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Selections from Gene Spafford's collection     <spaf@cs.purdue.edu>
----------------------------------------------------
 
Saddam Day
 
Baghdad residents are eagerly looking forward to the first few days of
February.  They will gather around what is left of the Presidential
Palace to see if their leader emerges from his bunker.  Unfortunately,
predicitions are he will see his shadow and return, bringing 6 more
weeks of bombing.
 
----------------------------------------------------
 
Letterman told something like this on last night's show (12/14):
 
There are two signs in Washington DC that Christmas time is near.
Yesterday, the Bushes lit the White House Christmas tree.  And
tomorrow, the Secret Service is taking Dan Quale to see Santa.
 
----------------------------------------------------
 
     Find It At New Products Store
   TORONTO (AP)
   Haven't you ever wished somebody would invent a doohickey that
fastens on the bathtub and holds your book while you wash?
   How about a gadget that opens and closes toilet lids, no hands?
   Or a box that creates your own subliminal advertising  injecting
microsecond-long messages into your TV, which could help you kick a
cigarette or other drug habit.
   Well they exist, on display at Toronto's New Product Store  a home
for the mad scientist and crazy inventor.
   The business was founded a year ago by Brian Gray, his brother
Joseph, and Ed Zwolinski.
   "Brian Gray was a frustrated inventor," says Zwolinski, who
manages the place. "He had a line of hardware products  a radon gas
detector, a disco music light box, custom construction hard hats  and
was frustrated by all the doors closed to him, being told to buzz
off."
   He says the biggest problem for inventors is skepticism.
   "It's so hard to get attention. You really have to have a lot of
clout behind you. One person alone doesn't have that."
   The New Products Store can't offer much in the way of clout. But
it can offer exposure, both in shelf space in the store and via the
publicity it has generated.
   It also offers professional evaluation from its board of engineers
and lawyers, distribution leads, contacts with retailers and a
sympathetic ear.
   The typical inventor usually follows a path like this: He gets an
idea, becomes obsessed with it, creates a product and produces it. At
that point, the honeymoon is over because he then has to sell it.
   "That's where we come in," says Zwolinski. "We offer them a start
in the market. There is no way an inventor can know how good his
product is without public exposure."
   The store is not very large, but it is located in one of Toronto's
most fashionable shopping districts. The store manager can judge
customer response to products, even browser response.
   Robert Dubeck invented the device for reader-bathers, an obsession
that has consumed nine years of his life.
   "No one thought this was going to go," says Dubeck. "Everyone
wanted me to give up the dream, just keep working. I was put down by
friends and family. They basically said work for a living, don't come
up with a dream to better yourself."
   In the store, potential customers will find such items as the
Leisure Reader for the bathtub; a lapel or blouse pin for holding
eyeglasses; the Bathroom Butler that opens and closes toilet lids;
erase protection tabs for computer disks; or the box that creates
those microsecond positive affirmation messages for your TV as a
means of changing behavior.
 
----------------------------------------------------
 
i before e except in weird
 
>From: kds@blabla.intel.com (Ken Shoemaker)
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 90 11:44:12 PDT
 
November 11, 1990
 
THE JUDGES JUST COULDN'T STRING ALONG
 
Blumita Singer of Brazil was invited, as one of 52 finalists, to perform at
the International Violin Competition in Indianapolis in September as the
result of an audition tape she submitted.  However, when she started to
perform, she played so poorly it became apparent that she could not have
been the person on the audition tape, and some of the judges walked out
while others began giggling.  She did not offer an explanation.
 
DOGGEDLY DEVOTED
 
Fran Trutt, 33, pleaded no contest in April to charges that she attempted to
kill the president of a supply firm that uses anesthetized dogs to help
train surgeons on new procedures.  She expressed hope that her own pet dog
would be allowed to visit her in prison.
 
Responding to the New York law banning dwarf-tossing contests, promoter
Baird Jones complained that "we're being lumped with bar sports.  This is
not someone promoting Jell-O wrestling.  It's performance art designed to
satarize the values of mainstream America."
 
In May, 200 people participated in the Third Annual Hill Country Machine Gun
Shoot near Helotes, Texas, firing rounds from more than 100 automatic
weapons, shredding washing machines, refrigerators and other targets.  Said
one: "Can you think of a better way to spend a holiday weekend?"
 
Birmingham, Ala, talk show host Tim Lennox was suspended in July after
announcing on the air that, for a segment on crime, he wanted to hear only
from white callers.
 
TALK ABOUT TALL TAILS
 
When police arrested Thomas "Tommy Karate" Pitera in June as a suspected
Mafia hitman in New York City, they found a well-stocked library in his
home, including such books as "The Hitman's Handbook." Kill or Be Killed"
and "Torture, Interrogation and Execution."
 
Animal trainer Arian Seidon, 60, who kidnapped two elephants five years
before in order to protect them from abuse by their owners, was arrested in
April.  Seidon supposedly had to procure 600 pounds of food per day during
that time and dispose of 500 pounds of droppings.
 
Darlene Brown's house in Lusby, Md., was destroyed by fire in May after a
neighbor tried to help her get rid of a non-poisonous black snake.  The
neighbor ignited the snake outside a bedroom window, 10 feet from a pilot
light of the furnace.  Thirty-five firefighters were called, and damage was
reported at $50,000, but the snake was killed.
 
November 18, 1990
 
A WORLD OF TROUBLE
 
A Coast Guard report issued in June revealed that personnel on duty at the
Exxon pipeline that ruptured in January near Linden, N.J., spilling 567,000
gallons of heating oil, manually overrode the automatic warning system 10
times over a six-hour period before checking to see if oil was actually
spilling.  Workers merely pushed the "reset" button because they assumed the
10 signals were false alarms.
 
Doctors in an April medical journal article reported that of more than 1,000
people who had undergone surgery for skin cancer from 1983 to 1987, 24
percent were back to sun-tanning and 38 percent still did not use sunscreen.
Most of the recidivists were females whose attitude, said a doctor, "was
that skin cancer was not enough of a problem to give up a tan."
 
The Yellow Ribbon Coalition, an Oregon timber industry organization,
complained to the U.S. Forest Service in August that an environmental
group's scheduled retreat in the Cascade Mountains should be canceled
because it posed a "fire hazard" and because the group's annual owl-hooting
contest would "constitute harassment of area owls."
 
LEGAL EAGLES
 
Johnnie Lee Jones, 27, in prison since 1985 - when he stole a truck in Fort
Lauderdale, Fla. (even though he'd never learned to drive), and smashed it
into several cars, killing a young mother - is on the verge of a large
financial settlement from Broward County Prison, which wants to save the
expense of a lawsuit.  In his getaway from the collisions, Jones ran in
front of a car and had one leg chopped off; he later filed a lawsuit
charging that the prison had caused him "pain and suffering" because of its
lack of facilities to help his recuperation. (The prison offered evidence
that Jones had urinated on a fellow prisoner and beat another with his
artificial leg.)
 
Anna Vincenza, 26, charged with helping her boyfriend murder her husband
last November in Detroit with a car bomb, demanded that the funeral home
that handled her husband's body give her custody of the ashes.
 
A New Jersey judge rejected Manuel Antonio Mauricio's defense to a charge of
murder with a sawed-off rifle in September.  Mauricio had claimed a
"machismo" defense - that his Dominican Republic upbringing had made him
easily offended by insults to his manhood.
 
In June, U.S., Sen. Strom Thurmond requested a $25 refund from Lexington,
S.C., for a water deposit he paid in 1938.  (He was eligible for the refund
because he had recently sold the property.)  Asked the mayor, "How in the
hell can anyone save a receipt for 52 years?"
 
----------------------------------------------------
 
Date:    Thu, 28 Jul 88 10:00:36 -0400
From comp.os.vms no less...
 
A friend gave me the following that was taken off a dial-up board
run by DECUS.
 
------------------------------------
 
              I N T E R O F F I C E   M E M O R A N D U M
 
                                    Date:     23-Jun-1988 12:08pm EST
                                    From:     Marc Lippmann
                                              LIPPMANN
                                    Dept:     Symp Committee
                                    Tel No:   (Omitted)
 
To: See Below
 
Subject: VMS V5.0 interesting facts
 
             Some Interesting VMS V5.0 Statistics
 
These statistics were provided to us from a friend in SDC.
 
Q.  What is gray and weighs 2550 tons?
A.  638 Elephants, or the VMS V5.0 relase.
 
Q.  What covers 102 football fields?
A.  4,590,000 square feet of Astro-Turf, or the Vinyl used to cover the
    VMS V5.0 documentation binders.
 
Q.  If a golfer plays one round of golf each week of the year, and then
    plays one additional round, (without a cart), how many miles does that
    golfer walk?
A.  185 miles, or the distance covered by all the VMS V5.0 binders placed
    end-to-end.
 
Q.  How much high-quality toilet tissue does it take to circle the equator?
A.  989,571 rolls, or the paper from the VMS V5.0 release.
 
Facts about the VMS V5.0 release:
 
The initial distribution will be 30,000 kits.
There will be 34 binders per kit, or a total of 1,020,000 binders.
At 6000 binders per trailer, that is 170 truckloads.
The total documentation set will use 6,600,000 pounds of paper.
At 80,000 pounds per trailer, that is almost 83 truckloads.
To make 6,600,000 pounds of paper requires 6,600 cords of wood, enough
    to heat an average home for 825 years, or a town of 2,500 for a year.
At 60 feet per trailer, the 253 (170+83) trailers required will stretch 4.8
    miles.
A single system-level VAX/VMS V5.0 distribution kit will:
    be packed in 10 boxes,
    weigh 170 pounds,
    consist of 34 binders,
    contain over 20,000 pages (or one 4 inch CD-rom disk),
    take 2-3 days to deliver via UPS, and
    be available on 11 different computer media.
 
 
Digital Has it Now.
 
Marc
