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Yucks Digest V1 #100
Yucks Digest Wed, 13 Nov 91 Volume 1 : Issue 100
Today's Topics:
another top-ten list
At last - the truth about the walrus
Aussie Concept Bands Flourish
Bundesbahn is too small for Mercedes
Bush: the tour
comparative technology
Even at the Moscow Airport!
Film Writer Collects Flubs
Japanese Are Mad For Mozart
Medical Play (don't try this at home...)
Oral Roberts pleads for funds to avert "satanic conspiracy"
Outhouse compiler humor
specialized architectures
Unspeakable prank costs Harrison England job
Warhol Brother Gets 15 Minutes
You probably always wondered what kept the planet revolving...
Yucks Digest V1 #99
The "Yucks" digest is a moderated list of the bizarre, the unusual, the
possibly insane, and the (usually) humorous. It is issued on a
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Back issues may be ftp'd from arthur.cs.purdue.edu from
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 6 Nov 91 18:28:00 EDT
From: "SANDE WALLFESH" <wallfesh@drcvax.af.mil>
Subject: another top-ten list
To: "eniac" <eniac@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
A friend gave me the following item from a recent "Washington Post".
Despite some network problems here, I thought I'd try to pass it on:
"As reported in this newspaper last week, the Central Intelligence Agency
has started a new advertising campaign designed to attract more minority
'professionals' to its ranks. The agancy has even adopted a new slogan:
'The CIA. Our business is knowing the world's business.'
"Nice try, but the wits at our office think the CIA could do better.
Herewith are our Top 10 new CIA ad slogans:
10. "When you care to assassinate the very best."
9. "This is not your father's OSS."
8. "There's an agent in your neighborhood, waiting to serve YOU."
7. "The CIA: Don't look back; something IS gaining on you."
6. "The CIA: We have a new slogan, but we can't tell you what it is."
5. "A job with the CIA. Look what it did for George Bush."
4. "Tastes great! Less killing!"
3. "You deserve a break (in) today."
2. "Have a cloak and a smile."
And the No. 1 slogan ... (drumroll): "Hold the pickles, hold the
lettuce, New World Orders don't upset us."
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 91 22:15:11 CST
From: meo@pencom.com (Miles O'Neal)
Subject: At last - the truth about the walrus
To: spaf
John Lennon - the Cold, Hard Fax
(Our Friend, the Walrus)
condensed for The Enquiring Reader's Digest
from the original Greek in The National Geographic
Few know the truth about John Lennon. Unlike Jim Morrison, Lennon is
widely believed to be dead. He is.
Most people don't realize Lennon was the only known specimen of karma
concurrencia instancia, or instant parallel karma. In other words,
John Lennon existed in all his reincarnations simultaneously during
part of his life. He was John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley,
Shirley Maclaine, Mahatma Gandhi, Leslie Fong, and Mayor Daly. There
are undoubtedly others, but Lennon never recorded them.
So far all have died on time - Ms. Maclaine is slated to kick the
bucket at some point during 1992. Three days later, the most
incredible harmonica convergence ever known will result in the
destruction of the entire state of California, in a manner similar to
death by bagpipes. A few dozen people will survive, all thanks to the
power of crystals - little crystals of methedrene, which will enable
them to outrun the sound of doom and its resultant quakes and tidal
waves, only to expire of early old age when their bodies wear out,
having sprinted non-stop from the West Coast to Muncie. Three gay men
in Cleveland will expire at the same time, when the power of the
pyramid, pent up since John's death, will be released, and Julian
Lennon will take on the nose of the Sphinx, be mistaken for Ammal
Nasser, and be trampled to death by Kissinger's groupies seeking
autographs.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 91 10:17:50 PST
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: Aussie Concept Bands Flourish
To: yucks-request
By PAUL ALEXANDER
Associated Press Writer
SYDNEY, Australia (AP)
The standing-room-only crowd goes wild as the longhaired,
leather-clad singer finishes crooning "Light My Fire" and the lead
guitar eases into the distinctive first riffs of "The End."
No, Jim Morrison hasn't come back from the dead for a resurrection
tour. It's just another night for the Australian Doors Show, one of
the plethora of bands who mimic star acts for the music-hungry pub
scene.
On any given weekend, Sydney revelers can choose from up to two
dozen so-called "tribute" or "concept" bands playing the hits of such
groups as Pink Floyd, the Police, the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
"Basically, the Australian scene is far different from anywhere in
the world because of the pub scene," said Maurie Cameron of Premier
Entertainment, which handles about a half-dozen tribute bands.
The tribute band concept developed over the years as a simple
matter of supply and demand, with a heavy dose of nostalgia and
familiarity tossed in, Cameron said.
"People at the clubs were tired of the same old trash being given
to them," Cameron said. "The plain cover bands who used to do lots of
songs by different artists started specializing in one group. They
were successful, so they started popping up all over the place."
Some, like the Beatnix (the Beatles), Elton Jack (Elton John),
Dynissty (Kiss) and Bjorn Again (Abba), focus on looking and sounding
like the real thing. But most just crank out the tunes and let the
audience's imagination and devotion do the rest.
"There is one guy who has been to nearly every gig we've played
since we formed two years ago," said Australian Doors Show manager
Brandon Saul. "He even managed to get inside Long Bay Jail when we
played there.
"A woman comes to our shows and exposes herself to the band and
other members of the audience, and another guy who comes along says
Jim Morrison talks to him through his television. Some of the fans
are definitely weird."
Cameron figures fans get more than their money's worth.
"They generally are such good reproductions," he said. "And people
only pay about $6 ($5 U.S.) per show. To see the real thing at the
Sydney Entertainment Center, they'd pay $20 to $30 ($16 to $24 U.S.)."
Ironically, many groups shift into the tribute mode to raise money
to pursue their own original music. "This gives them the chance to
stay in the business, save some money and continue making demo
tapes," Cameron said.
Chris O'Leary, lead singer of the former David Bowie tribute band
Golden Years, shrugs off criticism that he hears about the tribute
concept:
"Don't they know the best musicians play covers of Beethoven and
Mozart every night at places like the Opera House without a word
uttered against them?"
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 1991 10:01:42 PST
From: Chris "Johann" Borton <borton@garnet.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Bundesbahn is too small for Mercedes
To: spaf
BUNDESBAHN IS TOO SMALL FOR MERCEDES
====================================
from: De Volkskrant Thu. Okt. 31, 1991
Daimler-Benz keeps up to all its promises for the new S-class. In the
expensive advertising campaign, the firm sais that it sets new standards
with its new 'flagship'. That is correct: The German state railways have to
make 165 car-carrying railroadcars to be able to transport the new
Mercedes automobile.
The Mercedes S-class cars are too wide for the railroad cars (150mm, some
6 inches). And because Mercedes is one of the bigger customers of the
Deutsche Bundesbahn (DB), DB will spend a couple of million marks to ajust
their railroad cars.
``The next step will be to widen the tracks and to bore some new, wider
tunnels'' the Sueddeutsche Zeitung jokingly said in its editorial comment.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 91 11:07:21 PST
From: ross@harpo.qcktrn.com (Gary Ross)
Subject: Bush: the tour
To: spaf
>From the SJ Mercury News 11/5/91:
<picture of Bush in golf shirt talking to Gorbachev>
Bush: the tour
--------------
George Bush, seen here chatting up Sovier leader,
Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow during the July summit,
always seems perfectly comfortable in recreational garb.
But he is probably a little hot under the collar after
hearing what the Democratic National Committee dreamed up.
Committee wags took heed of polls signaling voter resentment
with Bush's preference for foreign issues over domestic ones.
The result - a T-shirt promoting Bush's "Anywhere But America
Tour." The First Traveler is headed to Rome on Wednesday to
attend a NATO meeting, inspiring the wording on the shirt's
front: "George Bush Went To Rome and All I Got Was This Lousy
Recession." On the back the Democrats have listed more than
30 foreign cities Bush has travelled to in the past year or
plans to visit soon. Modeled after shirts sold at rock concerts,
the cities are listed under the headline "George Bush ... The
Anywhere But America Tour."
DNC Chairman Ron Brown explained the $10 gag shirts this
way: "It's high time for President Bush to phone home. Rather
than return to Washington and face up to the economic mess left
by Reagan-Bush supply-side policies, George Bush will once again
run away from home." Yes but think of all the frequent-flier
points he's getting!
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 91 23:23:27 EST
From: Rehmi Post <rehmi@milk.ftp.com>
To: qotd@ghoti.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: the stream of life
reproduced without permission from the November 1991 CACM, p. 43
[Robert Robbins, NSF program director, Database Activities, and DOE acting
director, Genome Informatics Activities] emphasizes the complexity of the
informatics challenge by couching the goals of the Human Genome Initiative
in computer science terms. Dividing the project into obtaining the sequence
and then interpreting it, he looks first to the analysis:
Imagine that you are given a tape containing 3.5 gigabytes of
binary files for a large set of application programs and for some
future release of Unix (version 20,000,000, say). The tape is not a
file-by-file copy, but rather a streaming dump of the bytes in the
order they occupied on disk. You know many of the files on the disk
are fragmented and that some of the 3.5 GB represent erased files or
other garbage from unused portions of the disk. Your assignment?
Discard the garbage, then reassemble the fragmented executables and
reverse compile them back to the source code. Finally, reverse
engineer the source code into design specs.
If that's not challenging enough, bear in mind that you have only
partial and possibly incorrect documentation for the hardware on which
the codes run. You don't know all the details of the CPU, the registers
it has, or the opcodes it uses. Also, remember that your 3.5 GB of
programs are the result of 20,000,000 maintenance revisions performed
by the worst possible set of kludge-using, spaghetti-coding hackers who
delight in clever tricks like writing self-modifying code and relying
upon undocumented system quirks.
...Returning to Robbins' computer analogy and the sequencing part of the
HGI, Robbins says:
Remember that 3.5 GB tape that had to be reverse engineered? Well,
you don't really have that tape -- getting it is your first problem.
The technology doesn't exist to read the entire genome (the biological
"disk") to tape. But it is possible to obtain small fragments from
random locations on the disk. If you have enough random fragments, you
can compare them with each other, detect overlaps, and begin assembling
larger and larger portions of the whole tape. To finish the job, many
random fragments will be required. If each fragment is about 1/50,000th
the size of the disk, then about 250,000 are needed in order to have a
99% chance that every byte on the disk is contained in at least one
fragment.
To complicate things, errors occur so that some of the fragments are
really the concatenation of two or more pieces from different lcoations
on the disk. Also, identical substrings often occur at different
locations on the disk, leading to false overlap detections. Finally,
it would cost too much to "read" the byte sequence of every one of
these fragments directly, so first you must determine the minimum
spanning set of fragments. This requires you to devise and perform some
partial characterization of fragments that can be used in an exhaustive
set of pairwise comparisons to generate a 60-billion-entry
probability-of-overlap matrix from which you can attempt to deduce the
minimal spanning set. All of your characterization, comparison, and
assembly algorithms must take into account the possible occurrence of
random or systematic errors at every point.
think of that next time you fill an exabyte cartridge.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 10 Nov 91 11:33:03 PST
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: Even at the Moscow Airport!
To: yucks-request
Krishna Consciousness Growing
MOSCOW (AP)
Primavati Davidasi, formerly Olga Kisilova, has turned her home
into a Hare Krishna temple where she makes religious videos and
assembles packages of spiritual material.
Four years ago, she was released from jail, where she was sent for
being an "official member of an unofficial religion." Her third child
was born, and died, in prison.
"It's considered fashionable to be religious now," said Primavati
Davidasi, 43, who prefers her spiritual name. "But fashion or no
fashion, we now have complete freedom."
The Soviet government described the Hare Krishna movement as a
CIA-backed imperialist conspiracy when it appeared here 20 years ago.
Under Article 227 of the Russian republic's criminal code, for
instance, devotees were subject to up to five years in prison for
"organizing or conducting activities not registered with state
authorities due to their reactionary content."
Even chanting the Krishna mantra in the privacy of one's home was
deemed illegal. Followers were routinely rounded up and sent to jails
or psychiatric hospitals.
That was before the old communist system collapsed. Now, the
Soviet Hare Krishna movement claims more than 100,000 followers.
Devotees, many of whom shave their heads and wear saffron robes,
are allowed to sell their literature on street corners.
Nina Pritskir, thin and worn-looking, stood in the main hallway of
the crumbling communal apartment that serves as Moscow's central Hare
Krishna temple. Happy tears filled her eyes.
Candles flickered and the sweet smell of incense saturated the
main room, where several young men periodically kissed the floor as
they chanted afternoon prayers. Down one corridor in an enormous
kitchen, food was being cooked for up to 200 people.
"The second day I came here, I became alive," Mrs. Pritskir said.
The 69-year-old cleaning woman had felt depressed since her husband
left and her eldest daughter emigrated to Israel. She is Jewish, she
said, but rejects Judaism.
"Jews have always been bad to me," she said. "They haven't helped
me morally, physically, not materially. Jews have completely
destroyed me."
Galina, a 15-year-old who would not give her last name, has been
chanting with the Krishnas every day after school for four months,
although her parents disapprove.
Asked about the future, she said: "I am going to serve God, to
serve Krishna."
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 91 00:09:51 PST
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: Film Writer Collects Flubs
To: yucks-request
NEW YORK (AP)
He's the Sherlock Holmes of movie mistakes, the Hercule Poirot of
film faux pas. Free-lance movie writer Bill Givens steps up when
Hollywood messes up, picking out errors in box office hits from
"GoodFellas" to "Home Alone."
"It's the nature of movie-making that these things pop up," says
Givens, who is writing his third book on the subject. "There are 100
people working on a movie set, so many jobs intermeshing, that
there's lot of places for a slip between the cup and the lip."
Lots of places, indeed. Givens located flubs of varying degree in
14 of 1990's top 20 grossing movies, including the top-rated "Home
Alone," Academy Award winner "Dances With Wolves," the tearjerker
"Ghost," the thriller "Presumed Innocent" and action-packed "Die Hard
2."
"I call it the `A-ha!' factor. You're watching a movie, and it's,
`A-ha! There's the mistake!"' says Givens, who last year saw about
150 first-run films and rented 430 videos in his quest.
Givens' first found flub was in "Star Wars," where Mark Hamill
addresses Princess Leia as "Carrie" the name of the actress playing
the role, Carrie Fisher.
Things have snowballed since. Givens just completed his second
book on cinematic screw-ups, "Son of Film Flubs," and a third is in
the works. He receives about 1,000 letters a year from eagle-eyed
moviegoers who want to share what they've seen go wrong on screen.
The flubs run the gamut from minor to major to nearly
unbelievable. Editing in "Pretty Woman" had Julia Roberts pick up a
croissant, then take a bite from a pancake.
Mix-ups happen easily because films are not shot in the order in
which they are shown.
Director Kevin Costner wound up with egg on his face because one
of his actors in "Dances With Wolves" didn't. The film features a
wagon driver taking a hearty bite from a pickled egg, leaving pieces
all over his mustache. In the next shot, the egg is gone; in the
following shot, the egg is back on his face.
Other errors are more subtle. While Bruce Willis was getting ready
to rescue Washington's Dulles Airport from a terrorist attack in "Die
Hard 2," he walked up to a bank of pay phones clearly labeled
"Pacific Bell."
Whoops.
And there's the erotic scene in "Ghost," where Patrick Swayze and
Demi Moore engage in heavy petting over a pottery wheel. Although
they both have clay all over their hands and arms in that scene,
seconds later they are making love, clay-free.
Givens has seen about every mistake a movie can contain, although
he's quick to say that he's not perfect. He was recently watching a
video of "Awakenings," with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, when
he noticed what he initially thought was a mistake was actually
correct.
On first viewing, Givens believed a scene where De Niro got out of
a chair and walked away cut back to show a paper bag on the seat just
vacated by the star. Turns out the paper bag was actually on the
chair next to De Niro.
Unfortunately, Givens had already included the alleged error in
his second book.
"It fooled me," he said. "It's my own little flub."
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 91 11:09:27 PST
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: Japanese Are Mad For Mozart
To: yucks-request
TOKYO (AP) When fastened, it plays "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" a
tune the manufacturers believe was authored by Mozart.
The computer chip-laden bra and matching panties are worth about
$145, although the promotional gimmick is not for sale because it
can't be washed, company spokeswoman Tadako Musha said.
Dairy managers and at least two brewers of rice wine claim that
playing Mozart's music helps cows produce good milk and bacteria
produce good sake, some of which is named after the composer.
The Sawada Brewery in western Japan pipes Mozart programs through
its plant every day. "There's all kinds of classical music, but
Mozart seems to make the best sake, maybe because it's so gentle,"
says brewery worker Hatsue Kodama.
It's a claim even academics here ponder seriously.
"If you were going to make a sake named after Bach, Mozart, Miles
Davis or Saburo Kitajima (a singer), I suppose Mozart would be the
best choice," Hideo Takahashi, a Meiji University professor and an
expert on the composer said in an interview in the highbrow monthly
magazine Chuo Koron.
"I guess you'd have to drink it to find out," said writer Takeo
Ashizu.
All of this folderol dismays other Mozart specialists such as Bin
Ebisawa, president of Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo.
"Mozart isn't for eating, drinking or wearing, it's for
listening," Ebisawa said. "A memorial year should be observed
quietly, with some consideration for the sadness of Mozart's passing."
Ebisawa and other hard-core Japanese Mozarteans want nothing to do
with Mozart pens, chocolates and lingerie. They're solely interested
in the man and his music.
Some of that dedication seems to be paying off.
Japanese composer Shigeaki Saigusa has been honored with a request
by the the International Stiftung Mozarteum, an organization devoted
to Mozart research, to write an ending for the "Requiem Mass," left
unfinished at Mozart's death. The arrangement will be performed Dec.
5 in a memorial concert in Salzburg, Austria.
Among the others caught up in the bicentennial commemorations are
the Dai-Ichi Mutual Life Insurance Co., which has donated about $3.7
million to the International Stiftung Mozarteum to help convert into
a museum a Salzburg building that once was part of Mozart's home.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 91 11:00:41 -0800
From: bostic@okeeffe.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: Medical Play (don't try this at home...)
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.CS.Berkeley.EDU
For those not in or near SF, there's a local group, QSM, which offers
non-traditional educational opportunities.
Back By Popular Demand!
MEDICAL PLAY
With Albert Kraus, R.N.
Albert has been a Registered Nurse for over 15 years. A longtime
officer of Chicago Hellfire Club, he has also coordinated Inferno, the
country's premiere play weekend for leathermen.
Albert has been teaching SM classes since 1983. He first presented
this QSM series in August, 1990 and was highly praised by the students
who attended.
Friday, November 8th
Catheters & Sounds
Catheters are flexible tubes; sounds are solid metal rods, both
straight and curved. After discussing supplies, safety and
maintaining a clean environment, Albert will demonstrate proper
insertion and removal techniques.
Demonstration: $15. Doors open 7:00; class 7:30-10:00
Sunday, November 10th
Catheterization Workshop
After introductory remarks to the whole class, Albert will work
individually with each inserter, talking him/her through a complete
catheterization while the other students watch.
Singles and couples are both welcome; singles will be paired with one
another at the workshop. Within a pair, there can be one inserter and
one insertee, or the students can switch.
Each inserter must bring a #14, 16, or 18 catheter and a pair of
sterile gloves [an unopened sterilized packet] in the appropriate hand
size. Each insertee must bring a clean bath towel. QSM will provide
soap, lubricant, cotton balls, betadyne and a container for sharps.
Pre-requisite: Friday's demonstration or permission of instructor.
Maximum enrollment: 20.
Workshop: $20. Doors open Noon; class 12:30-3:00.
Monday, November 11th
Surgical Suturing
Suturing can be used for domination, humiliation or bondage, not to
mention as a chastity device. Albert's specialty is the "mock sex
change", where the ball sac is sutured with the cock tucked up inside.
Demonstration: $15. Doors open 7:00, class 7:30-10:00
Class Location: 1647 Sanchez (between 29th & 30th Streets), San
Francisco.
Pre-register to: QSM, PO Box 882242, SF CA 94188.
If space is available, you can pay at the door.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 91 12:07:02 PST
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: Oral Roberts pleads for funds to avert "satanic conspiracy"
To: yucks-request
TULSA, Oklahoma, Nov 12 (AFP) - Television evangelist Oral Roberts has
warned more than a million of his contibutors that if they don't donate 500
dollars apiece "all hell will break loose."
"A satanic conspiracy to stop God's healing ministry on the earth" is
unfolding, according to a Roberts' fundraising letter quoted in the Tulsa
(Oklahoma) World newspaper Tuesday.
"Please understand we've got to have the finances. There is no other way!
Hear me, there is no other way!" the letter urges.
In 1987, Roberts issued a similarly urgent appeal, saying he
needed to raise eight million dollars or God would "call me home."
"We've got to have a financial breakthrough or all hell is going to break
loose against this ministry," said the recent appeal, which explained that
letters were being used to raise the funds rather than television because of
"the enemies of the ministry."
The letter did not specify the amount needed, and only said there was a
financial emergency.
"Because this is a private matter, we went to our prayer partners, our
family, with our need," said the evangelist's son, Richard Roberts.
He said there had been a sudden decline in donations recently, probably
because of the scandals surrounding other evangelists, such as Jimmy Swaggart,
who was found with a prostitute last month.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 91 21:06:34 CST
From: meo@pencom.com (Miles O'Neal)
Subject: Outhouse compiler humor
To: spaf
| Hickok, a former employee of the Pennsylvania Historical Museum
|Commission and a font of bathroom humor, said the outhouse in its
Would that be a Bitstream font?
------------------------------
Date: 5 Nov 91 18:32:11 GMT
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: specialized architectures
Newsgroups: comp.arch
An amusing thought came to me the other night while I was packing boxes
for moving (a truly endless task when you have as many books as I do...).
The usual wisdom nowadays is that specialized processors are doomed to
eventual failure unless they attract a substantial body of customers,
because they don't make enough profit to finance enough development to
keep pace with general-purpose-processor development, and this erodes
any performance advantage fairly quickly. As witness the demise of
the Lisp machines.
So what specialized processors *have* been successful? The only obvious
example that comes to my mind (I'd be interested in others) is digital
signal processing.
But here's an offbeat case: the 80x86 series!
Specialized processors? Yes, they are specialized to interpret MSDOS
programs! These programs are expressed in a complex byte-encoded format
that is difficult (at best) to execute, painful to pipeline, and full of
obscene tricks like self-modifying code. It is register-starved to the
point where competitive performance is impossible, and hobbled by design
mistakes made a decade ago. However, there is enough of a market for
interpreting this goop to justify massive investments of money and heroic
technical feats to build interpreters that actually run nearly as fast
as slightly older modern general-purpose processors. :-) Of course, they
aren't what one would use for a clean-sheet-of-paper computer, but their
specialized market niche is large enough to keep them alive a long time.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 91 19:34:40 +0000
From: Kevin Hopkins <pkh@computer-science.nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject: Unspeakable prank costs Harrison England job
To: spaf
-> [This sounds fascinating. Anyone know what Harrison's prank *was*?
-> Surely it was printed in one of Rupert's papers? --spaf]
Steve Harrison allegedly defecated in a polystyrene cup to "cheer up" his
players before a match. Well, it would cheer you up, wouldn't it?
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 91 10:06:48 PST
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: Warhol Brother Gets 15 Minutes
To: yucks-request
HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP)
Andy Warhol's brother has earned his 15 minutes of fame by
painting critically acclaimed canvases with chicken's feet.
Paul Warhola's colorfully daubed panels of three-toed footprints
are on display here at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts.
Warhola his more famous brother, who died in 1987, dropped the
last vowel from his name is a retired scrap metal operator who lives
on a farm in Smock, Pa., surrounded by geese, ducks, cats, a dog and
at least 150 chickens.
Warhola, 69, said his chicken-scratch art began as an accident
when he was painting outdoors one day.
"I was called to the phone and when I came back, my chickens had
gotten in my paint and this is what they created," he said. "From
then on, I used it as a trademark."
Warhola said that at first he let the chickens prance around on
the canvas but later to gain more control began using chicken and
duck feet as his paintbrushes. He doesn't kill his own fowl; he gets
the feet from someone else.
The show, which closes Nov. 24, includes chicken-scratch panels in
blues, greens, yellows, purples and reds. A silk-screen photograph of
him and his brother as teen-agers is marked by a chicken foot dipped
in bright green paint.
The show also includes works by Warhola's son, James, an artist
and illustrator from New York.
Museum director Jean Woods said the elder Warhola's pop art is a
toned-down version of his brother's.
"The pop before was a blaze across the art scene at the time," Ms.
Woods said. The new pop art "is not so brazen. It's a softer, gentler
type of pop art like we're seeing in our politics."
Visitors to the museum saw similarities between the brothers' work
and said Warhola's would stand the test of time.
"It's amazing how strong the design element is," said Franz Lion,
an interior decorator from Pittsburgh. "It's the combination of
colors the tension between the colors. It creates a stimulation for
the eye. It's amazing that these are chicken feet."
Lance Davis, 21, a design major at Frostburg State University,
said both brothers use repetition, bright colors and commercial
images.
While Warhol made the Campbell soup can famous, his brother has
created images of Heinz bean cans and ketchup bottles.
"My uncle liked the jet set, high life rubbing shoulders with all
kinds of people," said James Warhola, 36. "My dad came from a
blue-collar family. He's living on a farm now. He's really down to
earth."
"But they both have these similarities. They both love attention
and the way they get ideas is the same," he said.
Warhola said he wasn't interested in the kind of fame that his
brother once predicted would belong to everyone for 15 minutes.
"I'm not looking for a lot of publicity," he said. "They want me
to be all over the place, but I'm not into that. At my age, I don't
need that."
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 91 12:57:20 -0800
From: bostic@okeeffe.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: You probably always wondered what kept the planet revolving...
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.CS.Berkeley.EDU
U.S. NAVAL OBSERVATORY
WASHINGTON, DC 20392-5100
31 October 1991
No. 51
TIME SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT SERIES 14
UTC TIME STEP
1. The International Earth Rotation Service has announced that there
will be NO introduction of a time step at the end of December 1991.
GERNOT M.R. WINKLER
Director
Time Service Department
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 91 21:04:42 CST
From: meo@pencom.com (Miles O'Neal)
Subject: Yucks Digest V1 #99
To: spaf
|The smell of sweat from men's armpits is being used to prduce bills that
|really get up your nose - and are more likely to be paid on time.
...
|The secret lies in the sweat men produce from their armpits and groins. It
|contains a pheromone called adrostenone, also found in animals,
|which gives off a chemical "aggresion" message.
Yeah, I suppose if a bill arrived which smelled like some guy
had kept it in his crotch for a week, most of us would pay it
pretty quickly, on the assumption the guy might show up at our
door otherwise.
Assuming we had any idea what the smell was.
"Dear - smell this bill from Penney's, please."
"Phew! What sort of perfume is that?"
"Smells like your underwear after you get back from camping."
Personally, I would probably send it back in a sealed plastic
bag, after soaking it in, say, essence of bear crotch for a week.
But then again, not everyone has the Roadkills-R-Us labs at their
disposal.
-Miles
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End of Yucks Digest
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