Digest for Tuesday, June 03, 1997
There are 12 messages totalling 624 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
- Income Taxes
- money in Boston
- Addected to the Net
- New Breeds of Dogs
- Joke-Rated: Manners
- Daves Lines Of The Week (3/17-3/21)
- Bad academic writing
- new terms (inoffensive)
- STORIES ABOUT MY DUMB, VERY DUMB COUSIN...
- Kid stories
- A Walk in the Park
- On Driving
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Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 05:23:31 -0400
From: Jim Moore Jr <jimjr@PIPELINE.COM>
Subject: Income Taxes
* While income tax time is over, that doesn't stop the stories from
abounding. At the Internal Revenue Service building in Baltimore a
sign on the door advises visitors to "Watch Your Step." As you exit
through the same door, another sign sez "Watch Your Language."
- - - - -
* An irate taxpayer demanded to know exactly how he had been selected
to be audited. "Yours was a rather easy choice." explained the
examiner, "Your return blew three chips in our computer."
- - - - -
* A caller to the information line wanted to know if birth control pills
were deductible. The IRS employee said, "Only if they don't work."
- - - - -
* I remember in college, my Economics Professor had no problem at all
admitting that he had trouble with both tax forms and the instructions.
"I think instead of a mathematician, you have to be a philosopher."
- - - - -
* The auditor had requested the 67 year old woman to appear because she
claimed seven dependents. He noted last year, she had claimed only two.
"It's quite simple." explained the matron. "The cat had kittens."
The auditor explained that while kittens may indeed be expensive,
they cannot be claimed as dependents.
"Why surely you must be mistaken young man." she replied. "I've
been claiming their parents for a good number of years now.
- - - - -
* When I finish filling out the tax forms, my wife checks them. One year,
just to be funny, I filled out a fake one where I itemized all of her
visits to the beauty shop and the hairdresser as a "loss". She failed
to see the humor in that at all.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Enjoy jokes ? Visit me @
http://www.corpcomm.net/~llittle/jimmy.html
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Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 05:29:03 -0400
From: Gwendolyn E Eckman <geckman@POLARIS.UMUC.EDU>
Subject: money in Boston
A businessman walks into a bank in Boston and asks for the loan officer.
He says he is going to Europe on business for two weeks and needs to
borrow $5,000.
The bank officer says the bank will need some kind of security for such a
loan. So the businessman hands over the keys to a Rolls-Royce parked on
the street in front of the bank. Everything checks out, and the bank
agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan. An employee drives
the Rolls into the bank's underground garage and parks it there.
Two weeks later, the businessman returns, repays the $5,000 and the
interest, which comes to $15.41. The loan officer says, We are very happy
to have had your business, and this transaction has worked out very
nicely, but we are a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you
out and found that you are a multimillionaire. What puzzles us is; why
would you bother to borrow $5,000?
The businessman replied: Where else in Boston can I park my car for two
weeks for 15 bucks?
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Date: Mon, 2 Jun 1997 18:34:00 -0600
From: Randall Woodman <randall.woodman@LUNATIC.COM>
Subject: Addected to the Net
YOU KNOW YOU ARE ADDICTED TO THE INTERNET WHEN:
1 You kiss your girlfriend's home page.
2 Your bookmark takes 15 minutes to scroll from top to bottom.
3 Your eyeglasses have a web site burned in on them.
4 You find yourself brainstorming for new subjects to search.
5 You refuse to go to a vacation spot with no electricity and no
phone lines.
6 You finally do take that vacation, but only after buying a
cellular modem and a laptop.
7 You spend half of the plane trip with your laptop on your
lap...and your child in the overhead compartment.
8 All your daydreaming is preoccupied with getting a faster
connection to the net: 28.8...ISDN...cable modem...T1...T3.
9 And even your night dreams are in HTML. ( Hi, Kelly! <g> )
10 You find yourself typing "com" after every period when using
a word processor.com.
11 You refer to going to the bathroom as downloading.
12 Your heart races faster and beats irregularly each time you see
a new WWW site address in print or on TV, even though you've
never had heart problems before.
13 You step out of your room and realize that your parents have moved
and you don't have a clue when they left.
14 You turn on your intercom when leaving the room so you can hear
if new e-mail arrives. ( Hi, Glenda! <g> )
15 Your wife drapes a blond wig over your monitor to remind you of
what she looks like. ( Hi, Joey! )
16 All of your friends have an @ in their names.
17 When looking at a pageful of someone else's links, you notice all
of them are already highlighted in purple.
18 Your dog has his/her own home page. ( Hi, Bats! )
19 You've already visited all the links at Yahoo and you're halfway
through Lycos.
20 You can't call your mother...she doesn't have a modem.
21 You realize there is not a sound in the house and you have no idea
where your children are.
22 You check your mail. It says "no new messages." So you check it
again.
23 You refer to your age as 3.x.
24 You have commandeered your teenager's phone line for the net;
his/her friends know not to call on his/her line anymore.
25 Your phone bill comes to your doorstep in a box.
26 Even though you died last week, you've managed to retain OPS on
your favorite IRC channel.
27 You code your homework in HTML and give your instructor the URL.
28 You don't know the sex of three of your closest friends, because
they have neutral nicknames and you never bothered to ask.
29 Your husband tells you he's had the beard for 2 months.
30 You miss more than five meals a week downloading the latest games
from Apogee.
31 You start looking for hot HTML addresses in public rest rooms.
32 You move into a new house and decide to Netscape before you
landscape.
33 You tell the cab driver you live at
http://123.elm.street/house/bluetrim.html
34 You actually just now tried that 123.elm.street address.
35 You tell the kids they can't use the computer because "Daddy's got
work to do" and you don't even have a job.
36 Your friends no longer send you e-mail... they just log on to your
IRC channel.
37 You buy a Captain Kirk chair with a built-in keyboard and mouse.
38 Your wife makes a new rule: "The computer cannot come to bed."
39 You are so familiar with the WWW that you find the search engines
useless.
40 You get a tattoo that says "This body best viewed with Netscape
1.1 or higher." ( Sounds like Kelly again! <g> )
41 You never have to deal with busy signals when calling your ISP...
because you never log off. ( Sounds like me! )
42 You ask a plumber how much it would cost to replace the chair
in front of your computer with a toilet.
43 You forget what day/year it is.
44 You start tilting your head sideways to smile.
45 You ask your doctor to implant a gig in your brain.
46 You leave the modem speaker on after connecting because you
think it sounds like the ocean wind... the perfect soundtrack
for "surfing the net".
47 You begin to wonder how on earth your service provider is allowed
to call 200 hours per month "unlimited."
48 You turn on your computer and turn off your wife.
49 Your wife says communication is important in marriage...so you
buy another computer and install a second phone line so the two
of you can chat. ( Yo, Ro! Wot's knu? <g> )
50 As your car crashes through the guardrail on a mountain road,
your first instinct is to search for the "back" button.
-=} Randall {=- randall.woodman@lunatic.com
---
. SPEED 2.00 #1157 . O%%%%.==0123456789ABCDEF=====- <= Hexcalibur
----
The Lunatic Fringe * Richardson, TX * 972-235-5288 * Home Of FringeNet
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Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 09:32:36 -0400
From: JIM MICA OFFICE OF ADMISSION ITHACA COLLEGE <JMICA@OA.ITHACA.EDU>
Subject: <HUMOR> New Breeds of Dogs
FORWARDED MESSAGE - Orig: 2-Jun-97 20:09
Subject: Name that Dog Contest
From: Carolyn Dane 74064,301
Forum: MENSA Section: 10 - Personally Speaking
----------------------------------------------------------- -------
Crossbred Dogs:
Pointer + Setter
Poinsetter, a traditional Christmas pet
Kerry Blue Terrier + Skye Terrier
Blue Skye, a dog for visionaries
Great Pyrenees + Dachshund
Pyradachs, a puzzling breed
Pekingnese + Lhasa Apso
Peekasso, an abstract dog
Irish Water Spaniel + English Springer Spaniel
Irish Springer, a dog fresh and clean as a whistle
Labrador Retriever + Curly Coated Retriever
Lab Coat Retriever, the choice of research scientists
Newfoundland + Basset Hound
Newfound Asset Hound, a dog for financial advisors
Terrier + Bulldog
Terribull, a dog that makes awful mistakes
Bloodhound + Labrador
Blabador, a dog that barks incessantly
Malamute + Pointer
Moot Point, owned by....oh, well, it doesn't matter anyway
Collie + Malamute
Commute, a dog that travels to work
Cocker Spaniel + Rottweiller
Cockrot, the perfect puppy for that philandering ex-husband
Deerhouse + Terrier
Derriere, a dog that's true to the end
Bull Terrier + Shitzu
Bullshitz, a gregarious but unreliable breed
Kuvasz + Golden Retriever
Kuvasz Gold . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 19:25:00 PDT
From: RAO NIKHIL K. /ILF/WRO <NIKHIL@ICICIBZO.ICICI.ERNET.IN>
Subject: Joke-Rated: Manners
The nervous young bride became irritated by her husband's lusty
advances on their wedding night and reprimanded him severely. "I
demand proper manners in bed," she declared, "just as I do at the
dinner table."
Amused by his wife's formality, the groom smoothed his rumpled hair
and climbed quietly between the sheets. "Is that better?" he asked,
with a hint of a smile."
"Yes," replied the girl, "much better."
"Very good, darling," the husband whispered. "Now would you be so kind
as to please pass the pussy."
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Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 12:04:31 -0400
From: Brian Myers <bmyers@IAFRICA.COM>
Subject: Dave's Lines Of The Week (3/17-3/21)
Dave Letterman's Lines of the Week
"Over the weekend, President Clinton was down in Florida at the home
of his good friend, golfer Greg Norman, and he slipped and fell, and --
it's no laughing matter -- and he, I guess, tore a tendon in his knee so
they had to repair it surgically. Now, during the operation, he was awake,
but numb from the waist down, and you know, if you think about it, that's
just the opposite of Al Gore."
"Doctors say President Clinton, because of the operation, will be laid
up for six months. And when he heard this, when the doctors told him this,
Clinton was very, very excited. You know, he didn't hear them say the word
'up.'"
"Over the weekend, President Clinton was vacationing at the home of
his good friend, golfer Greg Norman, and at 1:30 in the morning, President
Clinton slips and stumbles...The staff now, because it was 1:30 in the
morning, they're quick to point out that he wasn't drunk. You know, I said,
sure, well, of course. If he was drunk, he would have been with a woman."
"You know, for the last three days, President Clinton, since the
operation, has been showing up to work everyday at the White House. He's
got a cast, he's got a wheelchair and he's got a note from his doctor.
Coincidentally, now, in 1968, that's exactly how he showed up at his draft
board."
"But despite the serious nature of the injury and the surgery, the
President is very, very comfortable. He's using a non-narcotic muscle
relaxer. Uh, I believe her name is Rhonda."
"Sunday night right here on CBS -- maybe some of you folks saw this --
on '60 Minutes,' there was an interview with Paula Jones. You know Paula
Jones? And she's filed a sexual harassment suit against President Clinton.
She says in 1991, she went to then-Gov. Clinton's hotel room because she
was under the impression he had a job for her, you see. Well, she wasn't
entirely wrong."
"Anthony Lake, the nominee for director of the C.I.A., has taken
himself out of the running to be the chief of the C.I.A...So, let's
see, that's Anthony Lake will not be the director of the C.I.A. That's six
rejections for President Clinton. Well, seven if you count
Paula Jones."
"Earlier today, President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin
met in Helsinki. I think Yeltsin -- between you and me -- I think he's
drinking again, you know what I mean. He kept referring to Helsinki as the
capital of 'Finlandia.'"
"Everybody here in New York City, of course, on St. Patrick's Day is
in the St. Patrick's Day spirit. My cab driver this morning was even in the
spirit. You know, he had his green card pinned to his turban."
"The hookers in Times Square, God bless 'em, are getting into the St.
Patrick's Day spirit. For an extra $25, they'll drive the snakes out of
your pants."
"They're still picking up the trash from the big St. Patrick's Day
parade. Listen to this: the sanitation workers picked up 50,000
plastic green derbies -- there's a good look, huh --14,000 bottles of beer
and Robert Downey Jr."
=================================================
Brian Myers, an American in Cape Town. To join a virtual campfire of story-
tellers/listeners from all over the world, the Coolest Campfire on Wires,
e-mail to: majordomo@story.nerdnosh.org Type "subscribe nerdnosh"
personal: capekid@bigfoot.com, capekid@hotmail.com, bmyers@iafrica.com
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Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 13:37:09 EST
From: Bill Edwards <EDWARDS_BILL@COLSTATE.EDU>
Subject: Bad academic writing <heavy humor>
Bad Writing Contest Winners: The following is being forwarded from
the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. We are pleased to
announce winners of the third Bad Writing Contest, sponsored by the
scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature and its internet
discussion group, PHIL-LIT.
The Bad Writing Contest attempts to locate the ugliest, most
stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article
published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, etc.
are not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from
actual serious academic journals or books. In a field where
unintended self-parody is so widespread, deliberate send-ups are
hardly necessary. This year's winning passages include prose
published by established, successful scholars, experts who have
doubtless labored for years to write like his. Obscurity, after all,
can be a notable achievement. The fame and influence of writers such
as Hegel, Heidegger, or Derrida rests in part on their mysterious
impenetrability. On the other hand, as a cynic once remarked, John
Stuart Mill never attained Hegel's prestige because people found out
what he meant. This is a mistake the authors of our our prize-winning
passages seem determined to avoid.
* The first prize goes to a sentence by the distinguished scholar
Fredric Jameson, a man who on the evidence of his many admired books
finds it difficult to write intelligibly and impossible to write
well. Whether this is because of the deep complexity of Professor
Jameson's ideas or their patent absurdity is something readers must
decide for themselves. The winning sample is the very first sentence
of Professor Jameson's book, Signatures of the Visible (Routledge,
1990, p. 1):
"The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has
its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes
becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object;
while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the
attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more
thankless effort to discipline the viewer)."
* If reading Fredric Jameson is like swimming through cold porridge,
there are writers who strive for incoherence of a more bombastic
kind. Here is our next winner, Professor Rob Wilson:
"If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist
subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the
sublime superstate need to be decoded as the 'now-all-but-unreadable
DNA' of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like
strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the
tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence
upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city."
This colorful gem appears in a collection called The Administration of
Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere,
edited by Richard Burt "for the Social Text Collective" (University of
Minnesota Press, 1994). Social Text is the cultural studies journal
made famous by publishing physicist Alan Sokal's jargon-ridden parody
of postmodernist writing. If this essay is Social Text's idea of
scholarship, little wonder it fell for Sokal's hoax. (And precisely
what are "racially heteroglossic wilds and others"?) Dr. Wilson is
an English professor, of course.
* That incomprehensibility need not be long-winded is proven by our
third-place winner. It's a sentence from Making Monstrous:
Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory, by Fred Botting (Manchester
University Press, 1991):
"The lure of imaginary totality is momentarily frozen before the
dialectic of desire hastens on within symbolic chains."
* Still, prolixity is often a feature of bad writing, as
demonstrated by our next winner, written by Stephen Tyler, and
appears in Writing Culture, edited (it says) by James Clifford and
George E. Marcus (University of California Press, 1986). Of what he
calls "post-modern ethnography," Professor Tyler says:
"It thus relativizes discourse not just to form--that familiar
perversion of the modernist; nor to authorial intention--that conceit
of the romantics; nor to a foundational world beyond discourse--that
desperate grasping for a separate reality of the mystic and scientist
alike; nor even to history and ideology--those refuges of the
hermeneuticist; nor even less to language--that hypostasized
abstraction of the linguist; nor, ultimately, even to discourse--that
Nietzschean playground of world-lost signifiers of the structuralist
and grammatologist, but to all or none of these, for it is anarchic,
though not for the sake of anarchy but because it refuses to become a
fetishized object among objects--to be dismantled, compared,
classified, and neutered in that parody of scientific scrutiny known
as criticism."
There is more, so much more.
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Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 14:01:20 EDT
From: Richard V. Gilpin <71442.1351@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: new terms (inoffensive)
An update from "Jargon Watch" on new lingo flowing out of the Silicon
Valley and corporate jungles....
"batmobiling"
Putting up emotional shields from the retracting armor that covers
the batmobile as in "she started talking marriage and he started
batmobiling"
"prairie dogging"
In companies where everyone has a cubicle something happens and
everyone pops up to look
"ribs 'n' dick"
A budget with no fat as in "we've got ribs 'n' dick and we're
supposed to find 20K for memory upgrades"
"betamaxed"
When a technology is overtaken in the market by inferior but
better marketed competition as in "Microsoft betamaxed Apple right out of
the market"
"generica"
Fast food joints, strip malls, sub-divisions as in "we were so
lost in generica that I couldn't remember what city it was"
"going postal"
Totally stressed out and losing it like postal employees who went
on shooting rampages
"high dome"
Egghead, scientist, PhD
"irritainment"
Annoying but you can't stop watching, e.g. the O.J. trial
"meatspace"
The physical world (as opposed to the virtual) also "carbon
community" "facetime" "F2F" "RL"
"percussive maintenance"
The fine art of whacking a device to get it working
"siliwood"
The coming convergence of movies, interactive TV and computers;
also "hollywired"
"square headed girlfriend" (boyfriend)
Computer
"treeware"
Manuals and documentation
"umfriend"
Sexual relationship; "this is Dale, my...um...friend"
"yuppie food coupons"
Twenty dollar bills from an ATM
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Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 17:49:41 -0400
From: Jill Cohen <JillyC130@AOL.COM>
Subject: STORIES ABOUT MY DUMB, VERY DUMB COUSIN...
My cousin was driving down the highway to Disneyland when she saw a
sign that said "DISNEYLAND LEFT". After thinking for a minute, she
said to herself "oh well !" and turned around and drove home.
On her way home my cousin drove past another sign that said
"CLEAN RESTROOMS 8 MILES". By the time she drove eight miles, she
had cleaned 43 restrooms.
My cousin and a friend are walking along in a park. The friend says
suddenly, "Awww, look at the dead birdie". My cousin stops, looks up,
and says, "Where?"
A policeman pulled my cousin over after she'd been driving the wrong
way on a one-way street.
Cop: Do you know where you were going?
My cousin: No, but wherever it is, it must be bad 'cause all
the people were leaving.
My cousin and her brothers are attempting to change a light bulb. One
of them decides to call 911:
My cousin: We need help. We're trying to change a light bulb.
Operator: Hmmmmm. You put in a fresh bulb? My cousin: Yes.
Operator: The power in the house in on? My cousin: Of course.
Operator: And the switch is on? My cousin: Yes, yes.
Operator: And the bulb still won't light up?
My cousin: No, it's working fine.
Operator: Then what's the problem?
My cousin: We got dizzy spinning the ladder around and
we all fell and hurt ourselves.
When my cousin gave birth to twins, her husband wanted to know
who the other man was...
My cousin and her friend were walking through the woods when one looked
down and said "Oh, look at the deer tracks." The friend looks and says
"Those aren't deer tracks, those are wolf tracks." "No. Those are deer
tracks." They keep arguing, and arguing, and one half hour later they
were both killed by a train.
My cousin and her friend observed in a parking lot trying to unlock
the door of their Mercedes with a coat hanger.
Friend: I can't seem to get this door unlocked!
My Cousin: Well, you'd better hurry up and try harder, it's starting
to rain and the top is down!
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Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 18:27:54 -0400
From: Gail Katz <GKat86573@AOL.COM>
Subject: Kid stories
It is amazing how literal children are. Why just last week I said to my
nephew "Eat every carrot and pea on your plate!"
Little Johnnie couldn't sleep. He wandered to the bathroom and on the way,
peeked into his parents room. After the bathroom, he looked in again. He
was amazed.
"And to think they bawl me out for sucking my thumb!"
Gail Katz
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Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 20:14:11 -0400
From: Patrick Ash <pash@GRADIENT.CIS.UPENN.EDU>
Subject: A Walk in the Park <may offend gay, homeless>
late one evening, a man of the gay persuasion was taking a
shortcut home through a deserted part of the park. He came upon a
wino on a park bench sleeping off the days binge. Since he was
pretty horny, and there was no one else around, he 'had his way
with the man'. Feeling bad about what he had done, he took a $5
bill and placed it into the wino's clenched fist.
In the morning, when the wino woke up, he noticed the money, and
immediately went to the liquor store, where he told the clerk:
"Give me $5 worth of the cheapest stuff you have." He then spent
the rest of the day drinking his purchase.
That night, the same gay guy was coming through the park, and
came upon the wino again. Next morning, .... $5
The wino again went to the liquor store with the command: "Give
me $5 worth of the cheapest stuff you have." He then spent the
rest of the day drinking his purchase.
That night, the gay guy was accompanied by 3 of his friends. The
next morning .... $20.
As the wino came into the liquor store, the clerk cut him off. "I
know, I know, you want $5 of the cheapest stuff I have."
Taking out the $20, the wino replied, "No, give me something a
little better. That cheap stuff is tearing up my asshole!"
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Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 09:29:59 -0400
From: Chalapathi Rao Poduri <chaps@TC4HQ.CMC.STPH.NET>
Subject: On Driving <clean>
The following are a sampling of REAL answers received on exams given
by the California Department of Transportation's driving school (read
Saturday Traffic School for moving violation offenders.)
Q: Do you yield when a blind pedestrian is crossing the road?
A: What for? He can't see my license plate.
Q: Who has the right of way when four cars approach a four-way
stop at the same time?
A: The pick up truck with the gun rack and the bumper sticker
saying, "Guns don't kill people. I do."
Q: When driving through fog, what should you use?
A: Your car.
Q: What problems would you face if you were arrested for drunk
driving?
A: I'd probably lose my buzz a lot faster.
Q: What changes would occur in your lifestyle if you could no
longer drive lawfully?
A: I would be forced to drive unlawfully.
Q: What are some points to remember when passing or being
passed?
A: Make eye contact and wave "hello" if he/she is cute.
Q: What is the difference between a flashing red traffic light
and a flashing yellow traffic light?
A: The color.
Q: How do you deal with heavy traffic?
A: Heavy psychedelics.
Q: What can you do to help ease a heavy traffic problem?
A: Carry loaded weapons.
Chalapathi
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