Subject: Joel Furr FAQ
Supersedes: <joel-furr/faq_828569567@rtfm.mit.edu>
Date: 11 Apr 1996 05:50:19 GMT
X-Last-Updated: 1996/04/03

Alt-fan-joel-furr-archive-name: faq
Alt-bonehead-joel-furr-archive-name: faq
Version: 4.0

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

This is the Joel Furr FAQ.

It is not provided out of a sense of personal vanity but rather for the
purpose its name states: to answer some of the Frequently Asked Questions
about me, such as "how'd he get three newsgroups named after him" and
such.=20

Many of these questions are sent to me in electronic mail, usually as a
result of someone looking for the answers to their questions in
alt.fan.joel-furr and not finding them.  It would be a good idea to read
this FAQ before posting to alt.fan.joel-furr.=20

......-- Joel Furr

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

Frequently Asked Questions

(1) Who is Joel Furr?

(2) Why does he have three newsgroups named after him?

(3) Who appointed Joel Furr ruler of alt.*?

(4) What _is_ it about Joel and lemurs?

(5) Was Joel really elected Kibo, or is that just a myth?

(6) What happened between Joel and those "Green Card" lawyers in Arizona?

(7) What newsgroups is Joel Furr a moderator of?

(8) Does Joel Furr sell t-shirts and stuff?

(9) Does Joel spend all his time logged in, or what?

(10) Is Joel likely to reply if I write to him?

(11) What does Joel look like?

(12) What's the deal with those funny black floor lamps that point up at
the ceiling with the little knobs on the side about halfway up that you
turn back and forth to adjust the brightness?  Everyone seems to have the=
m
these days.=20

(13) Hey, where are the seatbelts?

(14) What's the 'soup du jour' today?

(15) Is cotton candy a solid or liquid or crystal or what?

(16) What's the 800 number for the North Carolina ferry system?

(17) Where is Paradise?

(18) Hey, what about those French?

(19) Is it true that if I jump up off the ground, I'm technically in low
earth orbit for as long as I'm in the air?=20

(20) Who's in charge of the weather?

(21) What is it with cats?  How do they make their legs disappear when
they perch on the arm of a sofa, looking content?=20

(22) Does Joel Furr like fish?

(23) How 'bout them Dawgs?

(24) Is Joel a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or what?

(25) What's in those bottles in the back of Joel Furr's refrigerator?

(26) Where do bad people go when they die?

(27) When's the best time to go to an amusement park?

(28) What's wrong with Joel Furr's blood?

(29) What *is* that thing at the bottom of that big glass jar full of wat=
er?

(30) Will seagulls eat small chunks of pork barbecue?

(31) St. Patrick's Day is a festive, cheery holiday wherein we celebrate
our Irish heritage, affecting bad Irish accents and wearing green.  How
does Joel Furr celebrate the holiday?=20

(32) Is it true that Joel Furr's car has a guardian spirit?

(33) Hey, isn't that song "YMCA" that they play at baseball games really =
cool?

(34) What's that chunk of powdery concrete atop Joel Furr's bookcase?

(35) Does Joel have a girlfriend?

(36) What's the greatest cinematographic achievement of all time?

(37) What is a Hokie?

(38) What instrument did Joel Furr play in the Blacksburg High School ban=
d?

(39) What does Joel typically say when someone asks him, rhetorically, ho=
w
he is?=20

(40) What's the best sort of implement to use when eating ice cream?

(41) What clubs and organizations does Joel Furr belong to?

(42) What's Joel Furr's ethnic and socioeconomic background?

(43) Define "good eatins."

(44) Joel Furr visited Las Vegas in July 1995 for the better part of a
day.  How much money did he gamble?  How much did he lose?=20

(45) What were the schools in Blacksburg, Virginia like when Joel Furr wa=
s
growing up there?=20

(46) Where does Carole, Joel Furr's girlfriend, come from?

(47) Who is the Official Stooge of alt.fan.joel-furr?

(48) What exactly is "hungus?"

(49) What is the name of the night manager at the International House of
Pancakes franchise on Baxter Street in Athens, Georgia?=20

(50) What is Joel Furr's best category in Trivial Pursuit?

(51) Who is Wally?

(52) Where can you go in Durham, North Carolina, to get "spaghetti and
salmon cakes?"=20

(53) What is Joel Furr's favorite soft drink?

(54) How many fingers am I holding up?

(55) Do we need more plastic cups?

(56) What color should mayonnaise be?

(57) What is Joel Furr's astrological sign?

(58) What is Joel Furr's Myers-Briggs type?

(59) Where are your videos?

(60) How is "Furr" pronounced?

(61) What is the law?

(62) Where do the keys go?

(63) What are some of the nicknames that Joel Furr has gone by over the
years?=20

(64) What happens when you put a real, formerly alive, sponge back in
water?=20

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

The Frequently Questioned Answers

(1) Who is Joel Furr?

Joel Furr is a writer and trainer who lives in Durham, North Carolina. =20

He was born in Roanoke, Virginia on September 20, 1967, lived in
Blacksburg, Virginia from 1967 to 1985, went out of state to attend the
University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia from 1985 to 1988, then went on
to graduate school at Virginia Tech (because of the cheaper in-state
tuition) in Blacksburg from 1988 to 1993.  He has degrees in English
(Bachelor of Arts, University of Georgia, 1988) and Public Administration
(Master of Public Administration, Virginia Tech, 1990). He did not
complete a Ph.D. in P ublic Administration, dropping out before reaching
the dissertation stage but after taking two full years of Ph.D.
coursework.=20

During his graduate school years, he spent a lot of time goofing around o=
n
Usenet and a few MUD systems, since his graduate assistantship position
with the Virginia Tech Department of Public Safety, Health, and
Transportation wasn't exactly demanding of h is time and since he was
expected to spend at least four hours per day in his office which happene=
d
to have a fast net connection.  After dropping out of his Ph.D. program i=
n
Public Administration at the end of 1992, he tried and failed to find
meaningful work in western Virginia, an economically depressed area with
few good-paying jobs.=20

In late 1993, he gave up looking for work in Virginia and moved to Durham=
,
North Carolina, where he had friends and a few relatives.  In fairly shor=
t
order, he got work, got an apartment, and resumed fooling around on the
Internet.=20

Since that time, he has worked in the pharmaceutical industry, in medical
research, and in higher education.  At this time, he is employed as a
computer software trainer and works on the side as a freelance writer.=20

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

(2) Why does he have three newsgroups named after him?

The newsgroups, alt.fan.joel-furr, alt.bonehead.joel-furr, and
alt.joel-furr.die.die.die, were *not* created by Joel Furr or by anyone
acting on his behalf.  Each was created as an act of satire and/or
criticism by people who did not like Furr.=20

Alt.fan.joel-furr exists because Joel Furr once created a newsgroup calle=
d
alt.fan.serdar-argic, angering the infamous Ahmet Cosar, a.k.a. "Serdar
Argic."  Cosar's infamous alter-ego was responsible for ruining many
history-related and culture-related new sgroups such as soc.history and
soc.culture.turkish; Cosar liked to post lengthy rants about one of his
pet delusions, namely, that in 1914, Armenians had killed all the Turks i=
n
northeastern Turkey and in Russian Armenia.  This is, of course, the
direct opposite of what actually happened, but Cosar, an apologist for th=
e
Turkish genocide, was certain that he could convince the world otherwise
if he posted megabyte-long rants to dozens of newsgroups per day, lowerin=
g
the signal-to-noise ratio so far that m any posters would desert the
newsgroups and leave the field to Cosar and his allies.  Furr created
alt.fan.serdar-argic to give people who were sick of Cosar's childish
pranks a place to comment and discuss what to do about Cosar. Within 24
hours, Cosar h ad newgrouped alt.fan.joel-furr.  Oddly enough, and no
doubt to the immense surprise of Cosar, the newsgroup has actually seen
considerable use from time to time.=20

Alt.bonehead.joel-furr exists for a similar reason.  A user named Paul
Hendry once spent a solid two months posting hundreds of messages to
alt.config trying to convince the alt.config regulars that the world of
Usenet direly needed a newsgroup for fans o f lampreys (jawless
parasitical fish) to chat.  However, he failed utterly because a simple
grep of the newsspool showed that the only lamprey-related traffic in
existence was on alt.config itself.  Hendry, as it turned out later, had
been trying to trick alt.config's regulars into rubber-stamping an
unnecessary newsgroup.  Why he thought this would be amusing is anyone's
guess.  Hendry finally exhausted Joel Furr's patience, and Furr newgroupe=
d
alt.bonehead.paul-hendry.  Hendry, in a masturbatory act of excess, then
turned around and newgrouped alt.animals.lampreys,
alt.animals.paul-hendry, and alt.bonehead.joel-furr.  None of the four
newsgroups gets any traffic to speak of.  Both sides in the affair, in th=
e
final analysis, acted childishly.=20

The third group, alt.joel-furr.die.die.die, is not carried much of
anywhere and isn't really considered a real newsgroup.  It was created by
a pseudonymous Netcom user without any evident provocation -- it just
"showed up" one day without any obvious just ification.  Fewer than 10% o=
f
sites carry the newsgroup on their system, and the sites that do are
generally those sites which have their newgrouping and rmgrouping set on
"autopilot," accepting all newsgroups that are created anywhere by anyone=
.=20

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

(3) Who appointed Joel Furr ruler of alt.*?

No one.  In fact, references to "King Joel of alt.*" are showing up less
frequently because Joel no longer gives much of a damn what happens in
alt.* - so many garbage newsgroups have been created that the alt.*
namespace is a hopeless mess and there's no thing that can be done about
it.  He used to spend a half hour to an hour each day trying to explain t=
o
the endless legions of clueless newbies why we didn't need to have sixtee=
n
newsgroups on the same subject, or why a newsgroup with a confusing,
meaning less name would get zero traffic.  It never made a dent in the
hordes of stupid-ass bozos who showed up day after day begging for
newsgroups only they cared about, so Joel eventually found better uses fo=
r
his time.=20

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

(4) What _is_ it about Joel and lemurs?

Joel and some friends started telling each other jokes about lemurs on on=
e
of the bulletin board systems (the late, lamented vtcosy.cns.vt.edu
conferencing system) at Virginia Tech back in 1991.  Neither Joel nor his
friends knew anything about lemurs except that they were from Madagascar.=
=20
When Joel and company found out that Duke University, located about three
and a half hours southeast of Blacksburg in Durham, North Carolina, had a
research center with a whole forest full of lemurs, Joel and company went
down and visited.  Joel fell in love with the furry little varmints,
especially since they were (and still are) gravely endangered in their
native habitat and needed help so badly.  Joel started campaigning online
for donations to the Duke University Primate Center and continued this
activity when he moved down to Durham.=20

If you would like to know more about lemurs, you can visit the DUPC home
page at http://www.duke.edu/web/primate/index.html and/or discuss lemurs
with fellow lemur fans on the Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.lemurs.=20

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

(5) Was Joel really elected Kibo, or is that just a myth?

In January of 1994, James "Kibo" Parry disappeared from Usenet for a long
time, over a month.  No one knew where he had gone or what he was up to.=20
Some people cared, some people didn't.  Finally, Andrew Bulhak, an
Australian net.user, called for an election to replace Parry in the role
of Kibo.  Bulhak accepted any nomination that came his way, then publishe=
d
a list of candidates and held an open vote via e-mail.  When the voting
period was up, Joel Furr had won with a solid plurality and almost a
majority, with 81 votes; the nearest runner up was Parry himself, with
around 30 votes.  Parry had returned from whatever it was he'd been off
doing halfway through the voting period and had known better than to
denounce the vote, for fear of inspiring people to vote against him in
glee.=20

However, once the vote *was* over, Parry started whining *very* loudly
about it and actually threatened Joel Furr with legal action over Joel's
frivolous use of the title "Kibo" in a few Usenet posts. According to
Parry, his nickname "Kibo" had actually won him a few endorsement
contracts in Boston (primarily for computer stores, primarily with tongue
lodged solidly in cheek) and if someone else were also using the term, it
would damage his marketability.=20

Inasmuch as Joel had only signed two or three messages with "Kibo," havin=
g
had better things to do than engage in the sort of idiocy practiced
regularly on alt.religion.kibology, he had little use for Parry's whining=
.=20
It was not as though Joel had actually set out to replace Parry as Kibo i=
n
the minds of Internet users - nor would Joel have had the slightest
interest in that, since being Kibo is fairly closely analogous to being
the biggest rat in the garbage heap.  Nonetheless, Parry was so whiny
about it that Joel stopped using the nickname in disgust.=20

As Joel said at the time, "It's ironic that Usenet's biggest jokester
cannot take a joke himself."=20

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

(6) What happened between Joel and those "Green Card" lawyers in Arizona?

Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, the so-called "Green Card Lawyers" who=
,
to everyone's regret, helped usher in a bad new age of newsgroup spamming
on Usenet, were so widely disliked that Joel Furr was asked by many peopl=
e
to make a t-shirt satirizing them.  (Furr had previously made and sold
about 150 copies of a t-shirt satirizing Ahmet "Serdar Argic" Cosar.) Whe=
n
he designed and began taking orders for a "Green Card Lawyers: Spamming
the Globe" t-shirt, Canter and Siegel got wind of it and threatened Joel
with "severe" legal action unless he removed the term "Green Card Lawyers=
"
from the shirts.=20

Canter and Siegel based their threats on two claims, both legally without
a shred of foundation:=20

Claim #1: They had exclusive trademark over the term "Green Card Lawyers,=
"
a term they had never used in trade and which in fact they had no rights
to whatsoever.  Legally, if you want to be able to assert a common-law
trademark over a term, you must have used that term in trade. Canter and
Siegel had *never* used that term as part of their business, so they had
no rights to it whatsoever.=20

Claim #2:  They had exclusive rights to produce or license the rights to
produce a t-shirt based on their exploits, and that "several large
companies" were already interested in marketing C&S-based shirts. Needles=
s
to say, no companies ever produced such a shirt - and in any case, they
certainly had no right to prevent someone else from exercising their
freedom of speech by producing t-shirts satirizing them.=20

During an exchange of email over the matter, Canter and Siegel betrayed a
complete lack of knowledge of the law - or, if you want to ascribe to
malice what others ascribed to stupidity, were engaged in barratry, the
use of legal threats for harassment reasons.  Canter and Siegel said that
the concept of "public figures" being considered legally vulnerable to
satire was complete nonsense, and they repeatedly asserted their trademar=
k
claim over a term they had never filed for trademark over and which they
couldn't even claim common law trademark over since they had never used
the term in trade.  It was easy to see, after a short round of discussion=
s
with them, why they'd had to sue to be permitted to *resign* from the
Florida Bar several years ago in an effort to avoid actual disbarment.=20

Furr was panicked after receiving their threats, because although he knew
that their claims were absolute garbage, he also knew that he didn't have
the financial resources to deal with a lawsuit brought by two lawyers in =
a
state two thousand miles from his home.  He considered taking the term
"Green Card Lawyers" off the shirts, but first, asked for suggestions and
comments from the readers of newsgroups like comp.org.eff.talk and
misc.legal.=20

Two days of absolute pandemonium followed.  Joel began getting hundreds o=
f
offers of free legal help and donations to a Joel Furr Defense Fund.
Thankfully, Mike Godwin, Chief Legal Counsel of the Electronic Frontiers
Foundation, also heard of the matter and offered the EFF's services in th=
e
case to defend Furr in any legal matters that did develop.  Heartened,
Joel publicly said "To hell with the lawyers, the shirts are going forwar=
d
with the original design, let them sue."=20

Canter and Siegel promptly began claiming that they had never made any
threats whatsoever and that it was all a fiction invented by Joel Furr. I=
n
later months, after the "Green Card Lawyers" shirts had sold like hotcake=
s
(the result of Canter and Siegel's effort to prevent their sale
altogether), Canter and Siegel went around claiming that Furr had actuall=
y
contacted them *first* and asked for permission to make the shirts and
that they'd just told him to go away and not talked to him again.  Since
Furr had kept all the email they'd sent him and had it handy to show
anyone who asked, this absurd claim was easily disproven.=20

Canter and Siegel went on to publish a book about the Internet entitled
"How To Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway" which, from all
accounts, was a pedestrian and rather lame ghost-written Net guide with a
sad little chapter or two at the end declaring the authors champions of
spamming.  They then tried to run a spam-for-hire service which collapsed
when no one would sell them net access, and after a few notable fiascoes
which introduced the Net to the concept of "disposable accounts" (dial-up
shell accounts used for spamming with the full knowledge that the provide=
r
would angrily delete the account once the spamming had taken place),
Canter and Siegel more or less vanished from sight.=20

What a pity.

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

(7) What newsgroups is Joel Furr a moderator of?

Joel is sole moderator of comp.society.folklore and alt.folklore.suburban=
.=20
He is the co-moderator of news.admin.net-abuse.announce and serves as the
moderation apparatus manager for alt.humor.best-of-usenet and
soc.religion.sikhism (He is not a Sikh and does not read the newsgroup).=20
He is a former co-moderator of soc.history.war.world-war-ii and is the
former moderator of triangle.singles.announce.=20

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

(8) Does Joel Furr sell t-shirts and stuff?

Yes and no.  He used to do that a lot, but has more or less stopped now
that he has a salaried job that requires a commute and now that he has a
steady girlfriend.=20

Joel designs various shirts and mugs and stuff and gets a local screen
printing firm to make them for him once he's accumulated orders from
various people around the world.  People read about the shirts and stuff
on the Internet, mainly on http://www.danger.com/netstuff.html, and send
orders and payment via ordinary postal mail.  Joel collects the orders,
deposits the checks, and then orders the shirts in the requested sizes an=
d
colors from the screen printer.  This sometimes takes a few months from
the time orders are first collected to the time the last shirt is in
someone's hands -- sometimes it takes quite a while to generate enough
orders to make ordering a particular shirt cost-effective, and other
times, so many orders come in (for example, for the Perl/RSA t-shirt) tha=
t
it takes a hell of a long time to open and enter all the orders in a
spreadsheet so the actual shirts can be ordered.=20

Joel does not charge a profit on the shirts; he prefers that the shirt
business remain more or less a hobby and not an actual business.  If he
were to charge a profit, people would expect a lot prompter service and
it'd probably stop being fun.  Besides, if a profit is charged, he cannot
post notices in related Usenet newsgroups (people resent advertising for
profit in discussion-based newsgroups) and sometimes, a few notices to a
few newsgroups are necessary to get the ball rolling.=20

However, all that is mostly academic now that Joel has largely retired
from doing shirts.=20

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

(9) Does Joel spend all his time logged in, or what?

No.  Despite the insults from losers who, when losing an argument in a
Usenet newsgroup, say "Hey, get out from in front of your monitor once in
a while, bub!"  Joel actually spends little time logged in.=20

Having a steady girlfriend will do that for you.=20

Joel does have a real life, a life that consists of spending time with hi=
s
girlfriend, reading, going to minor league baseball games, driving,
traveling, going to movies, hanging out with friends, and working on his
writing.  He *used* to spend a lot of time logged in, back when he was in
graduate school (he had a do-nothing graduate assistant position), so
people assume this is still the case.=20

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

(10) Is Joel likely to reply if I write to him?

If you write to him and ask stupid, clueless questions like "how do I set
up my newsreader?  I'm on a Mac," he'll cheerfully ignore you.  If you
have half a clue and need help, or just want to talk, he can usually find
time.  If you like talking about maps, travel in the USA, the South, mino=
r
league baseball, non-fiction books, and so forth, please write.  He's
often up late at night and may be around, but idle, when you send email.=20
His preferred email address is jfurr@acpub.duke.edu, but jfurr@danger.com
also works.=20

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

(11) What does Joel look like?

Joel Furr is a 6'2", 205-pound Caucasian male with dark brown hair and
brown eyes.  He has a very faint Y-shaped scar on his left cheek from a
childhood accident.  He typically does not have much of a tan because he
spends most of his time indoors.=20

When he's not at work, he tends to wear t-shirts or polo shirts, corduroy
shorts, and sneakers.  He prefers dark colors, such as navy or purple, bu=
t
rarely wears black shirts because he doesn't want people to come up and
start talking to him about "cyber space."=20

He tends to wear his hair in what's called a "professional haircut" -- no=
t
too short, but definitely not very long.  He prefers to wear his hair
fairly short because he tends to perspire heavily in summertime and that
makes long hair impractical.=20

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

(12) What's the deal with those funny black floor lamps that point up at
the ceiling with the little knobs on the side about halfway up that you
turn back and forth to adjust the brightness?  Everyone seems to have the=
m
these days.=20

They like it if you have one.  In fact, They like it if you have *more*
than one.  (If you don't know who we mean by They, sorry; we can't tell
you more than we already have.)

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

(13) Hey, where are the seatbelts?

There *aren't* any seatbelts on this ride.

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

(14) What's the 'soup du jour' today?

Cream of broccoli.

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

(15) Is cotton candy a solid or liquid or crystal or what?

Cotton candy is, technically, one big molecule -- one very long-chain
molecule, nonetheless, but one molecule.  If you unraveled a cotton candy
molecule of typical size and stretched it out straight, it'd stretch from
Durham, North Carolina to Atlanta, Georgia.=20

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

(16) What's the 800 number for the North Carolina ferry system?

1-800-BY-FERRY.

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

(17) Where is Paradise?

Paradise can be found in the men's room of the Mardi Gras Bowling Lanes,
located on NC 54 between Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.=20

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

(18) Hey, what about those French?

For the purposes of the game, the French are goobers.

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

(19) Is it true that if I jump up off the ground, I'm technically in low
earth orbit for as long as I'm in the air?=20

Yes.  Technically, anytime you leave the surface of the Earth, you're in
low earth orbit and the Earth will rotate slightly underneath you. The
distance the Earth travels beneath you while you're in the air is too
slight to be noticed, but there is a small but calculable orbital effect.=
=20

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

(20) Who's in charge of the weather?

The current Planetary Weather Supervisor is Mr. James L. Cambias of New
Orleans, Louisiana (currently dwelling in Durham, North Carolina).=20

You can complain to him when it rains all day with no end in sight, but h=
e
rarely acts in a responsive fashion.  He has his own agenda and until his
demands are met (he insists that the residents of Chapel Hill learn to
drive like sane people), he's not going to do anything about the weather.=
=20

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

(21) What is it with cats?  How do they make their legs disappear when
they perch on the arm of a sofa, looking content?=20

They've got little tubes up inside their body that their legs retract
into. No one's figured out exactly why they evolved this trait, but the
best guess anyone's come up with is that they did it so they could look
cool when they perch on the arm of a sofa.=20

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

(22) Does Joel Furr like fish?

No.  He hates fish.

When he was a kid, he used to eat Fish Filet sandwiches from McDonald's
with great satisfaction.  This all changed when he had two bad encounters
with fish which forever traumatized him.=20

First, at the age of six or so, he happened one summer to be at the house
of relatives in Florida who served up a big batch of fried mullet for
dinner one night.  It looked fairly nasty -- big platters of fried fish
with bones and stuff sticking out -- and smelled worse.  Joel didn't want
to eat any, but nothing else had been cooked for dinner.  Squeamishly,
Joel ate a few bites, then decided hunger was preferable to eating mullet=
.=20
Unfortunately, even the few bites he ate were a few bites too many.  Joel
developed debilitating nausea and a king-hell case of the hives which
lasted for a week or so, the result of *massive* and previously unknown
food allergies to mullet.  It turned him off on eating fish in general.=20

Second, while visiting relatives in North Carolina a year or two later, h=
e
went fishing with an uncle and promptly caught a little orange sunfish,
which, in its gasping and wriggling and bulging of eyes and so forth so
shocked and startled the young Furr that he dropped his pole and sprinted
off, leaving his uncle to release the fish from the hook and put it back
into the water.=20

For some reason, this encounter left Furr with a lifelong aversion to fis=
h
-- he's not afraid of them but can't stand the thought of touching them,
much less eating them -- and the allergy to mullet helps justify his
dislike of fish to people who, annoyingly, insist that he'd really like
fish if he just tried it.=20

It's a phobia.  No, it doesn't make sense.  That's what makes it a phobia=
.

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

(23) How 'bout them Dawgs? =20

Gooooooooooooo Dawgs!  Sic 'em!  Woof woof woof woof woof!

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

(24) Is Joel a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or what?

Joel is a registered Democrat; this is not to say that he's of a
particularly liberal bent, but rather, that he supports the broad goals o=
f
the Democratic Party and opposes the morals-based legislative agenda of
the Republicans.=20

Joel was 13 in 1981 when President Reagan took office.  He spent his high
school years watching Reagan's insane lies and deranged, senile babblings
on the news each night during dinner and, as a result, developed a
lifelong antipathy to the twisted Newspeak of the Republican Party.=20

He's not real fond of the Libertarians either, though, because most
Libertarians he's known have been so selfish and "it's MY money why shoul=
d
I pay ONE RED CENT to help the POOR"-oriented that he's learned to ignore
them.=20

Furr worked for a little over two years in a public library and learned
the importance of basic governmental services such as libraries.=20
Libertarians would have you believe that we should ban such services and
let for-profit libraries come into being -- never mind the fact that a lo=
t
of residents of Furr's hometown in Appalachia couldn't afford basic
*phone* service much less "luxuries" like a for-profit library.  What
would happen to the poor in a world where the Libertarian Party has close=
d
down all the libraries (i.e., the creation of an illiterate underclass
denied access to information) does not seem to matter to the Libertarians=
.=20

As someone put it recently, you don't see a lot of poor Libertarians.=20
People only become Libertarians when they decide that now that they've
made or are about to make a lot of money, it's time to change the rules
they've benefited from all their lives and stop sharing the wealth.=20

But anyway, in the end Furr is like many other people in this day and age
in that he tends to vote against candidates rather than for them.  The
Republicans being such odious walking piles of garbage and the
Libertarians being so completely out in left field, this means that he
typically votes Democratic.=20

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

(25) What's in those bottles in the back of Joel Furr's refrigerator?

The Coca-Cola bottle and the Cobb Mountain Natural Spring Water bottle ar=
e
full of salt water from the Pacific Ocean off San Francisco, California,
collected from the surf near Seal Rock during Joel's vacation to
California in July of 1995.=20

The bottle marked "Cuzcatlan" which appears to contain cloudy, stagnant
water is actually a bottle of Cuzcatlan "soursop" soda which Joel picked
up at a Mexican grocery in Durham out of curiosity and which he decided h=
e
might be better off not drinking when he noticed that the ingredients
consisted solely of "water, propylene glycol, vegetable gum, and glyceryl
abietate."=20

The bottle of Shasta tonic water with about one gin-and-tonic's worth of
tonic missing is just that, a partially consumed bottle of Shasta tonic
water. It dates from the summer of 1988 and has been with Joel through
five apartments.=20

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

(26) Where do bad people go when they die?

Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

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

(27) When's the best time to go to an amusement park?

Well, if you ask in terms of when will you find short lines and so forth,
experience shows that it's best to go during a full-fledged tropical
storm.=20

Joel Furr went to Carowinds, on the North Carolina/South Carolina border
at Charlotte, on a day when Tropical Storm Jerry was approaching and
torrential rains were already falling.  He was in town to see Warren Zevo=
n
in concert that night and decided to drive down early to visit Carowinds.=
=20
It was raining when the park opened at 10:00 a.m. and it rained hard most
of the day and it was *still* raining when he left at 8:00 p.m.  The park
stayed open throughout and there were minor lines around 1 p.m., but most
of the day, the lines on the coasters were so short that you could just
stay on the coasters and not even get off to run around to the line to ge=
t
back on again.  Joel went on something like 30 or 40 coaster rides in one
day, then left, soaking wet and chafed all over, to see Warren Zevon.=20

It was not until the next day that Joel and friends (who'd driven down an=
d
met him at the concert) read in the newspaper about how Tropical Storm
Jerry had brought extensive property damage, flooding, and a few drowning
deaths to the vicinity.=20

"Oh," Joel said.  "That explains why it was raining all day."

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

(28) What's wrong with Joel Furr's blood?

Joel has a hereditary anemia called "Hemoglobin C."  It's a trait found i=
n
people of Mediterranean descent, which Joel apparently is.  Joel shares
the disease with his sister and his father; his brother, Rob, instead has
a condition called beta thalassemia.  It is generally assumed that Rob is
a mutant.=20

If you look in an encyclopedia of medical syndromes to find a definition
of Hemoglobin C anemia, you may find a listing that describes it as
something that causes the person to have persistent jaundice and a high
likelihood of childhood mortality.  You may, on the other hand, find a
definition which describes those who have it as having red blood cells
that can't carry as much oxygen and fewer red blood cells overall.  This
latter definition is the type Joel has.  Joel has no idea what the former
definition refers to.  It's certainly not what he's got.  What he's got
are red blood cells that don't fully mature.=20

The anemia has had annoying effects on Joel's life.  He was fed iron
supplements for years when he was a kid because, well, he was "anemic."
These were discontinued when it was pointed out that they couldn't
possibly do any good.  He was turned down for military service (during a
period during graduate school where he was *really* sick of college)
because of it.  He was skinny and un-athletic for years.  Ultimately,
though, he lives a completely normal life -- except that he can't give
blood because the Red Cross won't accept his blood.  That's one of the
most annoying aspects of the anemia --people running blood drives never
believe you when an otherwise healthy-looking adult male says "um, I can'=
t
give blood, I'm anemic." If you *try* to give blood, though, they always
turn you down.  You can't win.=20

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

(29) What *is* that thing at the bottom of that big glass jar full of wat=
er?

A small plastic rubber octopus.  It likes it there.

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

(30) Will seagulls eat small chunks of pork barbecue?

Apparently not.

They ate everything *else* Joel threw to them, up to and including gravel=
,
but they spit out the pork barbecue.=20

Ingrates.

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

(31) St. Patrick's Day is a festive, cheery holiday wherein we celebrate
our Irish heritage, affecting bad Irish accents and wearing green.  How
does Joel Furr celebrate the holiday?=20

He wears orange.  Every year, without fail.  Orange.

To hell with the Irish.  If anyone has an explanation for why one ethnic
group has managed to wangle themselves what amounts to a national holiday
for their patron saint, celebrating alcoholism and leading zillions of
idiots without a drop of Irish blood in their body to wander around sayin=
g
"Aye and begorra" one day each year, Joel would like to hear it.=20

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

(32) Is it true that Joel Furr's car has a guardian spirit?

Actually, yes.  A small lemur statue, "Bondo" by name, sits on his
dashboard and theoretically keeps the car and all its passengers safe fro=
m
harm.=20

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

(33) Hey, isn't that song "YMCA" that they play at baseball games really =
cool?

Or, to put it another way, isn't it really cool, the way minor league
baseball teams have taken to playing "YMCA" over the public-address syste=
m
at every game, leading thousands of idiots who wouldn't know a fielder's
choice or a suicide squeeze if it came along and bit them to turn out in
large numbers night after night for no other reason than to stand up in
the sixth inning and sing a lousy, annoying song that should have been
*left* in the 1970 s, in a stomach-turning display of human futility that
rivals Catholic family planning efforts for utter stupidity?=20

The answer: "Um, well, no.  But at least it does help us identify those
who'll be first in line for the public executions when the revolution
comes."=20

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

(34) What's that chunk of powdery concrete atop Joel Furr's bookcase?

It's a big piece of the Berlin Wall that Julia Youngman, one of Joel
Furr's older sisters, chopped out of the Wall in November or December of
1989 during the big feeding frenzy as the Wall fell.=20

At least, that's what Julia *says* it is.  She came back from Army duty i=
n
Europe with a suitcase full of concrete, but for all any of the recipient=
s
know, she chipped those chunks off a concourse pillar at Dulles
International on her arrival in the USA.=20

No Communists have shown up asking for the chunk back yet, but you never
know.=20

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

(35) Does Joel have a girlfriend?

Fortunately, yes. Her name is Carole and he met her in real life at a
convention of sorts in suburban Maryland, then spent a solid month and a
half exchanging email with her before they decided to arrange another
meeting to determine whether or not relationship potential was present.=20
Joel visited Carole at her home in northern Virginia and spent part of a
cold, windy Sunday afternoon in December 1995 strolling around the Mall i=
n
Washington, DC.  As Carole and Joel were strolling past the Washington
Monument, they were accosted by an ABC-TV news crew which was there
interviewing tourists about the federal budget crisis which had caused al=
l
the monuments to be closed to the public that day.  Carole and Joel were
happy to mutter darkly about Congressional Republicans for the camera and
then went on their merry way, not really expecting to make the evening
news that night or anything like that.=20

Wrong-o.  Carole and Joel did make "World News Tonight" that night - one
of only two tourist interviews from that afternoon that made it onto the
air (the other, which came immediately before Carole and Joel's interview=
,
was of a cranky old guy who likewise blamed the idiots in Congress as
being responsible for the shutdown).  Fifteen seconds of irritated
grumbling, tops, but how many other couples can truthfully claim that
their first date wound up being nationally televised?=20

Carole's pretty damned attractive, which, before you ask, is the reason
Joel has no plans to post her picture to his Web page.  Given the amount
of e-mail Joel gets angrily asking why there's no pornography available
for viewing on his Web page, Joel's not about to post photos of his
girlfriend for legions of sickos to download.=20

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

(36) What's the greatest cinematographic achievement of all time?

That would be "Repo Man," starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton.=
=20
The life of a repo man is always intense.=20

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

(37) What is a Hokie?

The term "Hokie" has been applied for over a hundred years to members of
the athletics teams at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University, located in the mountains of southwest Virginia),
informally for much of that time and formally since the mid-1980 s.=20
Virginia Tech, a former military school, originally played under the name
"Cadets" and then, later on, switched to the nickname "Fighting Gobblers"
because, believe it or not, the members of the football team tended to
have prodigious appetites.  "Fighting Gobblers" is not exactly the sort o=
f
team nickname which strikes fear into the hearts of opponents, so "Hokies=
"
was often used as an informal substitute. In the mid-1980 s, under the
tenure of head football coach and athletic director Bill Dooley, "Hokies"
became the official team name, replacing "Fighting Gobblers," which
nonetheless remained plastered across the outside of Lane Stadium ("HOME
OF THE FIGHTING GOBBLERS").=20

Which brings us once again to the question, "What is a Hokie?"  We now
understand that the term refers to a Virginia Tech athlete, but we have
yet to determine where the term came from.=20

It's simple: it's a nonsense word which a student in the 1890's included
in a cheer he submitted to a contest which was being held to pick a new
school cheer.  Said cheer went something like this:=20

"Hokie, Hokie, Hokie, Hi
Tech, Tech, VPI
Solarex, solarah
Polytech Virginia
Ray, rah, VPI,
TEAM TEAM TEAM"

Okay, so it's a fairly lame cheer, but in the old days, things like that
were all the rage.  "Hokie" didn't mean anything -- it was simply filler
to stretch out the first line so it could end in a word that would rhyme
with the "I" in "VPI."=20

Now, Wahoos (the hopeless, hapless denizens of the University of Virginia=
,
a sort of technical and vocational school located in Charlottesville,
Virginia) will tell you that "Hokie" means "a castrated turkey."  Since
you can t castrate turkeys, you d thin k the Wahoos would realize that
their retroactive definition makes no sense, but sadly, asking a Wahoo to
make sense is asking for more intellectual capacity than he or she has
got.=20

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

(38) What instrument did Joel Furr play in the Blacksburg High School ban=
d?

Alto saxophone.  And damned badly, too.

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

(39) What does Joel typically say when someone asks him, rhetorically, ho=
w
he is?=20

"Paralyzed by fear.  You?"

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

(40) What's the best sort of implement to use when eating ice cream?

Tiny little wooden spoons, the sort that look like they were cut en masse
out of some thin piece of wood. You can get them in large quantities at
Francesca's on Ninth Street in Durham. They re fun to eat ice cream with
*and* they re environmentally friendly.=20

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

(41) What clubs and organizations does Joel Furr belong to?

Joel has never been much of a joiner in the sense of signing up for clubs
and organizations; he prefers to have his free time to himself rather tha=
n
having to head out to some meeting each night of the week.  He belonged t=
o
the Demosthenian Society when he was a student at the University of
Georgia and belonged briefly to two professional associations when he was
in graduate school but never attended any events or conferences.  Joel
dislikes the petty politics that characterize many organizations and
prefers to remain aloof from the madding crowds who use their officership
in various organizations as some sort of ego fix.=20

That being said, he has belonged to Toastmasters International, the
world's largest public-speaking education organization, since July 1,
1989, and has served in several District Officer positions, including two
terms as a Division Governor and one partial term as Lieutenant Governor
Marketing in District 66 (central, eastern, and western Virginia) and one
term as Public Relations Officer for District 37 (North Carolina).  He
earned his DTM (Distinguished Toastmaster) award in 1993 after four years
of membership and has also received the ATM (Able Toastmaster) Bronze
speaking certification.  Joel has served as a sponsor for three new
Toastmasters clubs (CELCO Toastmasters, #8108-66, ISE Toastmasters,
#8976-66, and Bull City Toastmasters, #9891-37) and has served two terms
as a Club President (one term with Christiansburg Toastmasters, #3715-66
and one term with Bull City Toastmasters, #9891-37).  Toastmasters is the
only organization he's ever taken very seriously and that was mainly the
result of boredom and ennui during graduate school -- serving as a
Toastmasters officer gave him something to do that brought him into
contact with people.  The organization is worthwhile and has helped many
people become better communicators but, sadly, the organization at the
state level is often plagued by the same sort of petty politics and
infighting that Joel prefers to avoid at all costs.  Joel is relatively
inactive in Toastmasters these days, holding only one office -- Sergeant
at Arms of the Bull City Toastmasters.=20

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

(42) What's Joel Furr's ethnic and socioeconomic background?

Joel is, to be blunt, highly educated white trash -- the scion of
generations of poor crackers in rural North Carolina and Florida.  He doe=
s
not come from any clear-cut European ancestral background -- he's your
basic American mongrel, not precisely what you'd call Anglo-Saxon and not
precisely derived from the British Isles.  At least one great-grandmother
was still speaking Dutch most of her life and he does have a blood trait
which is predominantly found in peoples of Mediterranean descent.  His
family, on both sides, has been resident in the rural South for so many
years that the country of origin of any branch of the family is mostly
guesswork.  His earliest known ancestor, one Henry Furr, is recorded as
having arrived in the Carolinas in 1742, having come from Zurich in
Switzerland.  However, there are currently no Furrs listed in the Swiss
telephone directory so it's anyone's guess as to whether Henry Furr was
actually Swiss or whether he had just traveled there from elsewhere befor=
e
journeying onward to America.=20

In any case, Furr's ancestors, once they reached America, made their home=
s
in the South and generally avoided those states north of the Potomac and
Ohio.  Furr has, as far as anyone can determine, exactly zero blood
relatives who originate north of the Mason-Dixon line.=20

His mother and father grew up in the Depression-era South: his father's
father was a textile mill foreman in rural North Carolina and his mother'=
s
father was a mostly-unemployed jack-of-all-trades and farmer in a rural
area on Florida's Gulf Coast.  Both parents came from families where no
one had ever gone to college yet both parents not only strove and toiled
and studied and made it to college, but did so well that they each
received master's degrees (father, in nuclear physics; mother, in botany)=
.=20
Both parents went on to Duke University to work on doctorates -- and
that's where they met, in a required language class the morning after
Furr's father had put in an all-night shift working on the campus Van de
Graaf generator.=20

Unfortunately, only Furr's father finished his Ph.D -- his mother worked
on hers for years but stopped just short. Furr's father earned his
doctorate in nuclear physics from Duke and was offered a tenure-track
position at Virginia Tech, but Tech made it clear that their anti-nepotis=
m
policy would prevent them from offering Furr's mother any position at all
even if she finished her Ph.D. in plant physiology.  Lacking the
motivation to finish a Ph.D. that she would not get to use in any
meaningful way, Fur r's mother never finished her studies.=20

Furr's father, a full professor, worked for many years at the nuclear
reactor at Virginia Tech and, when that program was slated for downscalin=
g
and eventual closure, moved to the new Safety department to head up
Virginia Tech's occupational safety efforts.  Furr's mother, on the other
hand, spent several years as a bored housewife, taking part in university
events as a professor's wife until children finally started to arrive in
the mid-1960's. After years spent raising kids and being a housewife, she
finally took a job at the local public library -- and, by the mid-1980's,
was running the place. Furr's parents both retired in 1995.  They did all
right for ignorant crackers from the rural South.=20

Furr was born in September 1967 in Roanoke, Virginia (Blacksburg, home of
Virginia Tech, had no hospital at the time), but grew up in the college
town of Blacksburg, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern
Virginia.  Blacksburg is home to Virginia's largest university but is
surrounded by extremely rural parts of Appalachia to the north, south, an=
d
west -- the sort of places that have only one stoplight in the entire
county.  Montgomery County, where Blacksburg is located, was only somewha=
t
less rural, and that was entirely the result of Virginia Tech.  You can
still go a few miles north or south from Virginia Tech and be right in th=
e
midst of darkest Appalachia.=20

Furr does not speak with much of an accent despite growing up in
Appalachia, a relatively accent-laden part of the country.  This was
largely the result of the averaging effect a college town has on the
accents the students, faculty, and staff bring with them.  With so many
competing accents, everyone tends to wind up speaking Standard American
before too long.  On the other hand, when he wants to, when he's
especially tired, or when he's talking to someone *with* an Appalachian o=
r
Southern accent, a muted but nonetheless bona fide cornball Suth'n accent
does sneak out.=20

Furr is very proud of growing up in Appalachia in much the same way that
residents of Hell's Kitchen have convinced themselves that it's a fine
thing to have grown up surrounded by squalor and ignorance.  Furr's
parents were well-to-do and Furr had ready access to all the books he
wanted so he wasn't exactly wading in squalor or ignorance, but he saw
both every time he drove out of Blacksburg and into the surrounding
countryside.  Even so, there are worse places to grow up in than the
Appalachian Mountains.  The countryside around Blacksburg is rolling and
mountainous and beautiful and the Jefferson National Forest starts only
two miles or so north of town.  Furr feels awkward and out of sorts when
he's visiting any part of the country that's especially f lat and that
doesn't have lots of trees.  Trees are important.=20

So in conclusion, it's fairly hard to say what Joel's ethnic group is or
say "Joel's a ______."  "White trash from Appalachia" is as good a term a=
s
any to describe him.  He's not a WASP by any means: he's white, but not
precisely Anglo-Saxon (though many of his forebears did come from England
and Scotland), and he's never been a member of any church congregation at
all, much less a practicing Protestant.  Thus, he's never invited to join
the good country clubs or included on the right mailing lists.=20

C'est la vie.

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

(43) Define "good eatins."

"Good eatins" is a term often used in the South to refer to especially
tasty, filling food: "Man, them's good eatins" or "Good eatins on that
there hog."  Good eatins can refer to a tasty cauldron of Brunswick stew,
an expertly-barbecued pig, a fried chicken dinner with all the trimmings,
or even so prosaic a meal as a bowl of pinto beans with onion on top and =
a
piece of cornbread on the side.=20

One thing that Southerners understand is that food need not be heavily
seasoned or cost a lot to be filling and worthy of the term "good eatins.=
"=20
Simple food is often the best kind of food.=20

Joel Furr traveled to the mountain town of Galax, Virginia to attend the
Galax Old Fiddlers' Convention one August when he was in graduate school,
not being a fiddler himself but mainly just wanting to listen to an
evening's worth of bluegrass and mountain music.  Some friends from
graduate school, all Utahns or otherwise Mormons who didn't know much
about Appalachia, came along as well.  Upon arriving at Felt Park in
Galax, the traveling party from Blacksburg hit the midway for food.  The
Mormons cringed at some of the things being passed off as food by the
locals and settled on "fajitas" -- which turned out to be ground beef and
Cheez Whiz served hot in a pita pocket -- while Joel Furr instinctively
headed for the "Beans" stand.  This stand had the longest line at the
midway and every man jack in that line was there to get a bowl of pinto
beans with diced onion sprinkled on top and a piece of cornbread on the
side.  Joel toddled away from the stand when he'd received his food and
immediately came in for astounded looks of confusion from his friends who
could not conceive of anyone *waiting* *in* *line* for a bowl of beans
with cornbread.=20

"Them's good eatins," Joel explained, gesturing at the beans with his
piece of cornbread.=20

"Uh huh," his friends said, disbelievingly.

Joel shrugged and tucked into his beans, enjoying his meal and feeling
happy and content when done -- while his friends ate their "fajitas,"
faces wrinkled with disgust.  Bright yellow cheese goo on ground beef,
apparently, was not quite the haute cuisine that his friends had expected
it to be -- while beans are pretty damned hard to mess up.=20

Evidently, the concept of "good eatins" is unknown among the Latter-Day
Saints -- while the rednecks from Appalachia know a good thing when they
see it.=20

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

(44) Joel Furr visited Las Vegas in July 1995 for the better part of a
day.  How much money did he gamble?  How much did he lose?=20

Not one red cent.  Knowing that the odds were overwhelmingly in favor of
his losing and that it's hard to stop after just one slot machine pull,
Joel cleverly left the slot machines and gaming tables completely alone.=20

His time in Las Vegas was spent wandering around the Strip eyeing the
other tourists, looking at the lights, sipping a giant Margarita, and
finally, going to see a Rockettes show at the Flamingo.=20

Sadly, the 200-foot-tall video screen at the Circus-Circus which Hunter S=
.=20
Thompson made famous in _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ was not there
anymore.  The Flamingo didn't have Neutrogena soap in the rooms either.=20
Apparently Thompson got it all 25 years ago and they never restocked.=20

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

(45) What were the schools in Blacksburg, Virginia like when Joel Furr wa=
s
growing up there?=20

Montgomery County, Virginia is a very rural county in the sticks of
Appalachia which, for reasons best explained elsewhere, happens to be hom=
e
to Virginia's largest university, Virginia Tech.=20

The local schools, therefore, had a very split personality.  Most of the
schools in the county were geared toward the kids of the locals, few of
whom had any plans at all to attend college and who wanted vocational and
business classes and lots of 'em.  The schools in Blacksburg proper, on
the other hand, had student bodies that were about half locals and half
kids of the Virginia Tech professors.=20

You might think that the local school system, faced with a large minority
population of very bright children, would take some steps to make sure
that all the kids got good educations, making sure that each child was
presented with challenges and material appropriate for his intellectual
level. You might even think that they'd try to put all the really bright
kids in some sort of gifted and talented program.  You'd be wrong, though
-- because Montgomery County intentionally tried to slow the bright kids
down so they couldn't be accused of elitism (gifted and talented programs
being considered elitist, you see) and so the teachers could teach at the
level of the lowest common denominator.=20

To cite but one example, Joel Furr was reading at a second grade level
before he entered kindergarten and had advanced so far by the time he
entered first grade that he read his entire "Your First Reader" -- which
had been intended to last him all year -- on the first day of school.  Th=
e
teachers and administrators at his school, not wanting to have to deal
with a child who was four or five grade levels beyond what they were
trying to teach the other kids, simply stuck Joel off in a second-grade
reading group in order to "challenge" him.  Joel's parents were pleased
that their son had been moved up to a second grade reading group, but wha=
t
they didn't know was that the group in question was actually made up of
the kids who were considered so stupid and unteachable that they didn't
actually do any reading during the reading period but instead were taken
down to the gymnasium to play dodgeball (which the local kids called
"bombardment") for two hours each day.  Joel, not knowing any better,
simply played dodgeball some days and other days snuck off to the school
library and read on his own.=20

By the time Joel Furr reached high school, the school system had develope=
d
three "tracks" for the kids in grades 9-12.  You could be in the
"vocational" track, the "college-bound" track, or the "honors" track.  Th=
e
college-bound and honors tracks were a lot alike except that the kids in
the honors classes were actually presented with less work in an apparent
attempt, once again, to slow them down.  It came as a surprise to the
honors students to find that the college-bound English classes were
reading more books and writing more papers than they were.  Joel Furr too=
k
all the honors classes Blacksburg High School offered -- social studies
and English classes, mainly -- and even though he was so painfully bored
by school that he rarely if ever took homework seriously (assuming he did
it at all), he was always stuck in the honors classes again the next year=
.=20

Why, you ask, was he placed in the honors classes year after year if he
had lousy grades?=20

Simple: to keep him away from the "normal" kids in the college-bound
track.  That's why *all* the bright kids were in the honors program -- to
keep them from disrupting the "college-bound" classes.  At least, that's
the conclusion all the bright kids tended to come to, especially after
they found out that the "college-bound" classes were in many ways tougher=
.=20
The honors students tended to get classes where the teacher discussed
"fire imagery" in Arthur Miller's _The Crucible_ for days on end.  Wheee!=
=20

In addition to creating the so-called "Honors ghetto," the schools also
created a Gifted and Talented program by the early 1980's -- and Joel Fur=
r
was, of course, in said program.  This meant that he was bused along with
all the other bright kids to the high school in the county seat,
Christiansburg, one day per year to be shown a day's worth of art films,
short films, and films like "The Wizard of Speed and Time."=20

That was it.  That was the "Gifted and Talented" program.

Uh huh.  Gifted and Talented program, my ass.

Quite a few of Joel's peers did get decent educations despite the school
system and made it into universities like Brown and Duke and the
University of Chicago, but Joel simply hadn't cared enough to jump throug=
h
the hoops necessary to get decent grades.  Classwork had been so utterly
boring and full of busy-work assignments that he spent most of high schoo=
l
with his nose in a book.  He wound up attending the University of Georgia=
.=20
Thank Heaven for high SAT scores -- with his grades alone, he would have
been lucky to get into a community college.=20

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

(46) Where does Carole, Joel Furr's girlfriend, come from?

Carole claims to have been born on the coast of California, near Monterey=
,
in the town of Pebble Beach.  She grew up just outside Dayton, Ohio, in a
town called Oakwood, and has lived in Cambridge (Massachusetts),
Baltimore, and northern Virginia.  She now lives in Durham, North
Carolina.=20

This is the version of events made available for public consumption,
however - the real truth is far stranger yet.=20

In actuality, Carole is a California sea otter in human form.  Her people
(the otters), curious about the game of golf which was regularly played b=
y
the humans who lived in Pebble Beach, selected her to be sent among the
humans to learn this strange game and bring back its secrets.  She was
left, clutching a putter in her tiny little otter paw, on the thirteenth
green at the Pebble Beach golf course in hopes that golfers would discove=
r
her and take her among them to learn the secrets of golf.=20

Unfortunately, two humans who were simply touring the golf course happene=
d
to stumble upon the little otter girl and took her back to live with them=
.=20
Over time, she came to resemble the humans she lived with more and more
until you can hardly tell by looking at her that she's a sea otter at all=
.=20

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

(47) Who is the Official Stooge of alt.fan.joel-furr?

That would be Joe Littrell of Mount Vernon, Illinois.  When Joel Furr was
courting Carole, his girlfriend-to-be, he wanted to send her an East
Carolina University sweatshirt anonymously to try to hint to her that she
should consider moving to North Carolina.  Joel asked for a stooge on
alt.fan.joel-furr; Joe Littrell volunteered; Joel sent the shirt to Joe t=
o
send to Carole and Joe graciously complied.  Unfortunately, when Carole
got the package, she instantly guessed who the true sender of the shirt
was and never even looked at the return address or postmark until after
she'd told Joel "thanks for the sweatshirt" and got asked "didn't the
postmark fool you?"=20

Sigh.

Okay, so it didn't exactly come off as planned, but Joe Littrell
nonetheless earned the title of "Official Stooge."  All hail the Stooge;
long may he reign.=20

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

(48) What exactly is "hungus?"

No one knows. =20

At least one theory exists that it has to do with the substances crusted
on and life forms found growing on Joe Cochrane's bathroom floor, but
since all scientists who have attempted to analyze said substances and
life forms have gone instantly mad, it seems doubtful that a descriptive
term having to do with said substances and life forms would have entered
the scientific jargon.=20

At present, therefore, "hungus" must remain undefined.

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

(49) What is the name of the night manager at the International House of
Pancakes franchise on Baxter Street in Athens, Georgia?=20

Hector.

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

(50) What is Joel Furr's best category in Trivial Pursuit?

Geography.

Joel's a serious map junkie; he loves to pore over maps for hours and
hours.=20

One of his favorite hobbies is asking people where they're from and then,
regardless of what they answer, somehow managing to ask a question that
implies extreme familiarity with the locale cited.  Given that he's
managed to, purely by accident, to absorb the names and general locations
of hundreds if not thousands of towns and localities around the world as =
a
result of his map-poring-over, he can often startle people with this
trick.=20

It's not *really* a trick, though -- he really does know a lot about
places around the globe and especially about the United States of America=
.=20
It just *seems* like a trick to some people who tell him they're from, oh=
,
Brooklyn, and then get asked "Which neighborhood?  Flatbush?"  The normal
assumption is that Joel has been to said locality and knows it well --
when in fact, he generally only knows a *few* things about each locality
and certainly hasn't been to every city in the USA and every country on
the planet.=20

Yet.

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

(51) Who is Wally?

Wally is a small gopherlike being who lives under Joel Furr's bed.

Neither Joel nor his girlfriend Carole is entirely sure how Wally came to
dwell under the bed.  Joel and Carole were doing some shopping for home
furnishings in January of 1996 and happened to be at K-Mart loading up on
paper goods, shelving, various chemicals, and so forth, when it occurred
to them that what the apartment really needed was a small gopherlike
being. Unfortunately, none of the employees of that particular K-Mart
admitted knowing where the "Small Gopherlike Beings" section might be
found.  Joel and Carole were forced to return home, lacking the small
gopherlike being they'd set their hearts on.=20

As it happened, however, a small gopherlike being was found living under
the bed a couple of days later, sitting in a small (gopher-sized) La-Z Bo=
y
armchair reading a copy of "No Exit" by Jean-Paul Sartre and chuckling to
itself. This being answers to the name of Wally and seems hell-bent on
gathering all the shoes in the apartment together under the bed where the=
y
can be used for purposes unknown.=20

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

(52) Where can you go in Durham, North Carolina, to get "spaghetti and
salmon cakes?"=20

That would be the Pan-Pan Diner, located just off I-85 at the Hillandale
Road exit.=20

For reasons unknown, virtually every category of food on the Pan-Pan
Diner's menu offers the option of salmon cakes on the side.  The menu
lists, for example, "pancakes and sausage," "pancakes and bacon," and
"pancakes and salmon cakes."  Salmon cakes are available as an option on
dozens of items, up to and including "spaghetti and salmon cakes."=20

No one knows why. =20

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

(53) What is Joel Furr's favorite soft drink?

Coca-Cola.

He always preferred Coca-Cola to Pepsi-Cola when he was a child -- partly
because he preferred the taste of Coke to Pepsi and partially because
Pepsi's negative attack ads (which attempted to convince people that only
squares and idiots drank Coca-Cola) irritated the living hell out of him.=
=20

This preference for Coca-Cola was reinforced when he was in college at th=
e
University of Georgia.  Coke machines were everywhere on campus and there
wasn't a Pepsi machine to be seen anywhere.  Coca-Cola's stockholders and
founders and such had been very good to the University over the years and
accordingly, no one at the university had much inclination to supplant
Coke with a competing soda.  The Athens community at large seemed to shar=
e
this sentiment -- it was not unusual to walk into a convenience store and
see two-liter jugs of Coca-Cola, stored at room temperature in the middle
of the floor, outselling refrigerated two-liter jugs of Pepsi on sale at
half the price.  The Coca-Cola would usually sell out entirely before any
great dents would be made in the Pepsi supply.=20

Things reached the point of ultimate absurdity when, in 1986 or 1987, the
Coca-Cola company celebrated its centennial and, to remind us all which
side our bread was buttered on, sponsored a special halftime celebration
at a UGA football game which featured dancing Coca-Cola cans.=20
Parenthetically, one of the dancing cans of Coca-Cola deflated
spontaneously during the show and the person inside went on dancing
merrily, apparently unable to tell that the inflated cylinder he or she
was wearing was now hangi ng on him or her like a bright red shroud.=20

Joel finished college a confirmed Coca-Cola addict, sadly, and only
through great effort was able to switch to drinking Diet Coke in graduate
school.  Had he not succeeded in this effort, his two-liter-per-day Coke
habit would probably have caused him to balloon to 300 pounds.  Thank God
for Diet Coke -- Joel remains a healthy 6'2" 200-pounder.=20

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

(54) How many fingers am I holding up?

Six.

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

(55) Do we need more plastic cups?

You bet.

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

(56) What color should mayonnaise be?

Yellow.

Real mayonnaise, e.g. Duke's Mayonnaise, is yellow.

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

(57) What is Joel Furr's astrological sign?

If you believe in astrology, Joel Furr would be a Virgo, as he was born o=
n
September 20, 1967 at about 4:30 in the afternoon.=20

If you have half a clue, however, you'll know that astrology is a bunch o=
f
utter bunkum, a pseudoscience not worthy of the billions of column-inches
dedicated to it in magazines and newspapers each year.=20

For one thing, the astrological tables developed millennia ago (to make i=
t
possible to generate horoscopes even on cloudy nights) contained errors
which, over time, have accumulated to the point that the calculations of
which planet is in which constellation are totally off.  Evidently,
actually going outside and looking at the sky to demonstrate that Venus i=
s
*not* in Aries at the current moment, despite what your friendly local
astrologer might say, is too complicated for most people.=20

Furthermore, a moment's consideration of the laws of physics should make
it obvious that the obstetrician or midwife has a greater gravitational
influence on a newborn child than any planet other than Earth.=20

Finally, actually looking at horoscopes in the newspaper or the more
detailed horoscopes you can purchase at supermarket checkout counters wil=
l
make it obvious that the horoscopes are recycled from month to month and
can't possibly begin to predict what will happen to 1/12 of the world's
population on any given day.=20

Needless to say, those who are ardent believers in astrology will
retroactively interpret the way events actually take place to the benefit
of the astrologers: "Well, my horoscope said I would meet a tall dark
stranger who would bring me good fortune, and there was that guy who
pulled up behind me at the light at the corner of Smyth Avenue and
Winderly Street... and if he hadn't come to a stop behind me, he'd have
totalled my car, so I guess he brought me good fortune.  Wow, my horoscop=
e
was right!!!!"=20

Uh huh.

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

(58) What is Joel Furr's Myers-Briggs type?

The last time he took the test, he got an ESTP result.

The first time he took the test, he got an ENFP result.

The E and the P are pretty certain: E for Extroversion and P for
Perceiving (how one uses time, etc.), but the other two are indefinite.=20
If you go by the actual personality descriptions in the various books tha=
t
explain the Myers-Briggs test, the ESTP sounds more like Joel than does
the ENFP.  If you're not familiar with the test or the books that explain
it, look in your local college library.  Books include "Type Talk" and
"Please Understand Me" but more may have come out since Joel was in
graduate school and routinely being subjected to the scrutiny of
Myers-Briggs aficionados.=20

Joel can see that the Myers-Briggs has some validity, but still dislikes
the emphasis some employers and administrators place on it.  Dividing the
human race up into sixteen basic personality types smacks of astrological
mumbo-jumbo, even if there's somewhat more of a scientific basis to the
Myers-Briggs than to astrology.=20

Joel once worked for a man who was so into the Myers-Briggs that he had
posted his own Myers-Briggs personality type on an engraved plastic sign
on his office door: "You Are Now Entering 'INTJ' Zone."  The "INTJ" was i=
n
big letters.=20

Really.

Once Joel grudingly informed his boss what *his* Myers-Briggs type was, i=
t
was brought up over and over again for the rest of the two years that Joe=
l
worked for that office.  A lot of the assignments Joel was given were
prefaced by "You're an ESTP, so you'll *love* this."  If an assignment
turned out to be something Joel hated to do, he was told, with a big,
cheerful smile, "No, you just don't understand it yet.  This is *exactly*
the sort of work you ESTP's love to do."=20

Of course, this same boss once turned out all the lights in his office,
sat in the dark wearing a hardhat, and muttered darkly to himself about
all the North Vietnamese he had napalmed when he was a fighter pilot in
Vietnam.=20

Apparently INTJ's are good at napalming people, but they don't like it.=20

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

(59) Where are your videos?

Glassy smile.  "I'm sorry, sir.  We don't have any videos."


Okay, okay, an explanation:  when Joel Furr worked for the
Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library system in southwestern Virginia, his jo=
b
was to work the circulation desk, check books out and in, and answer
reference questions that patrons brought to the desk or phoned in.  Sadly=
,
the clientele of the library were not exactly a bunch of rocket scientist=
s
and Joel and his co-workers wound up accumulating a lengthy list of
utterly stupid questions that were asked over and over again by various o=
f
the local white trash.=20

The most annoying of these was "Where are your videos?" =20

For some strange reason, many of the patrons of the library had gotten th=
e
odd idea that a library was supposed to double as a video store and came
up to the desk on occasion to ask where the videotapes were kept.  You
might be thinking "Well, sure, some libraries have educational videotapes
and nature videotapes, so what's the big deal?"  The big deal was that
people weren't *asking* for educational videotapes or nature videotapes -=
-
they were asking for recent-run movies that had only just come out on
videotape in the stores, and when they were told "We don't have any
videos," they'd gawk disbelievingly and then ask again to make sure they
hadn't heard the librarians wrong.=20

To be completely truthful, the library did in fact have two videos, both
training videos the local Cub Scout troops had prevailed on the library
system to keep under the desk for any Cub leaders who came by, but other
than that, the place had no videos and had no plans to acquire any
videotapes.  With a limited budget, dollars had to be allotted between th=
e
bestseller books everyone wanted to read, children's' books, books on
tape, magazines, newspapers, and then general collection development.=20
There was no money left over for luxuries such as videotapes, much less a=
n
extensive collection such as most of the patrons seemed to take for
granted that the library must have hidden somewhere.=20

On more than one occasion, conversations similar to this took place at th=
e
circulation desk:=20

Patron:.."Hi"

Librarian:."Hi.  Can I help you?"

Patron:.."Yes, where are your videotapes?"

Librarian:."I'm sorry, we don't have any videotapes."

Patron: ."Oh, so you just have donated videotapes, educational tapes,
nature tapes, and stuff like that?"=20

Librarian:."No, we don't have any videotapes at all."

Patron: ."Oh, right.  Well, could you show me where the instructional
videos are kept?"=20

Librarian:."We don't have any.  We don't have any videotapes at all."

Patron:.."You mean you don't have any videotapes?"

Librarian:."That's right, sir.  We don't have any."

Patron:.."And you call yourself a *library*?"


Grrrrr.

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

(60) How is "Furr" pronounced?

Some people pronounce "Furr" as though it was spelled "Fyure" or ""Foor"
or even more unlikely pronunciations.  The name is actually pronounced
exactly as though it had only one "r" =96 in other words, like the word
"fur" which we English speakers use to re fer to the pelt of an animal.=20

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

(61) What is the law?

Not to spill blood. Are we not men?

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

(62) Where do the keys go?

The keys go *under* the sofa.  Silly humans!

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

(63) What are some of the nicknames that Joel Furr has gone by over the y=
ears?

For some reason, Joel Furr has never had a great deal of luck getting
people to call him by various nicknames.  Joel has managed to get the
people at his office to call him "Jay" but none of his friends seem able
to make the switch.  To his family and friends, "Joel" it is and "Joel" i=
t
appears it will always be.=20

The only exceptions to this general rule came while Joel worked at the
Hardee's on South Main Street in Blacksburg, Virginia from 1984 to 1985
during his senior year of high school and the summer that came after.=20
Having found where the manager of the store kept the label-maker that mad=
e
the label tape that went on the "Hardee's" nametags all the employees
wore, Joel made himself a nametag that said "FLUFFY" and, when that one
got old, another that said "STRUDEL."  No one to speak of ever noticed,
though he wore them for months.=20

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

(64) What happens when you put a real, formerly alive, sponge back in wat=
er?

It comes back to life and devours you.  Be warned.=20

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

If you have other questions about Joel Furr which were not addressed in
this FAQ, please consult http://www.danger.com/index.html.=20

