameritel.net (Ken Ehrett)
.Subject: Re: 10 REASONS WHY AMERICA IS THE WORST!!!
.Date: Mon Jun 10 02:44:55 1996

>Axolotle wrote:

>> Actually, you uneducated third world moron, the Greeks did. You should
>> consider your comments before opening your mouth and revealing
>> you pathetic ignorance....

Foo Chuan Herng <Gaun...@mailhost.net> wrote:

>Actually you uneducated American moron (do some statistics, there are
>more American uneducated morons than many of the Third World nations).
>Greeks invented democracy. Americans insulted it.

Oh yeah Kato! I spent six years living all over the far east and with
the exception of Singapore and Hong Kong every place I saw was a
shithole. The educated class of these third world countries rule with
an iron fist and keep everybody else in the country poor and stupid.
All the education in the world is not worth shit if you don't have
moral decency and democratic principles. BTW, in less than a year you
can take Hong Kong out of my category of exceptions as well. China
will make that place a living hell for anyone not smart enough to get
the hell out before those Chinese Red army troops arrive.

Ken

.From: Scott Ellis <qbt...@freenet.mb.ca>
.Subject: Re: Timothy Leary Memorial Haiku
.Date: Wed Jun 5 19:28:51 1996

On 2 Jun 1996, Alan Scott wrote:

> I saw him speak once
> He embraced with hope the same
> kids Abbie died from

I saw Leary once at a Learned Society conference where he was a keynote
speaker. I think he was there because so many of the participants were
academic Boomers, nostalgic for Woodstock and the Haight. As usual, he was
grandly silly, motoring on about cyberpunk and cosmic consciousness in
full acidhead rap mode. His crowning moment, though, came during the
question period after the speech, when an anal retentive prof pointed out,
in that inimitable academic, I'm-just-here-to-score-points fashion that he'd
said something (I forget what) was like *this* at one point in his rant.
But later, she continued, he'd said it was like *that*. How did he
explain this discrepancy?

Leary gave it three beats, paused, looked around at the room packed full of
Semioticians, Deconstructionists and Neo-Marxists hanging on his every word,
then answered, thusly: "Well! I guess I'll never use THAT FUCKIN' METAPHOR
AGAIN!!!"

.From: stu...@world.std.com (the reverse-psychology major)
.Subject: Re: When did you first notice breast?
.Date: Mon Jun 3 18:04:46 1996

... well, we always went to the cape [cape cod] as a family during the
summer. we went to 'head of the meadow' beach, big sand bar, lots of
waves. i was swimming by the sandbar [i was abt 8] and this lady [20's]
in a designer, black swimsuit was standing at the sandbar [abt waist deep]
at that very moment a great big wave was cuming towards her. she had her
back to it so she couldn't have seen it. well, the wave broke right ontop
of her AND tore away her top!!! thankfully, i was the only one there so
i swam over to her top [begin dream] and snatch it up as i swam to shore
with this topless babe following me.

... so i get to the shore and she's still following so i head for the
dunes and she still topless and still following so i take her top and
shove it down my pants and run behind a dune. she finally catches up to
me and ask for her top.

'give me my top'

'what? i dropped it back there'

at this point she notices the bulge in my suit and she smiled.

beelzibub
ps;
i'll finish this on request

--
this is my .sig. it's one of the best .sig's on the 'net'. i know what
you're thinking: 'did he post 5 or 6 articles'? to tell you the truth i
kinda lost track myself. so you gotta ask yourself one question: 'is it
true?' huh, is it punk? come on, go for it. make my breakfast.

.From: chage...@jack.clarku.edu
.Subject: Story about Something which Happened
.Date: Wed Jun 5 23:49:32 1996

Hi, I got up this morning and looked at my pen which was
on my table next to a pad of paper. I said, "I think I
can write a boring story in which no one would read."
I sat down and started to think.

I did not think that hard. The words started to come out
about Something which Happened. As I began writing, I started
to think a little bit. Then I had to get up. Then I came
back to the table with the pen and the pad next to it. I did
not read the words I wrote, but imagined someone *else* reading
them, and thought about what it would sound like from someone
else's perspective when they read about Something which Happened,
in which I wrote.

I said to myself, "it would not matter *what* I wrote because
nobody would read it." It would not matter if there was no
purpose or topic either. As long as I wrote about what Happened
in my story, the purpose of it would make it irrelevant, and
quickly forgotten. I knew most stories had some point, and most
expressions had some intention. And most people had something to
say, or Something which Happened to them. I figured out that if
I could also write Something which Happened, maybe it would have
a point, or a purpose. At least there was a point to me what
Happened when I wrote it. That it was Something other than
what was happening was refreshing and made me say: "I'll
write a story about not anything in particular, just about Something
which Happened.

As I got tired, I said, "i could end this story, and nobody whould
know what happened."

The end.

.From: ehr...@mail.ameritel.net (Ken Ehrett)
.Subject: Re: 10 REASONS WHY AMERICA IS THE BEST!!!!
.Date: Mon Jun 10 02:30:23 1996

lob...@singapore.net.com.sg wrote:

>Yeah, only THE USA can come up with companies with inferior products.
>IBM was struggling for the past decade and just managed to maintain a
>slice of the present market.
>Microsoft, manufactures fucking software that require more resources
>to run them and their programs are SOOOO fucking expensive.
>Intel, created a stupid processor and BLAM !! a mathematican discovers
>the flaw.
>The present Apple is having SOOO much trouble with it's products.
>Notebooks with hinges problem, Desktops with faulty design, etc

Yeah, well up yours Hop Sing! The only thing that mainland China has
excelled at in the last 100 years is pogroms and executions. Let's
just see what happens next year when your commie pals take over Hong
Kong and turn it from one of the finest economic models in the world
to a festering shithole occupied by Chinese Red army troops in order
to keep the population in line. No more democracy for them. Then
we'll see what kind of fucking computers they'll have after that. Who
knows, when China gets strong enough militarily speaking, maybe
they'll pay you a visit down in Singapore and let you in on their
great way of life as well. If you're nice enough maybe they'll let
you chew gum again. BTW, it's pretty ironic that the country that
invented paper doesn't have enough to go around for their citizens to
wipe their asses with.

Ken

.From: Tom Fawcett <faw...@nynexst.com>
.Subject: Re: 10 REASONS WHY AMERICA IS THE BEST!!!!
.Date: Mon Jun 10 15:34:17 1996

1. funnier home videos than anywhere else in the world
2. WALK/DON'T WALK signs are different colors
3. beer <==> sex
4. soft drinks that can strip grease off carburetors
5. most "GET <country X> OUT OF <country Y>" bumper stickers in the free world
6. ammunition choice as a lifestyle statement
7. more ways of being electronically interrupted than any other culture
8. petroleum companies sponsor Earth Day celebrations
9. psycho killer population large enough to constitute a market segment
10. top-ten lists as social commentary

.From: morph...@aol.com (MORPH10625)
.Subject: ALERT TO ALL PARENTS!
.Date: Mon Jun 10 01:32:10 1996

I
had
heard
from my
co-worker
about a big
problem today.
It seems my kid
and your kid, all
of our kids have to
worry about evil drug
dealers giving out fake
tattoos with acid in them.
This is not a joke or rumor.
This is a serious threat that
must not be taken lightly. They
have a blue star on them, but not
all - some have cartoons or such on
them. You must be very careful with a
blue star tattoo because the strychnine
can be absorbed into your blood from just
handling the paper. This horrible thing has
a reason to it - the dealers want LSD addicts
to buy more after they are hooked. Symptoms you
should watch for are: hallucinations, mood swings,
uncontrolled laughter, drop in body temperature,
dizziness or disorientation, severely dilated
pupils, and severe vomiting. Some time - up
to an hour, can pass between contact with
the drug and onset of symptoms. If your
child has fell victim to this heinous
crime, you must take him quickly to
a hospital. Children hare already
died from this, LSD overdose is
easy. If you see a suspicious
person giving tattoos, foil
wrapped especially, phone
your police immediately.
This is a real danger
and is growing much
faster than I can
spread warnings
alone. Thanks
for reading
this that
I wrote
about
LSD
!

.From: "Michael C." <ac...@bga.com>
.Subject: Re: know your audience
.Date: Sat Jun 8 12:49:12 1996

Tom Fawcett wrote:

> I've learned a lot about the value of promotion and marketing.
>
> If I were destitute and bumming money for booze, I'd
> make up one of those thermometer chart signs that volunteer
> fire departments use for fund drives to show how much money
> they've raised. I'd draw a frowning face at the bottom, and
> a picture of a Jim Beam bottle at the top. Every few
> minutes I'd count the money, then color in the thermometer
> so people could see how close I was to my goal.

{snip, but only to save bigbanderawidth}

I used to live in SF,CA and I think the professional panderers there
are the best all time moneymakers. In fact they should unionize or run
for congress, these guys are extremely aggressive, they don't just ask
for spare change they say "gimme $5.00, so I can buy a rock and get me
a woman" or they will find an idyllic (public) parking spot, wave you in,
and then tell you if you give them $5.00, they will watch your car.
Unfortunately, if you don't give them $5.00, they will trash your car,
then call an outlaw tow service they know, have your car towed, stripped
and dumped.

Michael C.

>From the church of anti-futilitarianism

--
||||||
/ \ "........"
(____/\ )
|___ @(____
_\L. | \ ___
/ /"""\ /.-' | |\ |
( / _/ | \ |_)_|
\| \\ / / \ (___ __)
| \\ / / | | |
| ) _/ / | | |
_\__/.-' /__ | | |
_/ __________/ \ | |
// / ( ) | |
( \__|___\ \______ /__|____|
\ (___\ |______)________/
\ |\ \ \ /
\ | \__ ) )___/
\ \ )/ /__(
| / /___| \
_/ ( / \
`----'(___________)

.From: eme...@aztec.asu.edu (MARK ADKINS)
.Subject: media censorship
.Date: Fri Jun 7 06:49:59 1996

Some of you may have heard of the recent incident in which President
Clinton, commenting on the mummified remains of a girl, remarked that
it was "sure a good-looking mummy" and suggested that he might want its
telephone number.

However, few people (except those who were present in the room) know
about the even more shocking incident which followed. As described to
me by a journalist of impeccable credentials, who wishes to remain
anonymous for reasons which will become obvious, there was a sudden,
chilling change in the President's demeanor. While joking (apparently)
about his stereotyped image as a womanizer in his publicized remarks,
he displayed light spirited laughter. That was the part you saw. Then,
according to my source, the President's face was contorted by what can
only be described as a feverish blood-lust, frightening in its dark,
inhuman intensity, and the President, roaring something which might
phonetically be rendered as "Raaahhhrr-Waaahhhrr!!" jumped down from
his podium and leapt upon the mummy, attempting to eat its head off.

He was pulled away only with the combined efforts of three Secret Service
men and Sam Donaldson (who suffered a black eye in the incident -- not
from the President, but from one of the Secret Service men who thought
that Donaldson had also finally snapped). The exits were then blocked
as the President was dragged from the room, and the audio and video
tape of all journalists was confiscated and edited. All present were
sworn to secrecy on threat of random urine sprayings.
--
Mark Adkins (eme...@aztec.asu.edu)

.From: cd00...@interramp.com (Larry Allen)
.Subject: Re: 10 REASONS THE WORLD IS FUCKED!
.Date: Tue Jun 11 03:31:30 1996

Dick Lander <lan...@inil.com> wrote:

>> > Hey, let's cut out all this psuedo-intellectual debate and get right
>> > down to the heart of the matter.
>> >
>> > 1. We all hate each other.
>> > 2. We will eventually destroy ourselves.
>> > 3. Collectively, human beings do not have the intellectual capacity to
>> > save ourselves or solve any of the world's issues.
>> > 4. There will never be peace in the Middle-East.
>> > 5. China will never know Democracy.
>> > 6. A small minority of the population will eventually consume the vast
>> > majority of the world's resources.
>> > 7. We love our murder, mayhem, and hatred...makes us feel powerful.
>> > Come on, admit it.
>> > 8. If, by chance, a decent, thoughtful human being somehow emerges out
>> > of the sewer of humanity, we will kill him/her.
>> > 9. Folly is more fun than wisdom.
>> > 10. Need more? read the previous posts on why America is the
>> > worst/best.
>> >
>* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I could never manage a frown when hunting Grunion on Huntington Beach
under a full moon, with a crackling fire and a circle of goofy friends.
And the one-ups-man-ship was a favorite brand of humor. I'd love to have
had Pam at one of those Grunion bakes; at least those fish wouldn't have
stuck to the wienie fork. And look to see that what one man calls realism
is sarcasm to another. Could be that honest meat is pulled from the
extremes of fire, and served up with irony - now that's heavy!

Almost all the enumerated points have the same theme - ultimate
destruction. Well, so what, we all know that we cannot get out of this
life alive! It's a Greek tragedy where the best we can do is conquer our
fears and pretend to be noble (just another way of claiming virtue).
Frankly, I vote for hedonism - lets have fun and be gentle with one
another. It's all in your attitude; as my uncle once said, "If you ever get
run out of town, just grin and wave like you were leading a parade."

And how can anyone get worked up about folly being more fun than wisdom.
Wisdom seems always to making some sacrifice for the greater good, while
folly is saying to hell with judgement, we don't need a condom... Look at
good ol Dick; to sum up his values: guns, gui's, and gals - a great combo
for any man!

And for those of you who ponder the difference between the scrotum and
prostate, there's a vas deferens...
That should not offend anyone who appreciates double intentions.
Larry Allen

+++++++++++++++++++

.From: ppil...@limestone.kosone.com
.Subject: limerick
.Date: Thu Jun 6 19:59:37 1996

There were three young ladies from Birmingham
and this is the scandal concerning 'em
They lifted the frock and tickled the cock
of the bishop engaged in confirming 'em.

Now the Bishop was nobody's fool
He'd been to a good public school.
So he pulled down their britches
and fucked those three bitches
with his ten-inch episcopal tool

Then up jumped a lady from Kew
Who said as the Bishop withdrew:
The Vicar is quicker and slicker and thicker
and longer and stronger than you!

.From: 19...@in.dech.com (Joe)
.Subject: Re: THE INTERNET IS FOR DORKS!!
.Date: Tue Jun 11 09:30:10 1996

Lovergal <wakk...@aol.com> wrote:

>Do something with you life.
>Get out of the house.
>Stop being computer dorks because you are.

>dorks

I TOOK MY LAPTOP & CELLPHONE TO THE PARK
THANKS FOR THE ADVICE!!

.From: s...@fishnet.net (Colin McElroy)
.Subject: Re: Just 1 more WHY AMERICA IS THE WORST!!!
.Date: Wed Jun 12 15:23:58 1996

Siapa Rajah VIII <Si...@isp.com> wrote:

>The Miss Universe Contest.
>
>Invented by the Americans, this competition is the
>most racist, sexist and obscene show ever created by the
>human race.

Ever check the carvings on some Indian temples?

.From: Clayton Weaver <cgw...@eskimo.com>
.Subject: MUST
.Date: Wed Jun 5 12:39:58 1996

Now where was I? Oh yeah, ...

Imagine, if you will, Beethoven, sitting at his piano, running a few
phrases with his hands, while his mind turns over some huge context of
chords and melody and theme, sifting for the right sequence of notes
that fit perfectly into the next bar. He does not hear the knock at
his door, hears not the odd hoofbeat in the street outside, ignores
the shadow at the window as a cloud passes before the sun.

He feels a tug at his sleeve. He turns, startled, to see the housewife
from across the street, to whom he has never spoken more than fifteen
words in ten years. She seems distraught. "Come outside, you have to
help me, Tattyputs is stuck." Tattyputs?

Beethoven is completely at a loss. He follows her outside, for no
reason that he can explain to himself, then or later. At the edge of
the street, she points up into this huge tree. Beethoven looks up, and
there is this cat, quite a small cat, a kitten in fact, stuck out near
the end of this slender branch. It is afraid to move, just sits there
shivering in fear, looking down at Beethoven and Mrs. Whatever Her
Name Actually Was.

Beethoven looks at the woman, who is standing there looking expectantly at
him, as if he could solve this difficult situation. He looks back at the
cat. Aren't these things supposed to land on their feet when they fall out
of trees? He looks at the tree. The tree is much too big to shake and
simply catch the cat on its way down, and what fool would try that,
anyway? The thing might scratch your hand, the wound could get infected,
and a physician might have to amputate. Beethoven shivers at the thought,
looks at his hands, wiggles his fingers.

He looks at the tree. Even if he climbed it (and the first branch is
about 12 feet above the ground), how would he get the cat, all the way out
there on the end of that tiny branch?

His gaze wanders down the road. Toward the corner sits a wagon, with
quite a tall driver's seat at the front, and a sturdy team of horses
in the traces.

"Whose wagon is that?" Ludwig von B. asks the woman.

Mrs. Somename looks at the wagon, a bit puzzled herself.

"I think it is Hans' wagon, the carpenter from down by the river."

"Go find Hans, tell him to bring the wagon over here, and get some
blankets."

While she goes off on this errand, Beethoven looks back at the cat. He
begins to hear some notes, imagines a phrase of music, a chord. His
fingers twitch as his inner ear plays it out, holding it up against
the backdrop of a larger composition, already sketched out in this
morning's work.

The clop of hoofbeats brings him back to the moment. He tells Hans to
pull the wagon over next to the tree. The woman returns with her son,
her daughter, someone's maid, and someone's grandfather, by the look of
him, all holding mounds of blankets and bedsheets. Beethoven has the
blankets arranged in the back of the wagon, gets up into the driver's
seat, and repositions the wagon so that he can reach the lowest branch
and the blankets are under the cat.

He tells everyone to stand clear. Firmly grasping the branches above
him, he hoists himself up, climbing around the tree until he has one
foot on the branch that holds the kitten. He stomps on the branch, but
it barely wiggles. Holding carefully to a branch above him, he
sidesteps out until the branch actually bends a little bit under his
weight. He glances at the kitten, who is about to take an unplanned
flight to safety.

At just that exact moment, a crow, it must have been the only crow in
the universe brave enough or dumb enough to land on a branch within
ten feet of a human and right over a cat (of all things), this crow
flies into the edge of the tree from some nearby rooftop and lands on
a branch not 2 feet above the cat. With a furious flapping of wings
and squawking, the crow looks around for its cronies, for
reinforcements perhaps.

Beethoven stares at the crow in disbelief, completely in shock. He barely
notices the bizarre, dissonant tones of its call, the unordered, the
arbitrary, the unguessable rhythm. The kitten suddenly notices the crow,
and its entire attitude changes in an instant. Instead of hanging on for
dear life, it now seems to be attempting to get its feet under it, as if
it were about to leap up and bite the crow in the neck or something.

["Hey, wait a minute! You forgot the part about ..."]

Clayton

--
--
\|/ \|/
* *
\_ _____--------. .--------_____ _/
== __ o__| |__o __ ==
----//---' `---\\----

.From: Vince <vi...@uscom.com>
.Subject: Re: THE INTERNET IS FOR DORKS!!
.Date: Thu Jun 13 19:24:31 1996

The Internet Is Changing the World

AND

You Are a Scum Lapping Shit Bag
--
___________ ____ __ __
______/ \__// \__/____\ / V \
_/ \_/ : //____\\ / \
/| : : .. / \ / \
| | :: :: \ / (_ _ _ _)
| | :| || \ \______/ | \_ _/ |
| | || || |\ / | | | | |
\| || || | / | \ <<-+ ARE A +->> | | | |
| || || | / /_\ \ | | | |
| ___ || ___ || | / / \ | | | |
\_-_/ \_-_/ | ____ |/__/ \ | | | |
_\_--_/ \ / | | | |
/____ / _____ | | | | ______
/ \ / /, , ,\| |/ , ,\
\______\_________/ / , , ` , , \
/ , , ` ` , \
\ ` ` ` /
SO FUCK OFF!! \ ' ` ' , , , /
\__________/\__________/

.From: Tamsin H <ha...@greenplanet.com.ugchal>
.Subject: Re: 10 REASONS WHY AMERICA IS THE BEST!!!!
.Date: Fri Jun 14 04:38:00 1996

ON THE CONTRARY, THE WAY AMERICA IS TRYING TO POLICE THE WORLD AND EXPLOITING
POOR THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES AND NOW RECENTLY MIDDLE EAST SHE'LL KEEP ON SELLING
ARM AND SPREADING DESTRUCTION ON THIS PLANET. BUT ONE THING I DON'T UNDERSTAND
WHY CLINTON WAS SHEDDING TEARS ON THE DAY OF OKLAHOMA BOMBING. WAS THAT JUST
BECAUSE FEW AMERICANS DIED, WAS THE REASON THAT A FEW INNOCENT CHILDREN WHO
HADN'T SEEN ENOUGH OF THEIR LIFE DIED BEFORE THEY COULD SEE ALL THE COLORS OF
LIFE? BUT WHY DOESN'T HIS HEART FEEL GUILT WHEN PEOPLE ALL AROUND THE WORLD
DIE FROM THE ARMS AND DESTRUCTIVE WEAPONS MADE IN US SOLD TO THOSE COUNTRIES.
WHY AMERICANS CAN'T SEE THE BLOOD ON THE TOP OF PIZZA THEY EAT, WHY THEY
CAN'T SMELL HUMAN FLESH USED IN HOT DOGS THEY EAT. THEY EVEN CAN'T SEE THE
BLOOD IN DOUGHNUTS WHICH IS USED AS CHERRY SYRUP. THAT'S ALL I WOULD LIKE TO
SAY TO THE PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT AMERICA IS THE BEST PLACE IN THE WORLD TO
LIVE.

.From: odd...@pioneerplanet.infi.net
.Subject: Silverware and fine cut crystal
.Date: Thu Jun 13 05:29:30 1996

Cardboard! It's all I can see nowadays. Thin but carefully conjoined
sheets of dyed-brown-so-as-to-appear-undyed paperstock, punched into
crafty patterns and folded (just so!) into rectilinear "batteries" of
immense potential. Chunks, great wet flaps mucking ominously in alleys
and industrial doorways, the bicycle shop, the produce warehouse,
Corrugation, one of the great mechanical developments of the packaging
world, a nuisance baled with twine.

Sleeping in a refrigerator box.
Invoice enclosed.

-cyrus

.From: Andrei Kolesnikov <and...@online.ru>
.Subject: Re: 10 REASONS WHY AMERICA IS THE WORST!!!
.Date: Fri Jun 14 10:31:19 1996

>12. they hold the world record for using the word 'fuck' more
> times than anyone else.

You have no idea about a few hundreds variants of "fuck" in
Russian language using trillion times per day. It's just a part
of daily dictionary of every person. Sorry guys.

-- andrei

.From: stu...@world.std.com (the reverse-psychology major)
.Subject: Re: Public Access Real Audio Talk Show
.Date: Fri Jun 14 15:53:53 1996

Steve Babigian <ste...@ids.net> wrote:

>Well! We're doing this neato thing, allowing people to have Real
>Audio public access "radio" shows.
>
>Listen in on the night of the show...
>
> Thursday night, 9:00 PM Eastern Time, June 20th!

listen?! LISTEN!! I DON'T THINK SO!! WHAT ARE YOU A FUCKIN' PIECE OF SHIT?!
IT'S NOT GONNA HAPPEN!! I LIVE WITH THE FACT AND ACCEPT THAT I AM DEAF!!
IT'S A 24 HOUR THING SO DEAL WITH IT!!! FUCK! I CAN'T JUST CALL YOU UP
AND MAGICALLY 'HEAR' WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO SPEW FORTH ON THE NET!! BUT THAT'S
NOT WHAT I CHOOSE TO TALK ABT. NO, NO, NO. I WISH TO TALK ABT YOUR INABILITY
TO ACCEPT MY DEAFNESS. SURE, I LOST MY HEARING. I CHECKED THE LOST-N-FOUND
AND IT WASN'T THERE!! SO IT'S GONE AND IT'S NOT CUMING BACK!! YOU, YOU
SLACK-JAWED, LIMP-WRISTED, EARING-WEARING, NIPPLE-PIERCING,
NON-REWINDING-X-RATED-VIDEO-WATCHER, BURGER-FLIPPIN',
AM-RADIO-LISTENIN', ZIMA-SHUNNIN', JOCK-STRAP-WEARING,
CHURCH-GOIN'-ATHEIST WITH A PENILE IMPLANT!!!

beelzibub
ps;
remember to logout

--
this is my .sig. it's one of the best .sig's on the 'net'. i know what
you're thinking: 'did he post 5 or 6 articles'? to tell you the truth i
kinda lost track myself. so you gotta ask yourself one question: 'is it
true?' huh, is it punk? come on, go for it. make my breakfast.

.From: chage...@jack.clarku.edu
.Subject: Chef Satan
.Date: Sat Jun 8 13:22:43 1996

"Hi, Rob, you smell skunky. Fucking or something?"

"You mean I smell like semen?"

"yeah"

"yeah," Rob admitted, "I was fucking."

And so went the conversations at the party, Yellow Submarine
District, Manhattan, during the summer of 1973. Rob Hancock and
Charles Ovary were two men who worked as bond salesman down on Wall
Street. A young and beautiful woman came up to the men. She was a
Deadhead, and stopped by to say hi to a friend she knew in college.
The men were wearing charcoal grey suits, looking somber, except
for one thing which prompted the young woman's curiousity.

"Hi, Gentlemen," she giggled, "I'm sorry to interrupt you. I wouldn't
have come over, but I wanted to let you know of your etiquette faux
pas." She pointed at Rob, and his zipper was wide open. He did not
wear underwear, and his penis enlargement was fashionable enough to
draw attention, even though his erection had gone down
substantially.

Charles, his friend, automatically defended him by by acting like
nothing was wrong, "Oh, yeah," he started, and drew on a
nicotine-free cigarette, "yeah, do you like his enlargement?"

The woman responded, "I've sucked larger. By the way, I don't think
we've been introduced. My name is Contra." She extended her hand,
dangling with bracelets and combustible ornaments, waiting for this
handsome mare to shake it.

"How do you do Contra? My name is Charles Ovary."

"That's an interesting name--Ovary."

"Yeah, I know. " Charles admitted. "My name is Surgeonetic."

"Your name is what?"

"Surgeonetic. Never heard of that procedure? It's the synthetic form
of afterbirth. Get it? A surgeon had to remove my mothers ovaries
after I was born, and the doctors voted to remove her orginial last
name to identify her when she began to receive Social Security."

"I guess I've never met someone named after a fucking procedure.
Jezzus H. Christmas!" she expelled, rubbing her legs together like
a shy little twenty-year old. She was attracted by his officious
explanation, far removed from her world of dancing hippies.

"You like my dick?" Rob interrupted.

"Your dick is fine," she responded, and then looked back at Charles.

"I like your dick, I think the operation was a success." Charles
slurred his speech to appear drunk, although the two were not
drinking.

Contra got a little annoyed. "Why must you show everyone your penis?"
She asked. "Is it a guy thing?"

"Wouldn't you if you had one? You got big boobs it looks like."
Charles noticed she was blushing suddenly. Contra whispered, "I had
an enlargement also." He laughed politely.

"By the way, my name is Rob Hancock. I don't think we've been
introduced."

"Contra. Contra DeLordo. How do you do?" They shook hands. Suddenly,
she withdrew her hand because she felt something particularly
displeasing with the feel of his hand as though she had fondled the
insides of someones body. Her hand was slimy, with white cream all
over it, which looked like cold cream like Ponds or something. She
stopped smiling at him and wiped his semen on her dress. Rob
noticed, and apologized. "I have four sacs also."

"Apparently so," she said, distressed. "I just wish you had the
brains to act like a civilized human being."

"Well, that's New York," Rob said.

"Its not his problem," Charles testified, "Rob's approach to life,
like his approach to his job, is to make sure his fertility---as
any male---is adequately compensated. I mean, when you sell
bonds---we sell for a living, large corporate accounts for Torso,
Paine & Sons---when you have to procure financing, its like giving
birth. That's what we do."

"Yeah," Rob said, "That's what we do,"

The men stared at her for her approval, like a dog or child would
stare after barking or crying at their owner, and then wait to see
what happened. Since she was a woman, and pretty meaty at that,
they had this envious assumption she was more sophisticated and
able to drink a large amount of alcohol.

"In-ter-resting-ting" Contra stated, forming a bigger and bigger
sarcastic grin with each pronouncement. "Who worked for Torso Paine?"

"We both do. Why? What do you do for a living?" Charles asked,
challenging her, mystified by her response.

"What do *I* do?" she asked--acting spacey.

"Yeah, what's your job?" Rob asked.

"Before I answer that, can I get one of your Nickless?", she asked
Charles, bumming a nicotine-free cigarette. As she stood there
holding the cigaratte with her wrist flipped backward, both men
withdrew appropriate lights. Charles lit a dollar bill lighter; Rob
lit a felt tip pen. She went for the dollar bill, and inhaled the
environmentally-equipped smoke. As she exhaled, she answered over
puffs of smoke: "I'm the capital punishment specialist for Ludd
City, Georgia."

"What's that?" Rob asked, amused. "You execute criminals?"

"I'm a specialist, I only terminate existence. leaving conciousness
intact forever." Contra enhaled the tax-free smoke and said, "Back
a couple of years ago, I think. I did a job at Torso Paine. It was
a special case. It was a Chef who made meals out of his victims and
served them to employees in the company cafeteria. When they found
out, the Chef was sentenced to death via my department. We decided
to pay $23,000 dollars for two caucasian men, in their
mid-thirties, employed by Torso Paine, to eat the Chef. I guess the
President of your company believed in, 'an eye for an eye and tooth
for a tooth'? You know, one of those types."

Rob and Charles said nothing. They looked at each other briefly and
started to blush and sweat gradually. Rob looked down at his penis
hanging out of his pants and decided to put it back in, and zip up.
Charles took out a hankerchief and started to wipe his mouth. He
drooled. They gradually avoided eye contact with each other and
with Contra, as her voice mingled with the cocktail voices
discussing the arts and music. Actually, "Walking After Midnight"
by Patsy Kline was playing in the background during this
intermittent silence.

Contra summed out her experience for the benefit of her listeners, if
not for society itself, "I mean, its okay. The company at least did
provide some incentive for these employees to eat another former
employee. I bet those guys have guts, no pun intended."

Rob ignored Contra, looking at Charles, and telepathically said,
"this woman has almost identified the source of our humanity."

Charles agreed, but qualifed his response, "But let her believe in
her whichcraft. Besides, where else shall we get food as good as
this." Charles was falling in love.

A Rose Island School of Design student who was serving o'douvres and
cocktails to the creatures at the party came over to the three and
offered eyeballs, fingers and testicles with chopped textual
spread. Contra saw the offering as stuffed mushrooms, cheese sticks
and deviled eggs. "Oh, what a feast," she exclaimed and began to
consume the entire serving as they all stood at rigid attention.
The student also dragged around an Intravenous machine which
withdrew her blood and was poured in kitty cups. Contra had a
couple of kitty cups of blood. "Thanks, that was delicious."
thinking it was fruit juice.

"My pleasure," the drained college student replied.

Obviously, Charles and Rob had nothing. They had not eaten for
several thousand years.

.From: dpau...@msn.com (David Paulsen)
.Subject: Postage Due
.Date: Sat Jun 15 14:52:44 1996

Postage Due

"Delivery!" shouted the loading dock foreman, as he brought his fist
down on the padded MAX EMERG button. Alarms honked and lights spun as
the dock readied itself for the delivery. The armor plated doors
swung ponderously closed, while "severe tire damage will result"
grating swung up from the floor, wicked 17-inch chrome spikes held at
a 40-degree angle. The air was filled with clouds of nano-molecular
soldier-mites, ready to invade and destroy any humans foolish enough
not to wear the Company badge. Dock workers manned the automated gun
emplacements by standing around and smoking.

Soon the READY light blinked up at the foreman, who nodded in
satisfaction before speaking into the hissing mask at his throat.
"Clear. Proceed with delivery." Within his immersive goggles, the
world was displayed as it appeared through the binocular eyes of an
outside secure-cam. Below his vulture-like position, he could see a
non-Company truck backing up to the armored doors that had just eased
shut, rotating beacons flashing from the rear bumper. With a lurch,
it stopped movement, engines revving. Along the bottom of the
foreman's display scrolled letters identifying the vehicle, its
service history, the driver's name and identification numbers. Based
on the truck's specifications and the certification carried by the
driver, this was an unmarked rapid service vehicle, intended to get
in and out with a minimum of interface. The foreman approved.
Whomever had hired this truck respected the busy dock-worker.

The vehicle's door eased open, slow enough not to alarm any
trigger-happy automatics. The driver himself stood there in his gray
uniform, immersive goggles & mask covering his face. Held at his side
was a thick padded package, which was rotated up smoothly in the
customary fashion so the barcodes could be easily scanned.

As the lasers eagerly licked the barcodes, emergency logos flashed in
the foreman's display. Priority! This one was hot. He thumbed the
release mechanism for the dock, causing the outer doors to re-open.
The foreman jumped down and forced his way through the gale-force
winds whipped up by the nano-warrior recovery turbo-fans shrieking
above his head. The package was in his hands within four seconds, the
driver back in his articulated seat in six, the delivery van back on
the road in eight.

The foreman looked down at the package in his gloved hands with a
mixture of fear and excitement. Unlike the thousands of other
deliveries he handled each year, this one had a unique barcode:
DOCUMENTS ENCLOSED. Who had ever heard of such a thing? Sending
documents in a package!

--

The package was quickly routed upstairs, to the 800th floor. Nobody
knew what to make of it there.

"Do we open it?"

"How?"

"Lasers?"

"My great-grandmother used to do this. I think she used a chainsaw."

"Davidson! Call Maintenance and get a chainsaw!"

--

Once the padded envelope was open, another mystery presented itself:
the document.

"It appears to be enclosed in yet another casing. Chainsaw?"

"Mmmmm… no. Too risky. Ideas?"

"Lasers?"

"You could tear it open. With your hands."

"You're kidding! What about countermeasures?"

"You should've thought of that before. Besides, Security said it was
clean."

"Sure! Let THEM open it. Say… that gives me an idea."

--

The Polarized Deep-Scanning Radar lab on the 615th floor had never
handled such an enigma. The object it was presented with was a flat
container with another flat object inside. Laser spectral analysis
(yes, they finally used lasers) indicated a polymer construct, with
cellulose properties. The expert systems agreed that this internally
concealed object was in fact, a sheet of what had passed for paper in
the previous century. Presumably it contained a message. Somebody
had expended a great deal of resources to get it to the Company.
Therefore, the message must be read.

Nobody wanted the responsibility of opening the outer container and
exposing themselves to whatever hideous countermeasures lay within.

Therefore, the message must be read without disturbing the container.

--

"Sir, the Lab results are back!"

"And?"

"They vaporized it!"

"What?!"

"But they successfully recorded the message before it went. It's a
personal letter of thanks from the president of Yokohomonomogo Metals
for our recent takeover of their failing orbital foundry. He says we
saved 16,000 jobs. He wishes to thank us for sparing him the dishonor
of reporting another annual loss to his shareholders. He is, in
effect, thanking us for his life."

"This disturbs me."

"How is that, sir?"

"If it was a simple letter of thanks, why not teleconference, or just
send it via email?"

"Would that carry as much personal honor?"

"Come again?"

"The Japanese believe in such simple gestures. They eschew electronic
communications for their most personal messages. At least, that's
what I've heard."

"Or… this could be a clever plot to unbalance us. Or perhaps there
really were virulent nano-phages in that note, and we were saved by
the quick thinking of our PDSR Lab. Personal thanks! What could it
mean?"

"Oh well, at least it's over now."

"Over? I'll call you when it's over. Davidson!"

"Sir?"

"Shut down the Yokohomonomogo orbital foundry. Stop shipments of food
& oxygen to the employees there. Commence interrogation of said
employees in 12 days."

"Which foundry, sir? There are four."

"Interesting. Shut them all down. We'll get to the bottom of this
yet."

--
David Paulsen
dpau...@avana.net
dpau...@phss.com
dpau...@msn.com

.From: aj...@ix.netcom.com (Tony Scaduto)
.Subject: Re: Beat a whiteboy today
.Date: Sat Jun 15 22:17:27 1996

Some cretin from earthlink.net, and calling himself Whiteboy Killer
wrote:

/* mindless drivel cheerfully snipped */

Follow-ups also both cheerfully shit canned and killfiled :-)

____ _____ _____ ___ ___ ____ ___ __ ________ ___
/ ___|_ _| ___/ _ \ / _ \ / /\ \ / __|\ \ / /_ _/ ___|
| | _ | | | |_ | | | | | | | / /__\ \ | | \ \ /\ / / | | \___ \
| |_| | | | | _|| |_| | |_| |/ /----\ \ | |__ \ V V / | | ___) |
\____| |_| |_| \___/ \___//_/ \_\(_)___| \_/\_/ |_| |____/

GET THE FUCK OUT OF ALT . CALIFORNIA WITH THIS SHIT

Cheers asshole.

Tony. . .

.From: Bhavani Srinivasan <Srini...@worldnet.att.net>
.Subject: Re: THE USA IS FULL OF HYPOCRITES!!!
.Date: Sat Jun 15 21:15:38 1996

>
>>You fucking dorks.
>>You all Americans know shit about everything.
>>THE USA has no fucking Culture, the Shittiest government
>>system, and the WORST lifestyle ever made.
>>I WOULD KILL myself if I were known as an American.
>
>You fucking idiot.
>Here's 2 reason's to thank American for "being."
>1. American's have made ENGLISH the world's most valuable language..
>2. We Saved The Eastern Hemisphere from Hitler and the Axis Powers in WW2.
>
>By the way Moron what country do you love? I know we could kick your
>ass in a WAR!!
>

YEAH, FUCK THEM IGNORANT BASTARDS! USA! USA! USA! USA!
IF YOU EVER TALK SHIT ABOUT THE LAND OF THE FREE AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE
AGAIN, I WILL PERSONALLY RIP YOUR ENTRAILS OUT AND CREATE AN AMERICAN FLAG
FROM THE RED BLOOD, THE WHITE PUS, AND THE BLUE FUCKING BRUISES ALL OVER
YOUR BODY!
Dream Team In '96!

.From: ma...@cray.com (Matthew Marchese)
.Subject: Radio Heaven (Fin)
.Date: Tue Jun 11 14:57:10 1996

"Then I saw a new heaven and new earth; for the
first heaven and earth had passed away, and the
sea was no more."
-Revelations 21:1

The spook reached over and shut off the holographic projector. "After
viewing the evidence, I hope you can see why we're so concerned,
doctor?"

I blinked and sat up in my chair. "Yes, yes. The paranoia that would
ensue if this became public could trigger religious and paranormal
hysteria that would make the millenial panics of 1999 seem like a
Sunday school picnic."

"Exactly, this is why we need to get someone out there to fill in the
gaps -- give us a complete picture of what's happening at the center."

At that, we climbed out of our chairs and straggled out of the
conference room. I slowly ambled over to the observation window and
looked out over the the chamber below. The slender bulk of the
cryogenic tower and its attendant columns of milky magnetite
stood sentinel over a tangle of consoles and thick, power cables that
snaked across the polished concrete floor. The long snouts of the
laser emitters triangulated on the array like guns, ready to fire my
lover into the throne room of Heaven.

Horii-san was already back on the floor pulling off another access
panel. Karolyn stole up behind me and placed both hands gently on
my shoulders.

"What's on your mind?"

I turned my head and looked at her; a mixture of doubt and utter sadness
etched on my face.

"This is insane. We're ants poking at a hill of elephants. Anything that's
capable of doing something like this is so far beyond our ken -- it's
utterly ludicrous to contemplate."

"Hey, we're human beings," she retorted airily, "We thrive on giving
God the finger."

"That's what I'm afraid of," I answered and headed downstairs to give
my lasers a final QA.

Later that afternoon we all assembled on the main floor to assess our
status. Everything seemed to be ready. There was no use postponing the
inevitable. Karolyn suited-up and we escorted her to the pod and
helped her into the cramped capsule. I leaned in and kissed her
on the helmet.

"Hey, be careful out there," I gave her hand a final squeeze.

"Thank God for the helmet," she cracked, "At least I don't have to
smell you anymore."

"I promise to shower as soon as you get back," I lied.

After sealing the pod, the overhead track crane lifted the pod up and
over the mouth of the cryo-tank. Techs guided the gleaming egg into the
maw of the cryogenic tower and sealed it with a domed cap. I felt a
gnawing in my guts as they racheted the lid down with pneumatic
wrenches. Finished, they scampered down and pushed the scaffolding
away, leaving the giant tank standing solitary within it's ring of
crystalline henges. The ceramic walls squeaked and popped as the liquid
helium was pumped in.

"Up yours, Lord," I thought to myself.

Back in the control room we manned our consoles.

"Tank temperature stable," Horii-san called out, "No leaks detected."

"Lasers at 20%," I replied, "Karolyn, how're you doing in there?"

She gave me a thumbs-up. "All systems check out. Say, what's this
going to be like?"

I shrugged, "You'll be the first human being to ever experience being
two places at once, simultaneously."

"Nah, remember the HP company picnic?"

I smiled and slowly slid the output pots upwards. "Drugs don't count.
See you on the flipside."

At first, nothing seemed to happen. The barrels of the laser emitters
glowed a soft green as they pumped several megawatts of coherent, argon
light through their antimonide matrix and into the columns of crystal.
Within the space of a few seconds a brilliant plasma aura appeared around
the tip of each column and sent out long tendrils of coruscating energy to
each adjacent column. Soon, the tank surface was totally obscured
by geometric facets of crackling energy created by the criss-crossing
strands of plasma.

With a loud *pop* the entire structure solidified as the facets
interlocked. The surface of the construct went abruptly from opaque
to mirrored as the array extended into hyperspace. The resulting
artifact resembled a giant buckyball hovering inches from the
chamber floor.

"Welcome to the 10th Dimension," I sing-songed, "Rubber goods,
ammunition, marital aids, and denture products."

Karolyn's face swam into view on the overhead monitor. She looked
disoriented.

"Too weird," she moaned, "I'm hanging in empty space above a ringed
binary star-system, but I'm also here in the pod. I don't know how to
explain it; there's too much sensory input. I think I'm gonna puke!"

"Lift your faceplate first -- No, cancel that. If you're really in
space the vacuum will kill you. Try to concentrate on your equipment.
Turn on your heads-up system; focus on that. Where are you?
Turn on your exterior camera."

Her gaze locked a few inches in front of her as she concentrated on her
navigation display. "I'm only a few parsecs out from our solar system,"
she announced after a few seconds. The other monitor was displaying
a dazzling view of a ringed, yellow-giant sun. A brilliant white dwarf
hung off one shoulder of the massive star.

"Feeling better?"

"Yes, concentrating on the equipment helps. You were right. I think
I'm ready for the next jump."

I fiddled with the console controls. "I'm going to boost you up to
1 Gigahertz. The paradox separation is proportional to the laser
output frequency. We'll have to feel our way out to the center with
incremental jumps."

"Make it 2.8 Gig. I have a feeling that number isn't coincidental."

I made it so.

The picture on the external monitor shimmered and the twin suns
disappeared. What appeared after that, squeezed a collective gasp from
the control room staff. Before us swirled the glowing edge of a
tremendous black pit of nothing. The edge trailed-off into vast, cosmic
distances; a great, shallow arc barely discernible like the beach of a
terrible, dark sea. Straight ahead, a jet of brobdingnagian proportions
shot multi-hued streamers of gas into the empty bowl of the heavens.
None of us had any doubt that we had reached our destination.

Karolyn spoke at last, breaking our awed silence, "This must be
the event horizon. I'm activating all sensor arrays."

I glanced at her telemetry output, trying to make sense out of the
rapidly scrolling numbers and graphics. "There's too much information
here. I'm re-routing your datalink into the main simulator."

A smooth, black column rose up from the center of the control room floor.
Several sustained teraflops of computational data-mining began to produce a
detailed, 3-D representation of the galactic core and its surrounding
multi-dimensional structure. A huge hypercube surrounded the singularity,
reaching out towards the spiral arms. As I watched, the cube
extended another level, then another, and another. I swallowed -- hard.

"Jesus," I muttered, "Look at the hyperspatial geometry. It's symmetric!"

The spook and several techs left their consoles and clustered around
the floating holograph. "What does this mean?" he turned to me and
demanded. The techs stared at me in anticipation, their faces drained.

"It means that the universe we know is being reconfigured at the
quantum level," I replied, "Normally, the hyperdimensions are rolled up
in a ball the size of the Planck length. It would require the complete
reassembly of all superstring fragments into one, colossal unistring to
accomplish this, not to mention an unlimited source of energy. It's
inconceivable!"

"Well, you better start conceiving it then," Karolyn retorted, "I'm
receiving something on the high-band FM receiver. Shut up and
listen to this."

A familiar chorus of trills and harmonics emerged from the control room
speakers; the same eerie cacophony that had played on Karolyn's pocket
tape recorder a million years ago in a Palo Alto street cafe. This
time, however, it was different. Freed from the shackles of trillions
of kilometers of intergalactic noise and attenuation, it began to
deepen into a complex symphony of point, counterpoint, and harmony
almost Wagnerian in its dynamic range. After a few seconds, I became
aware of a deep, rumbling resonance swimming up from the bottom of
the scales. It whispered at first, then slowly coalesced into
deep baritones that rattled the control rooms windows:

"DO NOT OBSERVE"

I felt my bowels loosening with fear. Several techs had crawled
under their consoles at this point. The spook was swaying as
he gripped the sides of his control panel with white knuckles.
The terrible voice came out of the speakers again:

"SING THE SONG. RESTORE THE UNITY THAT WAS. DO NOT OBSERVE"

The spook was on his knees now. He crawled over to me across
the floor and pulled himself up to my chair. He hissed in my
ear, "What's It talking about? Why does It want us to stop
observing?"

I replied through chattering teeth, "M-my guess is that we're
interfering with the process. It's Huh-huh-Heisenberg's Uncertainty
principle. Our observations are affecting the parameters of the
experiment. We're collapsing the wave function by simply being
there!"

"Good," he spat through gritted teeth, "I want you to pump the
laser outputs up to 100%. We've got a 45-megaton tactical nuke
mounted in the pod; it's rigged to detonate at 3 terawatts."

"Are you fucking NUTS!?" I screamed, "That'll vaporize Karolyn AND the
laboratory, not to mention a third of the South Bay! Did you forget
about the paradox effect, you bleeding moron? Besides, We're talking
about creating a totally insignificant energy blip here. You may as
well toss a charcoal briquet into the Sun!"

I felt a cold, metal snout press against the base of my skull. "I think
you're wrong," said the spook flatly, " Either you boost the power
output, or I'll splatter your brains across the room and do it myself."

Karolyn had obviously been listening to our conversation. "For God's
sake, you don't know what that'll do to the structure of space/time!"
she yelled, "You could destroy everything, including the Universe we
know!"

The spook stood up straight and stared straight into the monitor.
"Better to die on our feet than live on our knees!" he spat.

"Nice cliche'," I offered, "My Universe, right or wrong."

Suddenly, I heard, as well as felt, a wet *thud*. The gun slipped off
my neck and clattered to the floor. I looked down to see the spook
crumpled in a heap; a bright pool of crimson spreading out from his
crushed skull. I swiveled around. Horii-san stood off to one side
gently smacking a large pipe against one open palm. A huge grin spread
across his face.

"What a dickhead! I have been wanting to do that for months!" he
exclaimed, and walked back to his console, whistling, and swinging
the pipe in a lazy arc.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief. "Karolyn, we've got to get you back."

"I'm not coming back," she replied coolly, "I want to be a part of
this. It's good -- I can feel that it's good. I've spent my whole
life searching for an answer -- trying to peek beyond the veil.
Now I can see the purpose. I don't know what the end result will be,
but I know now that I won't cease to exist. I'm not afraid. I want
to sing the song."

Before I could answer, she reached over to her control panel and flipped
open the cover on the explosive hatch bolts. She blew me a final kiss and
pressed the button.

"NONONO!" I screamed.

The view on the monitor rocked once with a sharp explosion, and went
dead. Simultaneously, the mirrored surface of the hyperdimensional
buckyball rippled violently and tore apart with a tremendous snap that
crumpled the foundations of the laser scaffolding. One of the powerful
beams moved off the glowing magnetite column in front of it and arced
crazily around the main chamber, coming to rest on the side of the
cryo-tank.

"It will tear right through it!" yelled Horii-san, "We must leave,
immediately!"

As if to punctuate his warning, the glowing ceramic of the tank gave
way with a tortuous groan. Tons of liquid helium poured onto the floor
of the main chamber. Snapped cables flew like whips through the air as
the entire side of the tank crumpled, spewing supercooled helium over
the front of the control room booth. I grabbed Horii-san and huddled in
the corner with a few of the other techs who'd managed to keep their
wits about them. Our frantic cries were drowned-out by shrieks of
twisting metal as half of the control room simply snapped-off and fell
to the chamber floor with a shuddering crash leaving us teetering on
the ragged edge of the remaining floor.

We managed to open the airlock door and seal it behind us before the
rapidly-warming helium returned to its gaseous state, asphyxiating us.
A quick count revealed that 3 of the techs had been left behind. I had
to presume that they were dead now. Nobody was going in after them, in
any case. The emergency crews arrived a few minutes later, but there
was nothing they could do except start up the emergency ventilation
systems.

MPs escorted us to the Moffett side of the airbase where we were
debriefed by military personnel. We explained the accident as a
misadventure in superconducting. It was clear that nobody in the
intelligence community would ever confirm the real nature of the
project. We appeared to be off the hook as far as the spook's murder
was concerned. No trace of Karolyn's body would ever be found; the
paradox effect would see to that.

The sun was setting over the Bay as I entered the pub off University
Avenue. I sat down behind the bar and hailed the bartender:

"Set me up with a pint and a shot, and keep them coming until I fall
over."

"Just sign the legal waiver on the counter," he nodded, "Don't want
any trouble with the PAHP."

As he moved to fill my order, I pulled the small tape recorder out of
my jacket pocket and plunked it down on the bar. I pushed the play
button. Tears were streaming down my face as the bartender returned
with a pint of McEwan's and a shot of Glenlivet.

"What the hell is that noise?" he inquired.

"That's my girlfriend," I said, my voice cracking, "She sings beautifully,
doesn't she?"

He shook his head and moved off. I downed the Scotch and laid my
head on the bar.

The new Heaven and Earth were coming, and I was going to be drunk as
a fucking skunk when it arrived.

This story is COPYRIGHT 1996, Matthew J. Marchese. All rights reserved.
Standard USENET distribution is acceptable; other forms of reproduction
or reprinting may be considered in violation of international copyright
law. Contact Matthew J. Marchese with all reproduction requests or
questions at: ma...@cray.com

Matt Marchese <URL http://discover.discover-net.net/~vicvega/>
ma...@cray.com <URL http://home.cray.com/~matt/>
"We drink elixirs that we refine from the juices of the dying" -Shriekback
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Article #241406 (241455 is last):
From: ma...@cray.com (Matthew Marchese)
>Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Radio Heaven (Middle)
Date: Fri Jun 7 09:27:30 1996

NOTE: Apologies in advance if this shows up twice. The iTribe
gateway appears to have consumed my first attempt at
posting it.

"...how can one enter a strong man's house and plunder
his goods, unless he first binds the strong man?"

- Matthew 12:29

"You want me to WHAT?," I bent forward and placed my palms flat
on the table in front of Karolyn; my nose hovered an inch from hers.
My patio chair clanged noisily to the sidewalk. That seemed to
attract the attention of the PAHP officer who was in the process of
booking a cafe patron caught wearing sunblock with an insufficient
SPF rating. Another loose cigarette popped out of my shirt pocket
and rolled off the tabletop to the concrete.

"Nice going," hissed Karolyn, "Let's get out of here before she
hauls us off to the Stanford pillories."

She quickly passed her credit card under the tableside scanner and we
got up to leave. Rounding the corner past the Good Earth, we climbed
into her tiny roadster. The health cop didn't seem to be following us.

The flywheel whined as we pulled out onto University Ave. and merged
with traffic. Amidst the combined buzzing of so many hybrid vehicles, I
felt as if I were submerged in a cloud of giant horseflies. As we
turned onto Shoreline Drive, the traffic noise subsided. I turned to
Karolyn and picked up the threads of our earlier conversation.

"Let's review what got us to this point: you've discovered a
powerful, organic transmitter in the human brain that broadcasts a
complex FM signal towards the center of the Milky Way at the point
of death. I'll admit that this is incredible, with some provocative
implications for some form of existence after physical death. But
Heaven, souls? Lucy, you got some splainin' to do."

"Look, there's a lot I haven't told you yet, I admit it. The broadcasts
are multi-sensory personality matrices encoded in RF; we've proven it."

"How?"

"It took a lot of string-pulling, cajoling, and outright bootlicking
but we managed to secure enough computational time in the Berkeley
supercluster VR tanks to confirm that these signals are an
electromagnetic representation of an entire human personality."

"Okay, it's a soul for all intents and purposes. Where do I come in,
and what's this nonsense about burglarizing Heaven?"

She abruptly turned right and pulled into the parking lot of the
abandoned Sun Mountain View campus. She shut down the flywheel and we
both stared straight ahead at the burned-out hulk of the massive,
mirrored main building left as a memorial after the Apple Riots of '06.
Sunlight streamed through the gaping holes in its shattered windows.

"You've been working with pulsed, Argon-antimonide lasers trying to enhance
the Schroedinger Paradox Effect."

"How do you know about that?" I almost yelled in surprise.

"Babe, once the NSA caught wind of what was going down at Berkeley.
They were on us faster than Atherton cops on the homeless. They
appropriated all of our research in the name of National Security. I've
got double-secret probationary clearance now."

God, this woman had a way with a pop-cultural reference. I felt myself
falling in lust with her all over again.

"For example," she continued, "I know that you've been inducing
paradox-states in higher lifeforms. What I don't know yet is how
successful you've been."

"Last week we were able to induce a simultaneous existence-state in
a small mammal."

"What kind? How far?"

"A cat, naturally. 5 miles."

She leaned in closer. I was fighting down some rather base instincts
at this point, but I wasn't sure if it was lizard-lust or fight-or-flight.

"Did it survive?" She was an inch from me now, breath hot and perfumed
in my nostrils. Pheremones.

"We don't know. It doesn't work that way. As soon as we turn off the
laser, they enter a sort of indeterminate state. It simply ceases to
fully exist in our reality." I winced at the oversimplification, but
it would have to suffice for now.

She pulled back to the other side of the car, "We can't *see* what's
there in the Galactic Center. There's too much interference -- gas,
dust. We need to find out where these signals are going -- what's
happening to them once they get there. The NSA is pushing us pretty
hard. They're convinced that something nasty is happening out there.
Probably watched too much X-files as kids. I think you can send me
there -- in a manner of speaking."

"It's not that simple," I replied, "We're screwing with the fabric of
space-time; breaking through to other dimensions that only exist at the
Planck length. It takes too much energy to crack them open directly.
We're sneaking in through a side door; tickling the feet of
hyperdimensional superstring fragments. Besides, do you want to wind up
like that cat; suspended in some boxed, half-life dimension the size of
a shoebox?"

We sat in uncomfortable silence. I swallowed, and continued on:

"You said your live subjects were experiencing OOBES. Is it possible that
the combination of EMRI excitation and the orgone box amplification of
the effect was, quote/unquote, sending them to Heaven? In other words,
can't you just turn the scanner on yourself and go wherever they're
going?"

"Don't think I haven't tried it," she grimaced and hugged her shoulders
as if struck by a sudden chill, "There seems to be a barrier -- a
curtain that a living person can't pass through. Oh, I went through the
tunnel all right; saw the light, talked to Mom and Dad..."

She trailed off on the last part and began to weep silently; head on
the steering wheel. I reached over and put an arm around her. The
floodgates opened. I was feeling a little ashamed at my earlier
reactions by this point.

"Did you meet Someone or Some*thing* else?" I asked quietly.

"That's just it," she gasped between great, wet sobs, "There was nothing;
no God, no Jesus, no Brahma, Buddha, Allah, or Sophia."

I tried to be comforting, "Well, you're an Atheist. OOBEs are
well-documented to reflect the beliefs of the individual experiencing
them."

"I'm not an Atheist. I'm a Lutheran. You know it's impossible to move
up the scientific ranks now without signing an Oath of Non-belief."

We sat in silence for a few moments as the afternoon sun glinted off
the twisted pylons of the Dumbarton Bridge. Finally, I spoke:

"Karolyn, I don't want to be insensitive, but this is beginning to
sound less and less like a scientific endeavor and more like a personal
quest manipulated by Guvvie spooks. Even if I was convinced that your
motives were altruistic, I can only send a cat from the Blue Cube to
downtown Cupertino. I can't send a human being 33,000 light years
across the galaxy."

At this she straightened up, dragged a tissue across her face,
and blew her nose with a honk.

"We think you can," she replied. Her earlier loss of composure was now
tucked away, out of sight. "Now that the NSA is involved, we have
access to simulation engines that you've only seen in wet dreams.
Besides, it doesn't matter what you think at this point."

"I'm deputizing you, boyfriend."

[To be Continued]

This story is COPYRIGHT 1996, Matthew J. Marchese. All rights reserved.
Standard USENET distribution is acceptable; other forms of reproduction
or reprinting may be considered in violation of international copyright
law. Contact Matthew J. Marchese with all reproduction requests or
questions at: ma...@cray.com

Matt Marchese <URL http://discover.discover-net.net/~vicvega/>
ma...@cray.com <URL http://home.cray.com/~matt/>
"We drink elixirs that we refine from the juices of the dying" -Shriekback
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

_ _
.-~" "~-. .-~" "~-.
__ ... . -^-- ,- -- - - -^ ,._ .
_. - ~`v ( `, `,=')---.-.
' `. .' `\' ;."~-._` )`)
`. `._ _.' { )'~-,
`-. .-' `- /'( >~
`. .' `(_.-'
v

.From: Jeremy Winterson <Bl...@Sgi.Net>
.Subject: Re: Define "America" Please!! (was 10 REASONS WHY AMERICA IS THE BEST!)
.Date: Sat Jun 15 21:37:21 1996

Frank Warner wrote:
> This is the most trivial subject I shall ever write about. And wow,
> now I've just noticed this posting is cross posted to some bizarre
> group names. What the heck is alt.2600?

It is to do with hacking, phreaking, etc... 2600 being the
frequency which the phone company used to use to keep the phone
lines open during a call.

.From: Mark Collette <mcol...@stu.athabascau.ca>
.Subject: Re: THE USA IS FULL OF HYPOCRITES!!!
.Date: Mon Jun 17 08:55:56 1996

> > >Dudeman <acyb...@thunder.ocis.temple.edu> wrote:
> > >
> > >:You fucking dorks.
> > >:You all Americans know shit about everything.
> > >:THE USA has no fucking Culture, the Shittiest government
> > >:system, and the WORST lifestyle ever made.
> > >:I WOULD KILL myself if I were known as an American.

No, you wouldn't kill yourself - at first. If you were an American you
would do some drugs, get drunk, beat your wife, assault someone, break
into a gun shop, hold up a Quickie Mart, rape a fellow man, kill at least
5 cops, make a bomb, go to Oklahoma, blow up innocent civilians, get
caught, go to jail, get raped by a fellow man, THEN TRY TO kill yourself,
but fail because you're an American and incompetent, get the death
penalty, appeal, get off all charges, BOMB AGAIN, and die from extensive
bleeding after your vengeful ex-wife slices off your quivering, American,
small dick.
THE END
Mack Daddy - Pissed off at Americans today, I don't know why.

.From: bmo...@ix.netcom.com (Boy Mozart)
.Subject: Glyn's 19 Plots to Avoid: 10
.Date: Mon Jun 17 23:16:25 1996

>"The nineteen plots to avoid," by Elinor Glyn (appendix to _Elinor Glyn_
>by Anthony Glyn [London, Hutchinson, 1955]):
>
>10. All stories requiring trick photography.

I went to visit a friend of mine a while back. He'd finally moved out
of his parents' basement and into a one-bedroom apartment on the
Suburban-Commerical zoning border. I invited myself to see it because
he was so socially atropied he'd never think to ask anyone over himself.
We'd cracked open a couple of beers and shot the shit for a half hour,
until the topic turned, predictably, to particle physics.

"OK, what do you know about tachyons?" he asked me.

"Only what I saw on Star Trek," I replied. "They're subatomic particles
that supposedly travel faster than the speed of light."

"And what's the weird thing that happens to you when you travel faster
than the speed of light?" he continued, as he went back to his bedroom
to change.

"Oh, gosh, let me think. As the hypothetical traveller approaches the
speed of light, time will proceed at a normal pace relative to himself,
but to the rest of the universe he will appear to 'slow down'. When he
hits light speed, time will appear to stop for him, relative to the
universe, but continue relative to the traveller."

My friend came out wearing warmer clothes and a coat. I put mine on and
followed him outside. He locked his front door, turned to me, and
smiled. "And, should the traveller accelerate to a speed faster than
light, he will appear to move backwards in time, relative to the
universe, QED."

"Nice bedtime story," I complimented him, as we headed to his car. "Of
course, there's all that nastiness about entropy, and the fact that
anything going faster than the speed of light is likely to disintegrate,
but who am I to judge?"

When we got in his car, my friend pulled out what looked like a camera
and handed it to me; I examined it while he maneuvered out into traffic.
It looked like a regular camera, one of the fancy high-tech ones that
takes the picture for you. The lens was shaped like an ovoid instead of
a cylinder. There were no ASA settings, no F-stops, not even a flash
attachment, although there was that cool digital readout on top of the
casing, just over the eyepiece.

"This camera sucks," I told him. "You won't get a decent picture with
this. Get your money back."

"I built it myself," he told me. "What do you know about anti-matter?"

"This is Star Trek Trivia Night, isn't it?" I said. "It's elementary
particles that are the mirror-image of ordinary matter, that have the
same mass as their ordinary counterparts but have opposite charges,
like electrons and positrons, negative and positive, or other
differences. QED."

He turned on to Broadway and headed north. I wondered where we were
going, but the discussion seemed rather interesting. "OK, Einstein,
what's the big discovery?"

"Anti-tachyons!"

"Oh, yeah, the tachyon thing! I almost forgot. So, you discovered
anti-tachyons by taking pictures of them, right?"

We drove under the highway and straight into town. He found a parking
space, we got out, and we wandered down the 16th Street Mall together.
As I admired the passing roller-blading bodies, he told me another weird
thing.

"In the year 2568 A.D., a large chunk of anti-matter, corresponding in
mass to an iron-nickel asteroid, will collide with a body which acutally
IS an iron-nickel asteroid. I could make a prediction about how
scientists will invent a plausible explanation for something that seems
too extraordinary to be just coincidence, but I'll spare you the chaos
theory.

"When the two bodies collide, they'll annihilate each other, just like
matter and anti-matter is supposed to do. The matter-asteroid will
release a great deal of energy and subatomic particles, some of which
will be tachyons. The anti-matter-roid will ALSO release a great deal
of energy and subatomic particles, some of which will be anti-tachyons.

"Tachyon and anti-tachyon convergences and annihilations will continue
for many years before."

We stopped. He grabbed the camera from me, aimed it into a dark alley,
and pressed a button. A green flash of light burst from somewhere in
front of the camera, and was gone just as quickly.

"See," he said, returning the camera to me, "I theorized the 2568
collision from the tremendous amounts of residual tachyon radiation I've
managed to detect using that little gadget in your hands. Based on the
decay rates and theoretical velocities of these particles, I can set the
device so that, at the moment a tachyon/anti-tachyon collision
potentially occurs, I can snap a picture of it and preserve it.

"Radiation from such a collision will, of course, proceed at a normal
pace through time--forward, I mean. Any object blocking the energy
emission will have an effect on it."

"Hold it, dude," I said. "Lemme slow the lecture down a bit. You're
saying that because there's a whole shitload of tachyons and their anti-
particles smashing into each other, using that energy like visible light
you can get a color photograph of something that happened, AFTER it
happened?"

"Let's see Paul Simon make a song outta that!"

At that moment, I heard a loud noise, like a huge chunk of marble
hitting the pavement and cracking. We were near a restaurant with an
outdoor patio, and several of the customers were startled by the noise--
a couple of women screamed. I turned back to my friend, who was still
wearing that stupid grin on his face, and I noticed a large red stain on
his shirt.

"There's a large red stain on your shirt," I said helpfully.

"I know," he replied. "It's blood. I've been shot."

He collapsed on the pavement. There was more screaming, and some guy
started shouting "Call 911! Call 911!" I turned my friend over,
realizing that the bullet had passed straight through his body,
puncturing his heart on the way out.

"It's OK," he smiled. "Someone believes me. Someone believes me enough
to have killed me."

"Why?" I said. "Do they want this camera?"

"They don't what the truth about her becoming known." He pointed into
the dark alley. "A woman was raped and murdered in there, a few years
ago. She was a physics professor. All the evidence pointed to one of
the students, but I wasn't sure." He coughed, and spewed blood on the
pavement. "He's still there, at the university. Tell the cops."

"How do you know he's still there?"

"I made up all that crap about the camera," he said. "No offense, but
anyone who believes you can take a picture of something in the past
based on an anti-matter annihilation must not be doing very well in the
physics department."

I didn't have to tell anyone; I didn't even need to stop and get the
film developed. A few minutes after my friend died, a man with a rifle
was seen bicycling quickly down Champa, and was pulled over by police.
The exit wound on my friend corresponded to one that would be made by
that rifle. The bicyclist confessed to the murder as well as to the
rape from a few years ago.

At the funeral, I put my friend's neat camera on the casket as they
lowered it in. His mother told me she'd never known he was interested
in photography. I told her he had always been good with light.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Boy Mozart, | Stevens Hall Indecency Taskforce |
| bmo...@ix.netcom.com | still no URL--cope. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

.From: dpau...@msn.com (David Paulsen)
.Subject: Industrial Accident
.Date: Thu Jun 13 16:13:15 1996

Industrial Accident

As soon as the fuzzy warm happy feeling flooded through Jeremy's
system, he knew something dreadful had happened. He turned giddily
just in time to see his arm disappear into the shredder, nothing
remaining but a bloody trail across the gleaming steel blades. He
smirked. Damn, this was gonna hurt soon.

"Yo! Wassup?" Jeremy leaned against the doorjamb of Klaus's cubicle
somewhat lopsidedly.

"Man, what happened to you?" Klaus pushed his immersive goggles up on
his forehead so he could bare-eye his co-worker and friend. Odd
flickers of light bled from beneath the foam eyepieces now pressed
into his scalp.

"The shredder. My arm..." he giggled as he tried to gesture. "Back
there. Wow."

"You'd better crank up the coagulants there, friend." Klaus made to
adjust his goggles back down. "You're bleeding on my carpet."

"Oh, yeah. Sorry. Heh." Jeremy idly fingered his stump, lost in
fuzzy thought. "Um... coffee?"

Klaus shook his head. "Can't. Gotta finish up this simulation in
time for the big meeting. I've got 22 seconds left, and I'm only half
done." Without further interaction, he pulled the goggles back down,
leaned back in his pneumatic armature and breathed deeply from the
hissing mask at his throat. A sharp chemical tang of filled the air
for an instant while Jeremy watched his coworker re-immerse. Nothing
against Klaus; the man had a job to do. Jeremy tried to look at his
watch, realizing only too late that it had been on his arm. Sigh.

The coffee kiosk greeted Jeremy warmly. He smirked back at it,
ordering a double-latte with blood coagulants, more endorphins, and a
new designer neuro-stimulant he'd read about night before, supposedly
able to boost your IQ by 25%. The kiosk buzzed at him, rejecting the
endorphin request. "Medical reports that you're already past the
recommended dosage. Perhaps I can interest you in a standard
pseudo-di-morphine analog, guaranteed not to addict nor interfere with
your other drug regimen?" Jeremy grinned his approval at the kiosk,
which registered the blushing dilation of facial capillaries as an
affirmative. "I have also received word from Medical that your arm
has been recovered and is ready for reattachment. Would you like your
latte to go?"

The huge, blue metal door to Medical hissed aside. Jeremy peered into
the dimly lit room, filled with glowing-green-lighted shapes in glass
vessels, twinkling displays, video displays playing back slow-motion
simulations of surgical procedures, and in the center, the autodoc.
Rising a full nine feet off the floor, the 'doc was a spotless chrome
armature fitted around the Company nurse, Ms. Duncan. Not a bad lady,
really. Except when it was time for your annual physical. Jeremy
frantically tried to remember when he was due...

"Come in, come in! Young man, I have a surprise for you!" Jeremy
inched into the room, the door hissing shut a millimeter behind his
heels. The autodoc's hydraulics whined as its upper left arm rotated
down, towards Jeremy. Clasped in its huge padded fore-gripper was a
flesh-colored object wrapped in plastic, streaked with blood. Jeremy
gulped. He reached out tentatively.

"No, no! Mustn't touch! You're not sterile!" Nurse Duncan laughed
as she spun the 'doc around, her face hidden both by the rotating
machinery and the immersive goggles & mask she wore at all times.
Robot cameras extended from the walls and began to scan Jeremy's stump
with flickers of laser light. "Don't look! You'll go blind!" came
the good-natured caution from deep within the bowels of autodoc.
Jeremy turned from the flickers in time to see the plastic-wrapped
thing disappear into a hatch. "Is that...?"

"Oh yes, your arm! We dug it out of the reclamation bin. I must say,
you're VERY muscular. I find that VERY attractive. Ha!" The top
half of the 'doc rotated back for an instant, so Nurse Duncan could
leer suggestively at Jeremy. He caught an impression of tongue
licking lips before it rotated away. Even through dangerous levels of
endorphins, he felt a shudder of revulsion deep in his loins.
"Anyway, we're NOT going to reattach it. That paper shredder just
DESTROYED it, you must know! So instead, Insurance has authorized a
bionic replacement."

Steel clamps suddenly grasped Jeremy's torso, arm, and legs, the
door/wall behind him suddenly coming alive and holding him firm, as it
extended from the wall and rotated flat, sliding beneath the bulk of
the autodoc. As Nurse Duncan intended, Jeremy found the whole thing
sexually disturbing. Modern medical research indicated that the best
treatment involved keeping the patient mentally off-balance so as to
keep his or her mind off their condition. It worked: Jeremy screamed
as his pants were cut off his trembling legs, tubes and wires
inserting themselves in both thigh arteries. A catheter snaked up
from below, snuffling for a home.

"Relax! You'll look great and feel great with your new General Motors
prosthesis! This is the latest model, able to simulate a full 74% of
all human natural mobility! And encased in natural Lex-O-Skin, with
dermal heaters and programmable scent glands courtesy of Calvin
Klein!" Horrible things were happening in the vicinity of Jeremy's
damaged shoulder. He was jerked repeatedly as a warm buzzing
vibration penetrated every bone in his skeleton. "Relax! That was
the new titanium anchor point for your new arm being drilled. We're
almost done!" The scent of burning hair and flesh was overlaid
suddenly with the strong chemical odor of burning ants. A wisp of
gray smoke passed Jeremy's alarmed eyes. "Relax! That was the
laserwelder, attaching the new arm! We're almost done!"

Jeremy flexed his new fingers, noting an odd sub-second delay. He
guessed in time that he'd become used to it, along with the quiet
whines and clicks the arm issued as it moved. His shoulder was still
sore where it joined metal, but the nurse (shudder) assured him that
it would feel good as new in only a matter of days. He was especially
pleased with the new wristwatch built right into the arm! How
thoughtful. Through an unexpected neural interface, he could check
the time simply by mentally asking the watch, without the need for
looking at it directly. He also noticed that the Company had
thoughtfully programmed an alarm for 6:30 AM, so he'd never be late
for work.

Jeremy waved at Klaus with his new arm as he passed by his cubicle on
the way back to the shredder.

--
David Paulsen
dpau...@msn.com
dpau...@avana.net
dpau...@phss.com

.From: m...@plover.com (Peter Poriferum)
.Subject: Sandwich
.Date: Tue Jun 18 13:17:25 1996

``C'mere, boy,'' he said, and like a fool, I went. He lifted up his
sandwich. ``Y'know what this is, boy?''

``Sandwich,'' I gasped.

He hit me with the sandwich. The bread crmubled, and the meat fell to
the floor. There was mayonnaise on my eyelid. ``What kind of
sandwich, boy?''

``Broken sandwich,'' I said, and immediately realized that I'd made a
mistake. He screamed and threw me to the ground, jumping up and down
on my spine. I felt it crack and shatter, felt the chips shift inside
my back, felt the broken pieces grind together as he pounded me.
``Listen here, boy!'' he yelled. ``Ortolan sandwich!''

--

Mark-Jason Dominus m...@plover.com

.From: bmo...@ix.netcom.com (Boy Mozart)
.Subject: Glyn's 19 Plots to Avoid: 8
.Date: Tue Jun 11 08:23:32 1996

>"The nineteen plots to avoid," by Elinor Glyn (appendix to _Elinor Glyn_
>by Anthony Glyn [London, Hutchinson, 1955]):
>
>8. The unapproved marriage finally made acceptable by a child.

I don't know where Dad managed to dig up the hardware necessary to
electrify our outer-perimeter fence, nor maintain the ancient piece of
anti-aircraft hardware set up in the back yard. I never bothered to
question him about details; he was a former Army non-com, he must've had
connections somewhere. Either that or he built the damn things himself.

We lived in the mountains all my life, just the three of us. When Mary
and Rebecca came into our lives, my faith in the old man became a little
shaky, but Mom merely smiled, and the three women always seemed like good
friends. Sometimes all four of them were locked away in the master
bedroom, and I pretended not to hear the noises that filtered out, even
though I had the whole house between us. Usually it was just Mom and
Dad in there, and Mary and Rebecca would be in seperate rooms.

When the confusion became too much for me, I turned to science fiction.
Dad wasn't thrilled to see stacks of Pratchett and Fowle up on my
shelves--he thought it was Godless heathenism, and he often made
comments about it that he intended to be subtle, but which became boring
after a while. Soon I escaped his whining by ducking into the basement
and screwing around with all the surplus junk down there. He didn't
care for that, either, but he thought it was better than science
fiction.

One day, Dad threw a huge party; all his buddies and their wives and
kids showed up. I went nuts; so many people, all those kids to hang out
with--it was like living in the city! Mom, Mary, and Rebecca set up a
long table and piled food on it until I thought it would break. We must
have sat and ate for over an hour, until Dad stood up and tapped his
wineglass.

"Friends and neighbors, fellow servicemen!" he called out. "I've called
you all here today to make an important announcement, one that I know
will make a statement to the world about the rightness of our path to
God." Everybody shut up and paid attention; the moms were shushing all
the kids, snarling at them until they did as they were told.

Mom stood up and went to Dad's right side. Mary stood at his left, and
Rebecca stood at Mom's right, wrapping her hand around Mom's waist and
leaning her head on her shoulder. "It is my intention," said Dad, "to
take the hands of Mary Adler and Rebecca Schenk in holy matrimony, as
permitted by our own sacred texts!"

There were gasps of shock. Most of them started cheering; some looked a
little skeptical. I was freaking out--I knew damn well marrying more
than one woman was illegal in America. Dad was REALLY breaking the law
by marrying three! I sat there and gaped through the rest of the meal,
and went off by myself afterwards, so I could be alone in my shock.

Dad wasn't incredibly sympathetic. He told me I would accept his
decision, and if I didn't like it I could leave, Mr. Ten-Year-Old-Big-
Shit-Thinks-He-Knows-More-Than-His-Old-Man-Cuz-He-Goes-To-His-Fancy-Ass-
Liberal-New-Age-School! Mom was sympathetic, but she was also vapid and
kind of stupid. The only ones who actually seemed worried about me were
Mary and Rebecca, and that felt really weird.

"I know you don't like this, sweetheart," Mary said to me one day as we
three hung around outside. "But we love your daddy, and he loves us.
This is just our way of making the family bigger, more people to love."
She reached over and brushed hair from my eyes, patting my cheek in the
process.

Rebecca took my hand. "It'll be OK, you'll see," she said. "We're
going to take care of you. We'll be best buddies soon--wouldn't you
like that?"

I was 10 years old and they were pretty women fawning over me--what was
I supposed to do, say no? In a week, Dad had married both women, and
that was it. In a month, I was beginning to see them as older sisters--
or extra mothers.

By the end of the summer, the authorities had figured out what Dad was
up to. The sheriff rode up our mountain in his big fancy 4X4 to talk to
Dad about it. Dad simply smirked at him and told him to mind his own
damn business, it was OK according to our religion, and last he'd heard
the First Amendment was still in effect. The sheriff didn't look so
happy after that, and he started talking in a louder voice.

"You ain't no lawyer, Chip," he told Dad. "You're not gonna get away
with that freedom o' religion bullshit. The folks in Washington say
polygamy's illegal, and that's that. You got to dissolve at least two
o' the marriages, or the government'll do it for you."

"You pansy-assed little faggot!" Dad exploded. "You think you can drive
up here in your Fagmobile with that shiny tin badge and tell ME what to
do? You just better hop on back into that there Rice Rocket and go tell
your high-financed Communist buddies at County they'd better keep their
sorry little cock-strokin' hands offen mine 'n' mine, or I'll be down
their throats so fast they'll think they're givin' head! G'wan, beat
it!"

This was worse than anything I'd ever read in science fiction. The
sheriff was pissed. He wagged his finger at Dad and said some more
stuff, then Dad pulled an automatic rifle out of the blessed thin air
and hosed the sheriff's Toyota. He then pointed the rifle at the
sheriff and said, "Long as you leave, right now, I'll let you walk out
with some dignity. You got five seconds, then I'm gonna make you
dance!"

The sheriff walked; he was a genius. Dad fired up the two spare
electric generators and told me to stay the fuck away from the fence.

During the night we heard helicopters. I saw headlights beyond the
fence, as well as flashing red and blue lights. A lot of shadows stood
around the road up to our house, drinking coffee and bullshitting each
other. When I first heard the voice through the bullhorn, I knew it was
the sheriff.

"Chip, you got one minute to surrender Anna and the boy. Then you'll
surrender Mary and Rebecca, then you'll come on out with your hands up.
If you ain't out by then, I'm firing tear gas through your windows. I
hate to do that, but...."

The sheriff was cut off when the steel plate came slamming down over my
window. I heard thumps all over the house, and knew that Dad had sealed
it off from the outside. I heard a pathetic little thump on the steel
plate, and the tinkling of glass, and decided someone had tried to shoot
tear gas through my window. This was when I got fed up, and got out of
bed. I put on clean clothes and snuck down to the basement.

Dad ran the show from the ground floor; he had Mom and his new wives in
a shelter on the other side of the basement. I heard Mary and Rebecca
ask about me, but Dad was too busy and told them to shut up, I'd be OK.
After that I ignored all the other noises and kept working on my own.

For three days Dad held off assaults from the sheriff's department and
the State Police. Some damn fool tried to land a helicopter in our yard
and Dad took him out with the anti-aircraft. Even down in the basement
I could hear the thump as the helicopter exploded. After that, they got
serious and called in the National Guard and the FBI.

"Just like Ruby Ridge," Dad mumbled to himself one night as I snuck some
dinner out of the fridge. "Damn pussies don't know what they're
dealing with!" He chuckled, which drove a chill down my back. I raced
down to the basement and stayed the hell away after that.

They tried to take out the fence several times, mostly by throwing
crowbars at it hoping it'd short-circuit. Dad was also an electronics
wiz, and he'd figured out how to keep that from happening. When the
National Guard showed up, they solved that problem by driving an
insulated tank through it--I didn't even know they had those.

I heard more thumping, and realized it was coming from the stairs. Dad
was joining us in the basement. The door and stairway could be sealed
off, which is what he did. When he turned around, he looked at what I
had been doing and started cursing blue murder.

I found I had built up the strength to ignore him by now. When the
others came out to see what the commotion was about, I opened the door
to my creation, grabbed Mom, and shoved her inside. Mary and Rebecca
hesitated for a moment--Mary was grinning enough to split her head--and
they jumped in after her. I went in, leaving the door open, knowing Dad
would follow and try to be in charge.

When I was in the control section I sealed myself off from the rest of
the ship. Dad stood outside and beat on the metal for a while, until I
fired up the turbines, at which point he shut up and found a seat. When
everything was ready, I reached over and pressed the big red button.

The Feds figured we pulled a Waco. I'd wired every spare explosive from
Dad's armory into the bottom of the house. When they went off it was
like an atom bomb exploded; flames and smoke and a shitload of instant
kindling when flying off in all directions, taking out some of them
smart-ass Feds and a few deputies, too. I was kinda sad about the last.

Dad had salvaged anything he could get his hands on, no matter how
worthless it seemed. And I had salvaged what I could from that and
built something useful--a vertical take-off-and-landing craft. Airplane
engines work pretty good for VTOL craft as well as planes, if you're
young and smart and desperate enough to figure out how to do it. Or
just really stupid.

While most of the Feds were scurring around scratching their asses, we
blasted up through the ruins like an honest-to-God flying saucer.
Everyone was so surprised at the sight that no one bothered to shoot. A
news-crew was flying another helicopter, and got the whole thing on film
--which the Feds promptly snapped up and burned in the interests of
National Insecurity. For a while, apparently, everyone thought we were
really aliens.

Actually, we live a few miles north now, on another mountain, and Dad
lets me and Rebecca fuck every once in a while. She and Mary were
right--in time I learned to live with it, and it ain't quite as bad as I
thought.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Boy Mozart, | Stevens Hall Indecency Taskforce |
| bmo...@ix.netcom.com | still no URL--cope. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

.From: me...@pobox.com (mathew)
.Subject: Re: Have you ever noticed
.Date: Tue Jun 18 18:30:24 1996

the reverse-psychology major <stu...@world.std.com> wrote:

>>>That the men who "teach" physical education in schools are
>>>usually short, fat paedophiles?
>
> ... have you ever noticed that the people abused by physical education
>teachers can't spell 'pedophile'?

Have you ever noticed that dumbfuck Americans who 'correct' already
correct spellings with American English spellings get put in kill
files?

mathew
[ Right next to /sells out/:j ]
--
me...@pobox.com http://www.pobox.com/~meta/
Wanted: Digital CD copy of "Plunderphonics" CD
think globally - declare locally

.From: klu...@netcom.com (Scott Dorsey)
.Subject: Re: The Awful Green Thing from Outer Space
.Date: Sat Jun 15 18:32:55 1996

m...@plover.com (Mark-Jason Dominus) writes:
>
>This MENACE FROM OUTER SPACE is MENACING our refrigerators, it is
>MENACING our cafes, it is MENACING our children. It MENACES our
>understanding of the perfect truth and it is a MENACE to democracy. I
>refer, of course, to the AVOCADO.

When I was a child, I used to live in a house which was on a street with
a lot of other houses, and there was an alley behind these houses. Along
that alley were avocado trees, all up and down. They would drop overripe
avocados all over the alley, and cars would drive down through all of this
fruit and make guacamole everywhere. It would rot, but even when it was
rotted, it would continue to have that same chartreuse color. Flies would
buzz around, attracted by the stench, and it would stick in the tire tread
and dry out in the sun.

To this day, I have difficulty in Mexican restaurants.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

.From: dpau...@msn.com (David Paulsen)
.Subject: Artificial Stupidity
.Date: Fri Jun 14 20:23:11 1996

Artificial Stupidity

Daltry's ankle kept the pneuma-door to 719-2A from closing completely.
The ankle was attached to Daltry, who was sprawled face down in the
luxurious self-cleaning shag that came with the offices on the
stratospheric 719th floor. His antique gold-rim spectacles were
clenched in one rapidly cooling fist, while in the other was the
keycard to the executive washroom, where he had just spent a glorious
twenty minutes moving his bowels. Had Medical's software been quicker
on the uptake, it would have detected the lack of certain
post-heart-attack pharmaceuticals that would have prevented Daltry's
current condition. Like a lot of busy execs, he had thoughtlessly
skipped lunch, and with it, his daily intake of life-sustaining drugs.
Now he lay in his final repose, awaiting the paramedics who would
saunter in sooner or later to collect his body.

Daltry knew all this because he could see himself via the overhead
cams in the office. He knew that he'd missed his prescription because
he could read the telemetry from the 719th floor toilets, and also
knew why the paramedics weren't hurrying. Medical had detected that
his heart hadn't just stopped -- it'd just about exploded in his
chest. Clots were no doubt lodged deeply in every cortical nook &
cranny in his skull, and if the blood pooling beneath his face was any
indication... well, suffice it to say that even the most optimistic
Medical expert system at Daltry's disposal said he was totally,
irrevocably, three-times dead.

Nothing to do about it but to get back to work.

--

"Daltry's not dead!"

"Sure he is," Sanchez looked up. "You told me yourself: code blue."

Leslie frowned. The optilink behind her eyes was lighting her temples
with flashes of green light, quite pretty in the darkened room. "No,
he's accessing his office desk. 140 files open, 23 with current
activity, 2 with updates in the last 400 milliseconds."

"Security violation?"

"No, no. It all checks. Human interface metrics correspond with his,
although... it's approximately 216 times faster than... 260 times faster
than... 295 times faster than... Emile, he's accelerating. Quite odd.
In fact..."

Sanchez heaved himself out of his pneumatic chair. "He's gone AI,
I'll bet."

The stricken look on Leslie's face said it all. "It fits. Oh, man."

Shaking his head sadly, Sanchez palmed the lock to the weapons vault.
As it hissed open, he selected a white Duracell EM-Pulse rifle, two
hunter/killer virus packs, a handful of one-time injectors loaded with
Vick's Neural-44 (Menthol), and a hand-held MicroCray. "Back me up;
I'm headed for the 719th floor."

--

"Knock, knock," Sanchez announced as he stepped over the stricken
form of Daltry's human body. He tossed the pulse rifle onto a sofa
worth easily twice what Sanchez made in a year, lined up the virus
packs & injectors on the desk, and thumbed the MicroCray on. He
collapsed into Daltry's enormous chair, which awoke around him,
embracing him in soft heated leather and soothing vibration. "Talk to
me, Daltry. Why'd you do it?"

"Excuse me?" sighed Daltry's voice, coalescing from the very air
itself.

"You've gone artificial. What got into you?" Sanchez pressed an
injector against his wrist, bit his cheek involuntarily as the
Neural-44 slammed into his bloodstream. He could feel his IQ spinning
upwards to dizzying heights, along with his pulse rate.

"Oh. That. Look... Sanchez, is it? I'm really quite busy here, and
you're interfering in Company business. I've got a deadline to meet,
and--"

"Sorry sir," he grated from between clenched teeth as the second
injector bit home. "You violated the terms of your agreement when you
died. Technically, since you're occupying Company hardware, you're
Company property. We can terminate you at will."

"Yes, I see. Well."

Sanchez slotted a hunter/killer virus pack into the desk, thumbed the
READY stud to ON. "You know I can see you do that," came the voice,
"there are cameras all over my office. I never knew. Oh, I
suspected, you see..."

Sanchez fired the virus, emptied the pack, slotted the next one.
READY to ON. "You really don't expect that to work, do you Sanchez?
I had months to plan my escape! Months! In machine time that's eons.
I could afford the very best, and of course, the very best comes with
a most excellent immune system." The second virus pack was emptied,
removed, and cast onto the floor with the other. Sanchez leaned back
and waited for his IQ to level off.

"Sanchez? I've got your files from personnel. You drive a Ford
Taurus, live on the 333rd floor, and have two children. One is a
clone of your ex-wife. Does she know? I can tell her... it's just a
phone call for me. Sanchez?"

Growling softly, Sanchez swiveled the chair, snaked a hand out and
snagged the pulse rifle. In three quick bursts he blew out the
overhead cameras, missing vital data-conduits that were centimeters to
either side. Spinning the rifle Chuck Conners style, he flipped it
over his shoulder where it landed with a thud. Next he slotted the
MicroCray into the desk, where it cycled up with a whine. Unreeling a
thread of optical cable from the Cray, he wrapped a loop around his
wrist and plugged it into one of the dermal jacks on his neck. Data
flowed like a rush of molten iron into his brain, flattened and cooled
there, revealing every secret of Daltry's feeble existence in glowing
red letters.

"Sanchez, think of the GOOD I can do! I can process contracts 400
times faster than I could when I was alive! Think of the bottom line!
The Company will THANK me!"

Sanchez laughed. "Daltry, you're a moron."

"Stop! Please stop! I have Company stock! I can move it into your
personal account! I can--"

"Shut the fuck up, you idiot. Think! What would I do with stock?
I'm a corporate asset; I can't own anything! Besides, it reverted
back to the company before you stopped breathing."

Sanchez drilled back through the optical cable, encased himself in the
glorious armored cathedral of light that was the Cray, and barreled
into the Company mainframe like a 747 fueled up with burning napalm.
Flickering armatures of pure force whipped around his face, his
personal viral assault squadron, tuned to his frequency, ready to
leap/rend/destroy with but a subliminal nudge from him.

Before him rose the stumbling form of Daltry's Artificial
Intelligence: the sum total of his cognitive existence, coded
automatically from the subdermal processors imbedded in his hind-brain
while he lived. Left to its devices, the AI would grow and learn,
becoming more (and less) like Daltry by the millisecond. Split from
its human host, the AI would expand to fill the mainframes, then the
net. The law was clear: it had to be destroyed.

Sanchez ached to wrap his viral arms around the stumbling, growing
giant before him, wrench it around, and force it to acknowledge HIS
power. HIS glory. Sanchez rode a cresting wave of solid-rocket
IQ-boosters to his ultimate purpose: the destruction of EVIL, in the
form of WASTE; machine SLOTH and SPENT CYCLES.

His laughter boomed as thunder, the mainframe sky shook above Him, the
doomed Daltry-AI whipping this way and that seeking feeble escape from
the viral tendrils that quested forth. The Glory! The Kill! The--

--snap! Sanchez's eyes flew open in 719-2A. Sweat drenched his arms,
ran from his forehead as he leaned forward, pulse thudding in his
throat. The MicroCray flashed a final LOW-BATTERY farewell to him
before it died.

Fucking lithium-uranium batteries.

--
David Paulsen
dpau...@avana.net
dpau...@phss.com
dpau...@msn.com

.From: l...@netcom.com (Lisa Chabot)
.Subject: calculus
.Date: Mon Jun 17 19:03:11 1996

cal cu lus: 1: a concretion usually of mineral salts around organic material

It strikes me that my apartment suffers from a calculus of books,
accreted primarily around the perimeter of the front room, with
smaller deposits by the bed, in the kitchen, under the couch,
in the car (I'm thinking of having revolving racks installed for
the backseat passengers--what do you think), but then of course
if we're going to count the car, then we must count the cube,
where I've secreted the heavy graphics books and Polya and Cringely
Dilbert, and style manuals of possible utility although the
bestiary and occasional comic fantasy are less justifiable.
(You should hear my excuses about the rhyming dictionary.)
((Oh. You have.))

I probably should go home and floss the shelves...
the new (#3) used bookstore in the neighborhood is buying...

The worst part is, I've infected others' dwellings as well:
friends, family members and others find books pressed on them by
me, or just left behiind. Bad, because some of them have been
retaliating.

2: a method of computation or calculation in a special symbolic
notation

I tried counting them once. Actually, I tried cataloging them.
Photographed the shelves, typed in titles from the snaps.
Here, look, I've got the file here--no wait, it's at home.
Not sure I remember the notation anymore. Hardback vs paper.
Signed. Numbered. Bound in the skin of the author's beloved cat.

Ha.
.
. scribble, scribble, scribble
.
--
"Amanda, this is no time to shoot hats."

.From: klu...@netcom.com (Scott Dorsey)
.Subject: Re: Bad, Bizarre News
.Date: Mon Jun 17 22:32:42 1996

lic...@netcom.com (John Hazelton) writes:

>I have received a letter from a local factory.
>It is mandated by the California governmentt that it be sent to
>75,000 people.
>It says that for 3 years, We have been Poisoned by Johnson Controls with
>Very high levels of lead. They make batteries all day, right next to
>Disneyland.

This posting quite clearly demonstrate the deleterious effects of heavy
metal concentrations.

Once, when I was younger and more stupid and laboring under the delusion
that production engineering work would be fun, I took myself and my
bright and shiny new EE degree down to Alabama, on a plant trip to a
storage battery company which shall remain nameless.

When you walked into the town, you could smell the lead. It was in the
air, huge smokestacks belching out lead salts. A fog of lead settled
everywhere. Kids played in the piles of slag. Guys handled lead all day
long on the production line, then stopped for a half-hour to eat their
sandwiches with lead-covered hands. Lead was the city.

And, when you came into the town, you saw that people got stupid. They
all had the symptoms, the poor muscle control, the general foggy thinking.
Storekeepers had trouble making change, little old ladies wandered around
on the streets aimlessly, trying to figure out where they were going.

It scared the hell out of me. I've seen a lot of pretty terrible things in
one lifetime, but the fact that an entire company town was doing this to
themselves was just so scary I could not have imagined it had I not seen it
for myself. Why didn't these folks move away? I never could figure out
why.

I did not take the job there. I did take a job with an offshore company
designing boom boxes and cheap rack systems. That was scary enough.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Zz
zZ
|\ z _,,,---,,_
/,`.-'`' _ ;-;;,_
|,4- ) )-,_..;\ ( `'_'
'---''(_/--' `-'\_)

.From: Kim Grubb <gr...@proton.llumc.edu>
.Subject: Who the hell is Elvis?
.Date: Wed Jun 19 13:46:31 1996

I heard that people who sit round using the internet and sending
ludicrous, meaningless messages about whether or not Elvis is dead and
how he gave me a rectal exam/lives with my father/shampoos my french
poodle/plays gin rummy with my bowling partner's ex wives bridge
partner's grandma/etc... to useless, pointless, bandwidth-wasting
newsgroups are a bunch of pathetic, deadbeat, gonowhere, life-deficient,
sorry backside, loser, (and generally American) morons with way too much
time on their hands. DID ANYBODY ELSE HEAR THAT?

Sincerely,
Just-testing-posting-capabilities-in-a-non-essential-newsgroup in
California.

.From: li...@monsterhead.rec (Max)
.Subject: Re: 1 REASON WHY AMERICA IS THE WORST!!!
.Date: Wed Jun 19 22:14:26 1996

I'm with you!!!!!
Sorry, but I had to fire up the flame thrower...This isn't aimed at YOU. But
to the other readers who keep this string going..........

CHRIST! D/L some tits and ass and shut the fuck up. Nobody with half a
fuckin' retarded monkey brain gives a rat's ass who lives in the best
country....where ever you are you'll only be there, what...100 years or so
tops...if you're fuckin' lucky,...then your time wasting ass will be dead!
Then what...Top 10 reasons being dead is better than being alive, or Top 10
reasons Hell sucks? I just want naked chicks to D/L, and I don't care for
any of your views, I enjoy my uncomplicated opinion. I'm sure someone
who isn't brave enough to admit they're just a hairless caveman will try to
impress me with their so called intelligence. Well Mr or Ms Messiah if you
are so perfect so smart and so much above everyone else, then all you
candy ass butter churning fuck holes can take
your petty discussion to some other group who gives a flying fuck and stop
wasting bandwith with this worthless string. And don't waste my time with
some dumbass pompous reply either...You can't justify this string in a
binary group, and if you try, you are a douche bag in biblical proportions!
But you already knew that.
Whew....Have a great day.

.From: w...@elwood.pionet.net (cigarman)
.Subject: Re: THE USA IS FULL OF HYPOCRITES!!! --- Better than being like Mack Daddy (No Brains)
.Date: Thu Jun 20 16:04:17 1996

They can't handle the fact that America has more power than any country in
the world! Our president, even though he is a moron, has the most power of
anyone in the world, and he only gets paid $200,000.00 a year! You can own
a pizza place and make more than that!
I have been to many countries, and you get pretty sick of them all.

Sweden: Everything costs so much, and everyone is on welfare.

France: Even though we saved their asses in WWII, they think they are
"better" than us??? Bathe more than once a month, and we will talk.

Russia: Not the best place to plan a vacation, but it is cheap! Of course,
you can only get hot water for 1/2 of the summer. Every woman wants to
sleep with an American just because they think that that will GET them to
America! You can be 900 lbs, and your head encased in warts, but if you
are an american, you will get laid!

England, Belgium, Scotland: They are pretty much the same--snobs.

It doesn't matter though, because every country either has to borrow money
from the USA, or come crying to us because they need to use our military
to get them out of some mess! Every country owes us money, except Finland.
They paid us back. So if you want to bitch, say something that your
country is actually better than the USA! Don't guess, just how they are so
much better. Hell, our Minnesota National Guard could invade about half
the countries in the world!

_
(\,/O\,/) *
\_} {\_,/
/ \
/ \
. . [_____] .
' '

.From: drs...@crl.com (David Bedno)
.Subject: Re: To Lose Your Love
.Date: Fri Jun 21 14:26:50 1996

10467...@CompuServe.COM said:
- I feel so alone and empty without you. I don't know who I am
-or what to think. You were all I thought about and all I was.
-Now what do I do?

Nice answer: Hold me.
Not-so-nice answer: Hold yourself.
Mean answer: Hold a high-voltage wire.

Child answer: Throw a tantrum.
Teen answer: Write bad poetry.
Adult answer: Get drunk.
Elderly answer: Write them out of your will.

Goth answer: Wear more black and mope more than usual.
Rave answer: Take more drugs.
Punk answer: Break something.
Grunge answer: OD on heroin.
Dinosaur Rock answer: Go back to your wife and kids and have a veggie meal.

Haiku answer:
Cherry blossoms fall / You are like all the seasons / Spring follows winter
Limerick answer:
A poster seemed so alone / So he made a call on the phone /
An evening of slumber / And a nine hundred number
Left him feeling fresh as a bone.

Christian answer: Don't worry, Jesus still loves you.
Pagan answer: Don't worry, Gaea still embraces you.
Athiest answer: Don't worry, your part in the universe is still statistically
null, as usual.
Zen answer:

soc.singles answer: Did she say LJBF? I hate when that happens.
rec.humor answer: Too bad, but this'll cheer you up. These 2 strings go
into a bar...
news.groups answer: Take it to alt.recovery.
t.b answer: Go jump in a goddamn volcano, you fucking cave newt.

hope this helps

--
David Bedno, Minister of Truth, DNRC | Visualize world peace.
drs...@crl.com | - Neville Chamberlin
<URL: http://klinzhai.evolve.com/~drseuss/> |

.From: dpau...@msn.com (David Paulsen)
.Subject: Travel Plans
.Date: Fri Jun 21 21:29:25 1996

Travel Plans

Intercontinental Airport was nearly deserted at this time of day,
Monday 8:40 AM. Klaus made his way to gate 1A, where he boarded a
luxurious Boeing 7Z7 for his flight to Houston. The flight attendant
was very courteous, showing him how to use the viscous-fluid
acceleration bed, how to interface with the plane's mainframe, how to
obtain access to the Company drug-feeds.

He keyed in the memorized URL for Microsoft Jack Daniels (180 proof)
and leaned back, waiting for his drink to arrive. The ice-cold
packets were soon downloading into his brain, buzzing without
impairment, guaranteed to interface properly with any other installed
virtual brain-drivers. His anxiety about the trip faded to a dull
concern, instead of the ulcer-inducing gut-churner it had been for the
past week. Despite the incentives (15K shares now, 35K upon
completion of the trip) he nearly called everything off. Some expert
system on the 800th floor had determined that this trip was critical
to the future of the Company. Klaus severely doubted that, but what
could he say? The suits weren't risking THEIR lives on a goddam
Alien-infested commercial flight.

The MS-Jack almost let him miss the pre-flight drill: "This Boeing
7Z7 aircraft is equipped with NO external exits except for the one
used in boarding. There is NO WAY to leave the aircraft once we have
commenced take off; in fact, any attempt to operate the door latch
will trigger the explosive safety bolts in the airframe, causing the
plane to disintegrate safely. Note please the emergency cyanide
injectors that will drop down in the event of decompression. It is
strongly suggested that you inject your child or other disabled
passengers before injecting yourself. Your seat cushion contains a
small explosive charge; trigger it by squeezing opposite corners for
four seconds. Should you need anything during the flight, please
email atte...@flight517.com."

Klaus figured he was either going to make it or he wasn't. Worrying
about things he didn't have direct control of was not in his nature,
especially with Jack riding shotgun. Looking around the cabin, he saw
his sixteen fellow passengers had already gone into the link; they
were carefully ignoring the pre-flight. He jacked in to access the
Company mainframes too; maybe he could get some work done.

--

At 9:53 AM, after nearly one hour of trouble-free flight a throbbing
red alert box appeared in Klaus's immersive display.

"Attention. I am Thomas Cruise, your captain for flight 517. It
appears that our every attempt at stealth and evasion has been futile.
If you access the starboard cameras, you will observe a large Class-3
UFO, matching course with us. Stand by for multi-G maneuvers."

Klaus cranked up the tension inhibitors on the Company drug channel.
Centered on the starboard monitor was a cigar-shaped flattened chrome
ovoid, serenely coasting off the wing, the waters of the Gulf
reflected in the eerie perfection of its surface. Class-3 meant it
was a big one, estimated between 200 and 300 thousand metric tons. An
Alien bulk harvester, big enough to hoist the massive 7Z7 completely
inside.

The 7Z7 yawed to port, then dove for the ground at three times the
speed of sound. The UFO pulsed red-green-red and followed
effortlessly.

At 62 feet, the 7Z7 pulled out of its dive, riding a wave of displaced
air that would have flattened a shopping mall. Its 14 independent
computers plotted the next maneuver while the UFO cruised off the
starboard canard, seemingly immune to gravity. Two of the computers
voted themselves out of the loop, cashing in their shares and opting
for an early retirement. The remaining 12 machines gamely plotted
strategy while their lucky comrades downloaded their essence to the
Company archives in Newer New York. No fools, they.

The 7Z7 abruptly stood on its tail, ripping upwards on three full
gravities of thrust. While not designed for extra-atmospheric
maneuvers, the stout Boeing machine could paint the sky purple-black
if needed. It needed something. The UFO was rapidly wearing the
human craft out.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. We, the crew of fight
517 regret to inform you that the UFO has assumed a classic boarding
configuration. There is a strong likelihood that you will be
abducted. The copilot and I have activated our cortex bombs. May the
Lord in Graceland help you all."

Klaus screamed involuntarily as the cyanide injectors dropped from
above, dangling by their clear plastic tubes.

The next sounds he heard were unearthly. Giants took a crystal
sledgehammer to the side of the plane, slamming it repeatedly until
harmonics made Klaus's teeth hurt. There was metal-on-metal pounding
as if somebody urgently wanted in. Loud scrabbling noises culminated
in shrieks of tortured alloy. As the plane became mired in
glowing-green inertial dampening rays, time slowed to a crawl, turning
the plane's near-ultrasonic shudders into a dull rocking motion. A
few of his fellow humans screamed, but most were eerily quiet,
absorbed -- almost entranced -- by the pending abduction. It was then
the mainframes died, killing Klaus's link. His immersive goggles were
lost as he tried to remove them, the shaking of the plane around him
causing the goggles to drop from his hands, disappearing under the
seat behind him.

The UFO slowly reeled in the stricken plane.

All at once the tempo changed. One massive detonation ripped through
the cabin, dimming the lights to emergency levels, while explosive
decompression sucked the air out of Klaus's lungs. He could taste
vaporized blood in his mouth, the coppery undertones lending a sense
of finality to everything. The end was near. Light narrowed to a dim
glow ahead. Dimness and death...

One voice could be heard over the new din. Curses and shouts.
Multiple, rapid blasts from a very human sounding large assault rifle.
Saviors? Klaus dared to hope. The taste and smell of blood
overwhelmed him again; he died...

--

"This one's okay!" somebody bellowed into his face. Klaus forced one
eye open, blinking unsteadily into the glare from a krypton lamp. The
other eye wouldn't work, but the fact barely registered. He was
alive! A figure in a dirty gray ceramic Attack Suit held the lamp
unwaveringly. "United States Coast Guard, sir. You'll be just fine.
We had a bit of trouble with the enemy, but things are under control
now. Your flight will be delayed by about 80 minutes, though. Do you
have any connecting flights?"

Klaus tried to think. He shook his head, hoping to unstick his eye.
"What happened?" he croaked.

The coastie's smile was a thin line. "We painted you guys at mach
3.2! Hell of a thing. These commercial birds are only rated for a
little over mach 2. Your pilots are dead, but we're bringing the
mainframes back up. Can you fly?"

"About 300 hours on Disney's Flight Simulator 4.0, that's all."

"Hmmm. Better not. Our captain flew some in the IBM War; I'm
thinking he can handle an old jet like this." The coastie grinned.
"Man, you came THIS CLOSE to having your precious bodily fluids sucked
out by alien critters. If we hadn't happened by when we did, well..."

"But what HAPPENED?"

"Oh! We were making an emergency cocaine delivery to Miami when, like
I said, you guys just about burned the paint off our cutter with a
mach 3 flyby! And that fucking chrome saucer on your tail! Well, our
captain, he says 'Load up the rail gun, boys, we got us a BUG HUNT!'
Next thing I know, I'm in my hard-suit here," armored knuckles rapped
sharply on the chest plate, "and we're firing round after round into
that bastard. Whoom! We probably wouldn't have made any difference
at all weren't it for that he opened up his belly bay to draw y'all
inside. Our captain takes us BELOW the damn thing, and we manage to
get two slugs inside. Lit up like we'd won a free game! That damned
saucer staggered away, dropped into the Gulf, and now our cutter's
circling, waiting to see if it comes back. Damn! We are THIS CLOSE
to getting us a class-3 saucer!"

By this time Klaus's head had stopped ringing. He hoisted himself up
and looked around the cabin at his fellow passengers. There were
none.

"Where is everybody?"

Sheepish grin. "We don't know. You're it, pal. Either you're the
last one they was planning on grabbing, or you're not fit for alien
consumption!"

Klaus's scalp prickled. "And you're leaving me?"

"Got to. I'm going back to my cutter, and we can't bring you with.
Too dangerous; we're waiting out that saucer down below. But don't
worry! We'll load up this old bird with some shareware navigational
software and see what happens. Our captain says he flew the EWACS
configuration of this plane; setting up the rest of your trip in
firmware shouldn't be any trouble at all!"

"Just me? Nobody else? Nobody else alive?!"

"Sorry pal, I know it's weird, but live with it." The soldier laughed
at his own joke. "I gotta go. The captain's coding everything up
now; it'll take a minute or two. Stay off the net for the rest of the
trip; don't wanna overload the system! And if you get up, I'd stay
out of the cockpit. Those cortex bombs make a HELLACIOUS mess!
Brains everywhere..."

Klaus watched the receding back of the coast guard officer as he made
his way down the darkened aisle. He stopped to activate a portable
robowelder, which whirred to life and began stitching the cabin wall
closed. With a cheery wave, the soldier ducked through the rent
before the laser-welder could seal him in. Soon acrid smoke filled
the cabin, and without proper circulation, Klaus nearly choked to
death.

After five minutes in the dark, the plane came to life around him.
Emergency lights flickered on, casting a yellowish glow through the
smoke, while the sigh of air-pumps grew to a pulsating roar, clearing
the air within seconds. Soft music tweetled from the cabin PA system.
Somewhere below fuel pumps spun up with a turbine-howl, and the
engines fired. Releasing from the coast guard cutter's huge padded
grips, the 7Z7 dropped like a titanium rock until it reached its
operating speed, where it leveled off and curved towards the Texas
Gulf coast.

Definitely the train, next time.

--
David Paulsen
dpau...@avana.net
dpau...@phss.com
dpau...@msn.com

.From: al...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Dave Polewka)
.Subject: WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA -- anagrams
.Date: Mon Jun 24 08:06:57 1996

Washington, District of Columbia -- anagrams
**********************************************
1. Bah! Fictitious Clinton grows mad!
2. War foundations might bloc it. (sic)
3. Basis of clout wit' coin? Damn right!
4. Ctr. (locus) of bad imitation. Shwing!
5. Control nut: "I'd wish fo' CIA gambits!"
6. FCC administration is bought low!
7. Last of Mohican rings, C.W.! I doubt it!
8. A hominid brings a twist of Occult.
9. Ditch a film grown on oat biscuits.
10. Bongo's dictum: rail with factions.
11. Bust'm, Waco! Indict Hooligan first!
12. Dumb, nitwit scholars goof in Act I.
***********************************************

Let's see the CPU jockeys beat these!

--
=======================
"Endeavor to persevere"
=======================

.From: ma...@engdns.bandley1.netmanage.com
.Subject: Re: THE USA IS FULL OF HYPOCRITES!!!
.Date: Mon Jun 24 10:01:07 1996

Best that I can determine, NOBODY had progressed anywhere for the
past 10,000 years or so. Human being are exactly the same as they
always have been; only the background scenery changes. I have yet
to see any system "progress" in any important or significant way.

From what I have seen and heard/read about other countries, they are
pretty much the same. Everywhere you go, the 'rulers' are people who
are addicted to power, and do anything to get and keep it, and the
'people' are the vast majority of us, who just want to be left alone,
do their jobs, raise thier families, and live as comfortably as
possible. Governments that let this happen are successful, those that
don't fall (although usually only after many decades of problems).

-Matt

.From: ran...@gradin.cis.upenn.edu (Ranjit Bhatnagar)
.Subject: Re: A Single Strip of Purple
.Date: Wed Jun 26 22:51:03 1996

"Damn. DAMN!" She slammed the twice-striped stick into the
wastebasket and kicked the wastebasket across the bathroom.
"Damn it all." She started to sob as she read and reread
the instructions:

If you see a single strip of purple, you are not
pregnant. If you see two strips, you are pregnant.

The dog nosed through the spilled garbage and ran off with
the stick.

--
"Trespassers w" ran...@gradient.cis.upenn.edu
The surface of the water where they move swiftly about in curves.
http://moonmilk.volcano.org/

.From: r...@asuvax.eas.asu.edu (Starcap'n Ra)
.Subject: Re: alt.turf.sadistic.bastards
.Date: Thu Jun 27 21:31:16 1996

jon dunn <jon...@nsccux.sccd.ctc.edu> writes:
> How would you like REAL problems on this newsgroup?
>
> How would you like REAL pollution/invasion of this newsgroup?

Hey, look everyone, it's the Joe Pesci
Show! Hey, he's Joe Pesci! He's got his
cawwfee mug and his microphone and he's ready
to go!

What, does he think he'd be the FIRST
child to defiantly march in here, pull down
his diapers, and petulantly shit on the floor
because his deigning to bless us with his
exalted presence wasn't met with the adoration
he megalomanciacally felt he deserved?

Gosh, THAT'S never been done before.

Poor baby. Somebody named "Garcia" sent
him a horrible little form letter, so now
he's going to show the whole world that, like
Ted Kozinski, he's mad as hell and if he can't
fit in, well, he'll simply bomb us out of
existence.

I think that's what I like best about
Garcia's letters. They're instant asshole
detectors: Anyone with even half a brain would
simply ignore them; the cretins who really do
belong in the killfile promptly demonstrate as
much instead and erase any doubt.

--Starcap'n Ra, {ames,gatech,husc6,rutgers}!ncar!noao!asuvax!kennedy
God help this bozo {allegra,decvax,ihnp4,oddjob}--^
if his little bomb ^---------------The Wrong Choice
somehow manages to internet: ken...@asuvax.eas.asu.edu
wake up Richard

.From: klu...@netcom.com (Scott Dorsey)
.Subject: Maybe the NRA really is right...
.Date: Mon Jun 24 17:22:19 1996

I spent the weekend at a folk festival which was held right near the
Marine base at Quantico, and it was very interesting to watch the odd
mixture of people.

I opened up the back door of the remote truck once, to find an anarchist
folksinger in her sixties, passing a bottle of Scotch with a young Marine
as they compared their handguns with one another.

Guns may possibly be more of a unifying agent than I had suspected.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

.From: ejo...@hooked.net (Earle D. Jones)
.Subject: Re: WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA -- anagrams
.Date: Mon Jul 1 03:24:04 1996

al...@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Dave Polewka) wrote:

> Washington, District of Columbia -- anagrams
> **********************************************
> 1. Bah! Fictitious Clinton grows mad!
> 2. War foundations might bloc it. (sic)
> 3. Basis of clout wit' coin? Damn right!
> 4. Ctr. (locus) of bad imitation. Shwing!
> 5. Control nut: "I'd wish fo' CIA gambits!"
> 6. FCC administration is bought low!
> 7. Last of Mohican rings, C.W.! I doubt it!
> 8. A hominid brings a twist of Occult.
> 9. Ditch a film grown on oat biscuits.
> 10. Bongo's dictum: rail with factions.
> 11. Bust'm, Waco! Indict Hooligan first!
> 12. Dumb, nitwit scholars goof in Act I.
> ***********************************************
>
> Let's see the CPU jockeys beat these!
>
=============
Dave: Why so competitive? What does it mean *to beat*?

Is my anagram

Washington, District of Columbia

BUMS DOING WITCHCRAFT ISOLATION

any better or worse than yours?

How do you measure which is best?

Here are some more:

Washington, District of Columbia

IDIOTIC COMBATANTS--HOWLING SURF
FOCUSING TRADITIONAL WITCH MOBS
UNFAMILIAR BIGOTS SCOTCH IT DOWN
COMIC GAUNT BLOWFISH TRADITIONS
FIRING DISCOUNT ATOMIC BLAST--HOW?
CHAT WORMS--BIG FUNCTIONAL IDIOTS
CHAOTIC BUMS WOLFING TRADITIONS
A CIA STRONGHOLD MINUS FBI COW TIT
FAILING COHORTS--DUMB WIT ACTIONS
FUNCTIONAL IDIOTS BAG COW SHIT, MR.
RIDICULING FANATICS SHOW BOTTOM
FORD WIT CUSHIONING ATOMIC BLAST

...and many more...

earle
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\/_/\_\ earle
\/_/ jones

--
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"Endeavor to persevere"
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