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Yucks Digest V1 #94
Yucks Digest Sun, 27 Oct 91 Volume 1 : Issue 94
Today's Topics:
"Big Tits" and the Interior Dept.
A magnetic display
Another great ad!
back cover blurb (from rec.arts.books)
CIA's Ad Drive Targets Blacks
Health Watch: Your Doctor Maybe an Alien
How the Gov. does research
I can name that tune in 5K bytes...
Joke from AstroPhysicist Boyfriend
Mss Found In A Septic Tank
New Sparcstation?
rmt
The Thomas hearings in brief
Trudeau Sells Out, For A Cause
World Series News
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 14:51:00 PDT
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: "Big Tits" and the Interior Dept.
To: yucks-request
Spy Magazine Prank Exposed!
WASHINGTON (AP)
For three weeks, Interior Department officials struggled over how
to answer a letter from the Committee to Restore Decency to Our
National Parks.
The committee wanted to rename Grand Teton National Park in
Wyoming, because as chairman A.S. Rider put it: "Grand Teton ... is
actually a French phrase that means and I apologize for this
indelicacy, but this is the literal definition `Big Tit."'
That's true. But it's had that name for 65 years, so, the folks at
Interior wondered, why raise a fuss now?
It wasn't a fuss. It was a prank. The letter came from Spy, the
New York-based monthly humor magazine.
But not knowing that, the Interior officials felt they had to
reply. After all, the committee had written Interior Secretary Manuel
Lujan, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who is a Wyoming native, and
three officials of Interior's National Park Service.
They even wrangled a bit over how best to reject the idea politely
and delicately.
They rejected one draft reply that acknowledged the 13,770-foot
Grand Teton mountain "appears to some to bear a striking resemblance
to a female breast." Some Interior officials thought that might
offend women.
The response they finally sent said they "are sensitive to your
concern but cannot support an attempt to rewrite history and create
needless offense to a local citizenry that clearly supports the
present name for a matter that has drawn no previous serious
complaint in the 65-year history of the park."
And they explained that changing the name would require an act of
Congress and imply a need to rename the entire mountain range andd
three individual peaks with Teton in their names a task requiring a
petition to the independent U.S. Board of Geographic Names.
Some lines in the committee's letter had raised eyebrows at
Interior. Lines like:
"Though a great many Americans may be oblivious to this vulgarity,
hundreds of millions of French people around the world are not! How
embarrassing that these spectacular, majestic mountains are reduced
to a dirty joke overseas (and in parts of Canada)."
In the process of trying to speak with committee chairman A.S.
Rider, The Associated Press learned that she is Andrea Rider,
Washington correspondent for Spy. And the four other names on the
committee's letterhead match names on Spy's October masthead.
Rider told The AP that she had sent out 70 letters but had only
heard thus far from the governor of Wyoming, U.S. Rep. Craig Thomas,
R-Wyo., and Jane Fonda. "The replies so far are hilarious. We were
hoping to get a lot more," she said. "I hope (Sen.) Jesse Helms
(R-N.C.) doesn't see your story about it."
Spy has produced prank letters in the past once sending
millionaires refund checks for small change from fictitious companies
to see which ones were frugal enough to cash the checks.
"Well, I'll be ...," said Park Service public affairs chief George
Berklacy when told about the prank on Tuesday. "I'm delighted it's a
spoof, because I thought, `My, we're going to hear more from them.'
When you think of all the myriad geologic formations we have
throughout the National Park Service and how they could be
interpreted, the correspondence could be never-ending."
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 00:35:01 PDT
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: A magnetic display
To: yucks-request
Fridge Magnets Attract Fans
LAUREL, Md. (AP)
How could Marlou Freeman have guessed, when she started sticking
those cute little magnets on her refrigerator door, that someday
she'd become the toast of New York's jaded oracles of artistic chic?
Her collection of 2,300 fridge magnets that's right, 2,300 went
on display at a funky SoHo art gallery in lower Manhattan in July,
and it's still drawing admiring crowds.
"She has put together a masterpiece of American popular culture in
miniature," gushed gallery owner Alesh Loren.
Convinced that Freeman has elevated kitchen kitsch to the status
of high art, Loren is negotiating to take his "Marlou's Magnets"
exhibition on a world tour next year. He's offering to sell her
entire collection on her behalf for a cool $2 million.
All this fuss comes as a breathtaking surprise to Freeman, a
47-year-old divorcee who works as a bartender and waitress at
O'Toole's Roadhouse near the racetrack in this Washington, D.C.,
suburb.
"It's unbelievable," she said, "and I'm loving every minute of it."
Freeman loves to collect stuff.
She began in the early 1970s with Avon cosmetic collectibles, then
switched to miniature liquor bottles. Smitten by quarterback Roger
Staubach, she turned to Dallas Cowboy souvenirs, from oven mitts to
helmet lamps.
Then, at a Laurel street fair about a decade ago, she bought a
handful of refrigerator magnets decorated with crocheted animals
"because they were cute."
Before long, her refrigerator was completely covered by magnets,
about 800 of them. They spilled over onto her dishwasher and other
kitchen appliances. She bought nearly two dozen panels of sheet
metal, which she painted and bolted to every wall of her apartment.
They quickly filled with magnets.
"My girlfriend Terri came over one day and said, `Marlou, you're
totally out of control,"' Freeman said. She was unchastened.
Her magnets are decorated with tiny TV dinners, boxes of pizza,
cakes and pies; Hershey's Kisses, Peter Pan peanut butter and Burger
King cheeseburgers; movie posters; silhouettes of all 50 states plus
Puerto Rico; a complete set of NFL team helmets; figures of Marilyn
Monroe, Ronald Reagan and the Three Stooges; jolly Santas, Halloween
witches and cuddly little bunnies; a housewife at the ironing board;
a husband taking out the trash; a golfer teeing off under a plastic
palm tree.
Her most unusual magnet: a dead cicada that she found in her
parking lot.
"I painted it with clear nail polish, glued a little magnetic tape
to its little belly and put it on my refrigerator," she said.
Early this year, Freeman decided to move out of the two-bedroom
apartment she has rented for 17 years. She would sell her fridge
magnets, which are insured for $10,000, and buy a mobile home.
"If the collection can't be displayed, it can't be appreciated,"
she said.
Loren noticed her classified "For Sale" advertisement in The New
York Times and rushed to Laurel with a photographer.
"I was shocked," he said in a recent telephone interview. "I just
stood there and said, `Wow!' It was incredible."
Back at his gallery, Loren installed the magnets on 64 old
refrigerator doors, and Freeman made her first trip to New York to
attend the grand opening.
"When I go shopping, I still look at magnets," Freeman confessed.
"There are so many I don't have. I pick up a couple now and then."
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 91 11:04:51 -0500
From: kelley@vet.vet.purdue.edu (Stephen Kelley)
Subject: Another great ad!
To: eniac@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
Art is where you find it, and I sometimes have a twisted sense of art.
One of my favorite examples from the advertising world is the TV
ad for DHL, a FedEx wannabe. The ad features panel trucks flying around
the sky with a reassuring voice-over; however, the music is the
overture from Der Fliegende Hollander. It sounds stirring and all,
but the story behind it is about a sea captain who is cursed to
sail *forever*, *never* returning to port. (more or less).
I've seen another, really the punch line to an old cynical joke.
Yesterday, the Chicago Trib had a large ad on page 2, selling cars.
The ad had fairly big pictures of the various models, with text next
to each and one or two line captions under each. The top picture, the
one your eye is drawn to immediately had the following caption:
"Model shown with optional wheels."
They did mention the engine was standard, I think.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 13:35:50 CDT
From: chk@cs.rice.edu (Charles Koelbel)
Subject: back cover blurb (from rec.arts.books)
To: spaf
In article <'~N|_-$@uzi-9mm.fulcrum.bt.co.uk>, igb@fulcrum.bt.co.uk (Ian G Batten) writes:
|> I think this is the finest back cover blurb I've ever seen.
|>
|> This already dated novel is set inside the head of
|> an ageing, divorced, alcoholic, insomniac
|> supervisor of security installations who is
|> tippling in the bedroom of a small Scottish hotel.
|> Though full of depressing memories and propaganda
|> for the Conservative Party it is mainly a
|> sadomasochistic fetishistic fantasy. Even the
|> arrival of God in the later chapters fails to
|> elevate the tone. Every stylistic excess and
|> moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in
|> the author's first books, ``Lanark'' and
|> ``Unlikely Stories, Mostly'' is to be found here
|> in concentrated form.
|>
|> It's from Alasdair Gray's novel ``1982 Janine''. Which is excellent, by
|> the way.
|>
|> ian
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 91 11:46:16 PDT
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: CIA's Ad Drive Targets Blacks
To: yucks-request
WASHINGTON (AP)
"Wouldn't You Want to Know if U.S. Territory Was Going to be
Invaded?" asks a full-page advertisement in the new issue of Ebony
magazine.
A recruiting ad for the Marines, for the U.S. Army? Guess again.
It's the CIA appealing to blacks and other minorities to join the
agency's ranks of spies, analysts and bureaucrats.
The campaign appears designed to overcome a traditional mistrust
in the black community toward the CIA, which along with the FBI is
viewed by some as sort of a secret white police force hostile to
blacks.
"There's a lot of misperceptions about us," said CIA spokesman
Mark Mansfield.
The color photo shows a black girl skipping rope outside a row
house, a black boy perched on a skateboard and a gray-haired woman
looking on from the stoop of a well-kept row house in what appears to
be a middle-income urban neighborhood.
The ad explains that the CIA is not a law enforcement agency, and
that its job is to gather and analyze information for decision makers.
Below the agency's eagle-head seal appears a new motto: "The CIA:
Our Business is Knowing the World's Business." And in very small
print, a P.O. box to address queries about career opportunities.
Applicants, the smaller letters caution, must pass medical and
polygraph tests.
The CIA periodically runs recruitment ads in newspapers and
specialized publications. But this is the first time it has turned to
a magazine whose readership is predominantly black.
One newspaper ad can generate as many as 200 requests for
information, said Mansfield.
The outreach to the black community and similar ads being planned
for publications read by Hispanics, Asian-Americans and the
handicapped comes as the CIA braces for planned personnel reductions
of 15 percent over the next five to seven years.
The agency is hoping to achieve this cut, mandated by
congressional budget cuts in light of a diminished need for spying on
the Soviet Union, mostly through attrition and other management tools.
"Our rate of hiring will drop, but we will continue to hire and
our priority is to place minorities in our professional ranks," said
Mansfield.
Currently, 9.8 percent of the CIA workforce is black, he said. Of
the new personnel hired last year, 21.4 percent were minorities, he
said. The number of agency employees is a secret.
But many of the agency's black employees are merely support staff,
said an official familiar with efforts to increase CIA's minority
hires.
The push to bring in minorities was begun in 1989 by then-Director
William Webster, in conjunction with the congressional oversight
committees of the agency. Under William Casey, Webster's predecessor,
few efforts were made to recruit minorities, the official said.
[Considering the apparent legacy of William Casey, I assume
"law-abiding citizens" were a minority that was not recruited? --spaf]
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1991 16:37:41 -0400
From: Linda Birmingham <ADMN8647@RYERSON.CA>
Subject: Health Watch: Your Doctor Maybe an Alien
To: mail list <eniac@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
Taken from the Globe & Mail, which got it from
"Weekly World News"
Headline: YOUR DOCTOR MAY BE A SPACE ALIEN
... ABOUT THOSE SPACE DOCTORS
Some warning signs that your doctor is a space alien, according
to Weekly World News:
o has trouble identifying your body parts
o doesn't keep patients waiting
o has neat handwriting
o has obscure diplomas or none at all
o recommends surgery for people who feel great
o when drawing a blood sample, takes a quart or more.
Linda
- an informed patient, is a healthy patient -
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 91 10:31:33 MDT
From: Dave Grisham <dave@triton.unm.edu>
Subject: How the Gov. does research
To: yucks
USDA's food consumption survey, or how not to do a survey...
According to Carole Sugarman of the Washington Post, the General
Accounting Office (GAO) released a report last month criticizing the
recent USDA survey of the dietary habits of U.S. citizens. This
survey, conducted every 10 years since 1936, is considered critical
information for multibillion-dollar federal food assistance programs,
nutrition education programs, EPA decisions on pesticide use and risks
(e.g., they might target the seafood industry if they knew Americans
were eating a lot of fish), agricultural producers, etc. The GAO is
unhappy with the survey for many reasons, including the following:
Aside from the extremely low response rate (34%), National Analysts
did not give details on those who didn't respond--crucial in
determining how they differ from those who did. The firm said it lost
the documents during an office move.
The two-part survey was burdensome and time-consuming. The first
section required the main meal preparer to complete an 89-page
questionnaire about foods consumed or disposed of over a week's
period. The second section required each household member to keep a
three-day food diary. Each participant was paid only $2, and the
interviewers just showed up at respondents' doors without advance notice.
Results were two years overdue and $1.4 million over budget.
The EPA considers the recent survey so unreliable that it has chosen
to stick with the dietary patterns identified by the USDA's 1977-78
survey, which are clearly outdated.
And so go our tax dollars, folks...
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 18:53:15 PDT
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: I can name that tune in 5K bytes...
To: yucks-request
Nec-audio: NEC unveils voice-referencing audio player
tokyo, oct. 21 Kyodo - nec corp. Has developed avoice-referencing
audio player that enables a user to select amusical track on a
compact disc by simply singing a portion of themelody, a company
official said monday.
yosuke takashima, nec's research manager of c and c
informationtechnology research laboratory, said, "the prototype
system isideal for when you can't recall the title of a song you have
heardbefore but know part of the melody."
the system requires a personal computer, voice signalprocessing
unit, a music database synthesizer, and a microphone. Italso
recognizes any person's voice.
"the experimental system we built can voice-reference about124
tunes in three seconds," takashima said.
"however, it will only be of practical use when it can
voice-reference about 10,000 songs on a compact disc read only
memoryunit."
nec expects to have the voice-referencing audio system readyin
about two or three years, he said.
------------------------------
Date: 16 Oct 91 10:30:05 GMT
From: erica@cc.gatech.edu (Erica Liebman)
Subject: Joke from AstroPhysicist Boyfriend
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
An astronomer on an extended lecture tour became weary of delivering the
same lecture night after night. He confided this state of mind to his
chauffeur as they were driving to their next destination. The chauffeur
expressed a similar boredom in his line of work.
"I've got it!" said the astronomer. "You are bored with driving and I am
weary of lecturing. Let's exchange places for one night. It will be a
refreshing change for both of us. My lecture is all written out word for word
and nobody in the next town knows me by sight anyway." The driver agreed and
the exchange of roles and dress was made. That night the lecture hall filled
to capacity. At the appointed time those in attendance heard a flawlessly
delivered lecture. At its conclusion the lecturer basked in the euphoric
applause. Then came the question and answer period.
"Who discovered Uranus?" came from a boy in the front.
"Uh...William Herschel." He remembered that from somewhere.
"And who discovered Pluto?" continued the boy.
"Aaaa...that would be Clyde Tombaugh." He had read a little.
Then from the back: "Would you please comment on the relative merits
of the pulsation instability model and the accretion disk instability model for
the explanation of outbursts of cataclysmic variable stars?"
The speaker paused for a moment, then said, "I am surprised that you
would bother to ask me such a simple question. To show you how really simple
it is I shall have my chauffeur answer it for you."
------------------------------
Date: 24 Oct 91 10:30:03 GMT
From: scs@wotan.iti.org (Steve Simmons)
Subject: Mss Found In A Septic Tank
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
One hot summer I worked for the "L'il Stinker" company, a guy down the
street from us that pumped septic tanks. It actually wasn't a bad
job. Most of my day was spent driving all over backwoods San Diego
County in a big white pickup truck (San Diego County still had
backwoods then). My job was to get to the customer in advance of the
tank truck, find the septic tank, and dig down to the lid so everything
would be ready when "Sweeney" got there with the tank truck. The tank
truck was great -- huge black monster with two white stripes running
down the back, a picture of a skunk, and his phone number. If you saw
it once, you remembered it instantly whenever your toilets backed up.
Over the course of the summer "Sweeney" told me a number of interesting
and possibly true stories. This has always been one of my favorites.
Sweeney got called out to this house in Rancho Santa Fe, a very ritzy
suburb. Typical problem, the toilets are backing up. Young husband
answers the door, tells him the tank is "out there" somewhere. Sweeney
goes out, finds and uncovers the tank, takes a look inside. It's got
zillions of condoms happily floating on top of the, ah, other
contents. They've floated up against the outflow hole, thereby
blocking up the whole system. Sweeney walks back up to the house and
brings the guy out to show him what the problem is. The guy is
obviously stunned, so Sweeney starts to explain that condoms don't do
well in a septic tank. The guy cuts him off and says between clenched
teeth, "I don't use them." He thinks it over for a minute, writes
Sweeney a check for the full bill, and tells him to just leave it like
it is. To this day he has no idea what happened when the wife got home.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 15:06:22 PDT
From: Don Bennett (408)922-2768 <dpb@frame.com>
Subject: New Sparcstation?
To: yucks
>From UNIX Today! 10/21/91 -
Wire services report to us that Greyhound commissioned some art
through a Venice, CA. organization that produces, preserves and
exhibits public art.
The name of the organization? The Social and Public Art Resource
Center. SPARC.
Hmmm... gues that would make your nearest bus terminal - complete
with grime, stark decor and the requisite assortment of unsavory
characters - a SPARCstation, wouldn't it?
Okay, maybe not.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 16:27:38 -0700
From: bostic@okeeffe.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: rmt
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.CS.Berkeley.EDU
From: norman@clsc.utoronto.ca (Norman Wilson)
rmt(8) on SunOS:
BUGS
People tempted to use this for a remote file access protocol
are discouraged.
rmt(1m) on IRIX:
BUGS
People tempted to use this for a remote file access protocol are
discouraged.
rmt(8) on Ultrix:
RESTRICTIONS
Do not use this for a remote file access protocol.
rmt(1m) on Cray UNICOS:
BUGS
Because of restrictions in the UNICOS tape drivers, you cannot use rmt
for accessing actual tape devices. However, it can be used for remote
file access.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 91 23:27:35 EDT
From: lotus!"CRD!David Kaufman@LOTUS "@uunet.UU.NET
Subject: The Thomas hearings in brief
To: eniac@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
For those who might have missed the rousing finale to the Clarence
Thomas hearings, I present a concise summary which was written by
syndicated columnist Dave Barry:
CHAIRMAN BIDEN: Judge Thomas, these past few days have been very,
very hard for all of us -- especially my good friend and colleague
Senator Kennedy, because it is not easy for a man to sit through
three full days of hearings with a paper bag over his head -- but
before we let you go, there is just one more point I want to make,
and it is a very, very important point, and I fully intend to make
it if I ever get to the end of this sentence, which as you know
and I know, judge, is highly unlikely to occur in the current
fiscal year, so...
SEN HATCH: I want to say that I am disgusted. These are disturbing
things that we have been talking about here, and I personally am
disgusted by them. Pubic hair! Big organs! Disgusting. And yet
we must talk about them. We must get to the bottom of this, no
matter how disgusted we are, and believe me I am. We must talk
about these matters, the pubic hair and the big organs, HUGE organs,
because it just makes us sick, to think that these kinds of matters
would come up -- I refer here to the organs, and the hairs -- that
we here in the United States Senate would find ourselves delving
deeply into these matters, to be frank, totally disgusts me, both
aspects of it, the hair aspect AND the organ...
CHAIRMAN BIDEN: Thank you.
SEN. HEFLIN: Judge Thomas [30-second pause] I certainly appreciate
[45-second pause] the fact [20-second pause] that [three minute
20-second pause] my time is up.
SEN. THURMOND: Soamwhoan ben crudin' mheah widm tan' bfust drang.
TRANSLATOR: He says, "Somebody has colored my hair with what appears
to be Tang breakfast drink."
CHAIRMAN BIDEN: Thank you. May I just add that the top of my own
personal head appears to be an unsuccessful attempt to grow okra.
But judge, as soon as I make this one final point we're going to let
you go, because this has been very, very painful, and believe me I
know what pain is, because at one time in my career I was the son of
a Welsh coal miner, and let me just say, judge, that when I do make
this point, whatever it is, it will be something that I believe in
very, very deeply, because I am the chairman, and I can talk as long
as I want, using an infinite number of dependent clauses, and nobody
can stop me.
SEN. HATCH: How BIG an organ? How MANY pubic hairs? These are the
issues we need to deeply probe into, no matter how much they disgust
us! And believe me, nobody is more disgusted than I am! I am
revolted that we are thinking about these disgusting things, day and
night! Tossing and turning, trying to sleep, writhing and moaning,
and...
SEN. KENNEDY (from under his bag): Are the cameras still here?
CHAIRMAN BIDEN: Judge, we know you're tired, and we're going to let you
go in just a moment here, just as soon as I make this one point...
SEN. THURMOND: Deah wheah etn lonsh yep?
TRANSLATOR: He says, "Did we eat lunch yet?"
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 91 11:41:30 PDT
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: Trudeau Sells Out, For A Cause
To: yucks-request
By ELISABETH DUNHAM
Associated Press Writer
SAUSALITO, Calif. (AP)
With a little help from his fanciful friend Duke, Doonesbury
creator Garry Trudeau is selling out.
The Great Doonesbury Sellout, a mail-order catalog featuring "the
Club Scud collection and other cool stuff from the New World Order,"
is Trudeau's first foray into commercial licensing.
But it's a sellout the most politically correct Doonesbury devotee
can enjoy with a clean conscience because Trudeau won't get richer
from it. His share of the proceeds will benefit four non-profit
organizations: Trees for the Future, Asia Watch, The Coalition for
the Homeless and The Center for Plant Conservation.
The 32-page catalog published in Sausalito by the Doonesbury Co.
also offers the kind of witty satire that made Doonesbury famous;
Trudeau wrote the copy and conceived of the products.
Items range from a $355 Duke-emblazoned leather bomber jacket
"tough enough to garden in" to a $7.95 set of plastic swizzle sticks
adorned with the characters Mr. Butts, described as "America's cutest
death monger," Honey and Duke.
The catalog includes comments from dignitaries occasionally
depicted in the strip:
President Bush: "I have gotten more composed, sure of myself. I
can laugh at Doonesbury. It doesn't bother me like it used to."
Marilyn Quayle, who Trudeau refers to as the second lady: "I don't
think he's funny. He's been wrong so many times."
Doonesbury Co. President Richard Shell said the company plans to
publish two catalogs a year during the five-year licensing agreement
with Trudeau and Universal Press Syndicate, which carries the strip.
According to an anonymous news release that sounds suspiciously
like Trudeau, the cartoonist resisted licensing his characters for 21
years. But he changed his mind last year when he was persuaded by
Paul Hawken, founder of the Smith & Hawken gardening catalog, "to
take another look at the fast-changing world of swizzle sticks and
novelty underwear."
The "sellout" is probably the only legitimate catalog featuring a
$25 set of fake press credentials that might, or might not, fool a
Secret Service agent.
"If you and yours have ever tried to attend a White House or
Pentagon press briefing, then you know how hard it is to get good
seats. Why? Probably because you were woefully undercredentialed and
understandably so. Most people simply lack the time to apply to the
Secret Service for clearance. Still others have criminal records,"
Trudeau writes.
Others gifts:
A full line of Boopsie dune wear, inspired by Operation Desert
Storm, including a camouflage bikini "so authentic in detailing that
we absolutely guarantee the wearer cannot be spotted on a beach by a
Blackhawk helicopter pilot flying by at 85 knots or better, unless
she waves her arms a lot."
Autographed Doonesbury books, $6.95 each. "Each signature has
been carefully checked for spelling," the catalog guarantees.
Catalogs are available at (415) 331-DUKE.
------------------------------
Date: 24 Oct 91 06:16:08 GMT
From: apucorle%idbsu.bitnet@utcs.utoronto.ca
Subject: World Series News
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
The Iraqi Veteran's Association has announced that it will be protesting
outside the Minneapolis Metrodome during the baseball World Series. They
say that all the waving of "homer hankies" by Twins fans is demeaning and
degrading to Iraqi soldiers.
- Rush Limbaugh, Radio talk show host.
------------------------------
Date: 22 Oct 91 23:18:29 GMT
From: jpr@jpradley.jpr.com (Jean-Pierre Radley)
Newsgroups: biz.sco.general
[Or, yet another reason why people don't like SCO's "unix". --spaf]
>>The Adventures of Anne Jones in Santa Cruz.<<
A few days ago, I installed unx304.
I then started receiving complaints from users that Pnews was barfing.
Well, it wasn't Pnews, but inews that was presenting an error message, and
it was one of the stranger ones, actually originating from /bin/date:
No TOY clock [Does anyone know what that means?]
Further traipsing around led me to /usr/lib/newsbin/inject/anne.jones, and
to the point in that script where a news-posting acquires a GMT timestamp.
From a shell prompt, "date" produced:
Tue Oct 22 18:50:50 1991
The three-letter timezone designation was gone!
Boys and girls, it was late at night, and perhaps I thought I was dreaming,
that it had never been there in the first place. But I reached for another
soothing snifter of cognac and recalled those early days of my adventures in
Xenix, when I would stay up to 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning to see 'EDT'
switch to 'EST', or the other way around.
Further fiddling and faddling led me to /usr/lib/lang/C/C/C/, and there I did
a hex dump on a file called "time". Sure enough, no "%Z" (BTW, the man page
for 'date' doesn't show %X, %Z, and a bunch of other nice formatting choices).
Moving "time" to "time-" did result in the old-style output from the date
command, but I thought that far too cheap a hack.
Then I trundled back up the directory tree and back down to /usr/lib/lang.src.
There, after reading all the time files, it came down to this particular
extract of the output of "diff tim.C.src tim.us.src":
9c9
< # timtbl specification file for C_C.C
---
> # timtbl specification file for english.us
13c13
< D_T_FMT="%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y" # Wed Apr 22 14:43:40 BST 1987
---
> D_T_FMT="%a %b %d %X %Z %Y" # Wed Apr 22 14:43:40 BST 1987
And so finally, "timtbl tim.us.src" produced a "time" file which, gently
ensconced in /usr/lib/lang/C/C/C/, restored the old "date" output correctly
and sweetly.
Then did Anne Jones wend peacefully back to her watchful slumber, well
appeased and satisfied, and then did news articles emanate hence again.
------------------------------
End of Yucks Digest
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