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Yucks Digest V1 #52

Yucks Digest                Fri, 17 May 91       Volume 1 : Issue  52 

Today's Topics:
      "Hey!  Quiet back there!  I'm trying to run my camcorder!"
                               Bad joke
 Case of the Replicated Errors: An Internet Postmaster's Horror Story
                   Computing is like sex because...
                     D News Help Needed (2 msgs)
                   Poppy on line:  Hail to the chip
                   Silly Newsgroups time once again
                           The Ninja Master

The "Yucks" digest is a moderated list of the bizarre, the unusual, the
possibly insane, and the (usually) humorous.  It is issued on a
semi-regular basis, as the whim and time present themselves.

Back issues may be ftp'd from arthur.cs.purdue.edu from
the ~ftp/pub/spaf/yucks directory.  Material in archives
Mail.1--Mail.4 is not in digest format.

Submissions and subscription requests should be sent to spaf@cs.purdue.edu

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

Date: Fri, 3 May 91 01:13:11 PDT
From: one of our correspondants
Subject: "Hey!  Quiet back there!  I'm trying to run my camcorder!"

   Video bootleggers clash with film houses
   by ROBERT KOCH

   WASHINGTON, May 1 (AFP) - American video pirates are walking into cinemas
with camcorders and taping films from the screen, then openly hawking them on
the streets of New York, Washington and other U.S. cities, cinema owners claim.
   "Low quality video versions of 'Dances with Wolves,' or 'New Jack City,'
have been confiscated from street sellers" in several major U.S. cities, said
Mark Harrad, spokesman for the Motion Picture Association in New York.
   They are "sold for 10 or 15 dollars, crude copies with a blurry screen and
coughing and crunching of popcorn on the soundtrack," he added. Saavy to their
clients, the video pirates are going after the most current box office hits.
   Kevin Costner's Oscar-winning 'Dances with Wolves' and 'New Jack City' with
Mario Van Peebles about trafficking in crack cocaine, a movie that has sparked
looting and rampaging in some U.S. cities, have been in demand.
   The pirate video vendors are less than surreptitious about their trade in
Brooklyn and Harlem where it is not uncommon to hear them barking at passersby
"Get your bootleg videos!" and selling them from car trunks.
   Video pirating "has nothing to do with the usual bootlegging," said Molly
Kellog, a spokesman for the Warner Bros.' anti-pirating operation in Los
Angeles.
   "There are always people, although they might be very few of them, wanting
to have a copy of a movie that's not officially out. And their friends would
go: 'Oooh, why don't you make me a copy?,'" she said.
   Warner Bros., which produced and distributed, 'New Jack City,' takes the
bootlegging seriously because the copies could compromise the sales of the
company produced videocassettes that take about six to eight months to market.
   Video piracy costs the film industry 150 million dollars a year, Mr. Harrad
said. "If we're talking world wide, it's 1.2 billion dollars."
   Last year, police seized some 180,000 pirate videos cassettes in the United
States.

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

Date: Thu, 16 May 1991 14:59:36 EDT
From: KLUDGE@AGCB1.LARC.NASA.GOV
Subject: Bad joke
To: spaf

If dreaming you are a muffler causes you to wake up exhausted, does 
dreaming that you are a wheel rim cause you to awaken still tired?

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

Date: Sun, 12 May 91 14:17:25 -0700
From: bostic@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: Case of the Replicated Errors: An Internet Postmaster's Horror Story
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU

>From: fair@APPLE.COM ("Erik E. Fair", Your Friendly Postmaster)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip

This Is The Network: The Apple Engineering Network.

The Apple Engineering Network has about 100 IP subnets, 224 AppleTalk
zones, and over 600 AppleTalk networks. It stretches from Tokyo, Japan,
to Paris, France, with half a dozen locations in the U.S., and 40
buildings in the Silicon Valley. It is interconnected with the Internet
in three places: two in the Silicon Valley, and one in Boston. It
supports almost 10,000 users every day.

When things go wrong with E-mail on this network, it's my problem.
My name is Fair. I carry a badge.

[insert theme from "Dragnet"]

The story you are about to read is true. The names have not been
changed so as to finger the guilty.

It was early evening, on a Monday. I was working the swing shift out of
Engineering Computer Operations under the command of Richard Herndon.
I don't have a partner.

While I was reading my E-mail that evening, I noticed that the load
average on apple.com, our VAX-8650, had climbed way out of its normal
range to just over 72.

Upon investigation, I found that thousands of Internet hosts were trying
to send us an error message. I also found 2,000+ copies of this error
message already in our queue.

I immediately shut down the sendmail daemon which was offering SMTP
service on our VAX.

I examined the error message, and reconstructed the following sequence
of events:

We have a large community of users who use QuickMail, a popular
macintosh based E-mail system from CE Software. In order to make it
possible for these users to communicate with other users who have
chosen to use other E-mail systems, ECO supports a QuickMail to
Internet E-mail gateway. We use RFC822 Internet mail format, and RFC821
SMTP as our common intermediate E-mail standard, and we gateway
everything that we can to that standard, to promote interoperability.

The gateway that we installed for this purpose is MAIL*LINK SMTP from
Starnine Systems. This product is also known as GatorMail-Q from
Cayman Systems. It does gateway duty for all of the 3,500 QuickMail
users on the Apple Engineering Network.

Many of our users subscribe, from QuickMail, to Internet mailing lists
which are delivered to them through this gateway. One such user, Mark
E. Davis, is on the unicode@sun.com mailing list, to discuss some
alternatives to ASCII with the other members of that list.

Sometime on Monday, he replied to a message that he recieved from the
mailing list. He composed a one paragraph comment on the original
message, and hit the "send" button.

Somewhere in the process of that reply, either QuickMail or 
MAIL*LINK SMTP mangled the "To:" field of the message.

The important part is that the "To:" field contained exactly one "<"
character, without a matching ">" character. This minor point caused
the massive devastation, because it interacted with a bug in sendmail.

Note that this syntax error in the "To:" field has nothing whatsoever
to do with the actual recipient list, which is handled separately, and
which, in this case, was perfectly correct.

The message made it out of the Apple Engineering Network, and over to
Sun Microsystems, where it was exploded out to all the recipients of
the unicode@sun.com mailing list.

Sendmail, arguably the standard SMTP daemon and mailer for UNIX,
doesn't like "To:" fields which are constructed as described. What it
does about this is the real problem: it sends an error message back to
the sender of the message, AND delivers the original message onward to
whatever specified destinations are listed in the recipient list.

This is deadly.

The effect was that every sendmail daemon on every host which touched
the bad message sent an error message back to us about it. I have
often dreaded the possibility that one day, every host on the Internet
(all 400,000 of them) would try to send us a message, all at once.

On monday, we got a taste of what that must be like.

I don't know how many people are on the unicode@sun.com mailing list,
but I've heard from Postmasters in Sweden, Japan, Korea, Australia,
Britain, France, and all over the U.S. I speculate that the list has
at least 200 recipients, and about 25% of them are actually UUCP sites
that are MX'd on the Internet.

I destroyed about 4,000 copies of the error message in our queues here
at Apple Computer.

After I turned off our SMTP daemon, our secondary MX sites got whacked.
We have a secondary MX site so that when we're down, someone else will
collect our mail in one place, and deliver it to us in an orderly
fashion, rather than have every host which has a message for us jump on
us the very second that we come back up.

Our secondary MX is the CSNET Relay (relay.cs.net and relay2.cs.net).
They eventually destroyed over 11,000 copies of the error message in
the queues on the two relay machines. Their postmistress was at wit's
end when I spoke to her. She wanted to know what had hit her machines.

It seems that for every one machine that had successfully contacted
apple.com and delivered a copy of that error message, there were three
hosts which couldn't get ahold of apple.com because we were overloaded
from all the mail, and so they contacted the CSNET Relay instead.

I also heard from CSNET that UUNET, a major MX site for many other
hosts, had destroyed 2,000 copies of the error message. I presume that
their modems were very busy delivering copies of the error message
from outlying UUCP sites back to us at Apple Computer.

This instantiation of this problem has abated for the moment, but I'm
still spending a lot of time answering E-mail queries from postmasters
all over the world.

The next day, I replaced the current release of MAIL*LINK SMTP with a
beta test version of their next release. It has not shown the header
mangling bug, yet.

The final chapter of this horror story has yet to be written.

The versions of sendmail with this behavior are still out there on
hundreds of thousands of computers, waiting for another chance to bury
some unlucky site in error messages.

Are you next?
	just the vax, ma'am,
	Erik E. Fair	apple!fair	fair@apple.com

[Hmmm, don't anybody send mail to "<yucks-request" ! --spaf]

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

Date: 11 May 91 10:30:03 GMT
From: jimmy@pyra.co.uk (Jimmy Aitken)
Subject: Computing is like sex because...
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny

Excerpted from The Guardian Computer Page on March 14th:

The March issue of Forth Dimensions reported the results of a
competition held at a recent conference about Forth where you had to
complete the phrase "Computing is like sex because..".  The women's
entries included:
 "You never know when to stop."
 "Many users are satisfied without documentation."
 And the winner from Anne Edgecomb: "It's never finished."

The men's entries included:
 "I can never get enough of it."
 "When I can't get to sleep I have to do one or the other."
 "My wife doesn't want me to do either."
 "When you do it professionally it's not as much fun."
 "When you make a mistake you end up supporting it for years."
 And the winner from Nick Grossman:
  "You can hear about it, you can talk about it, you can read about
   it, you can even watch it done by experts, but even with all the
   fumbling mess, it's still more satisfying to get personally
   involved with it."

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

Date: 10 May 91 21:37:07 GMT
From: cmf851@anu.oz.au (Albert Langer)
Subject: D News Help Needed
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.misc

[This is the first of two articles that use an old and wonderful
Usenet humor format, little-seen in recent years.  The idea is to
respond to an article that really never appeared, and talk about
something that sounds fascinating but doesn't exist.  Then see how
many people fall for it.

The Rosen technique and Tonga Plugs were two memorable ones from the
early days of net.singles (and I'll repost them here if anyone really
wants to see them).       --spaf]

In article <-09g55#@rpi.edu> kibo@nuge107.its.rpi.edu 

(James 'Kibo' Parry) writes:

>	I'm having trouble getting D News to run on my IBM PS/2 Model 95
>under MS Windows 4.0a.  

With D News there is no need to specify your particular hardware and
software configuration when reporting problems. All that configuration
nonsense is now handled properly and any remaining problems are
application specific rather than configuration specific.

>In particular, the 'D-Con' file that controls
>how embedded graphic animation sequences within multimedia articles are
>displayed, is what's been puzzling me.  How do I set the D-Con file up
>so that users have a choice of using two-dimensional or
>three-dimensional displays in either color or grayscale?

Just delete the D-Con file entirely and D news will default to 
displaying things however the user prefers. (Users rotate sequentially
through available possibilities until they accept one to become
permanent). The D-Con file is only needed for RESTRICTING the user
options to emulate what is available under earlier software.

>	Also, some of the interactive multimedia presentations in
>alt.sex.multimedia.interactive tend to crash the NNTP server, mangling
>all the thread, web, and rhizome files.  Is there an easy way to rebuild
>them without using pmpdipmumpzipopulos?

Not really, this is a known limitation and little priority is being
given to fixing it because D news software developers have more
important things to do with their time than participate in
alt.sex.multimedia.interactive (or at any rate are not willing to
admit that they do), even if it is the most popular news group.

Anyway, what's wrong with using pmpdipmumpzipopulos? Don't be put
off by the absurdly long command name and equally weird syntax.
It's actually no harder than writing a sendmail configuration
file (which has been compared with performing dentistry on oneself).

Once you get used to the CONCEPT of self-reproducing genetic
algorithms modifying neural networks to "grow" intelligent
object-oriented hypertext from networked interactive multimedia
presentations, restoring the rhizome files is no harder than
undeleting an ordinary unix file. (BTW you realize of course
that you can fix the web and thread files with the ordinary
arbitrary treewalking debugger "arbtdb", and that the rhizome
files are only needed for the extra artificial life options.
The wierd name for the rhizome debugger is intended to warn
novices off attempting to use it. Us gurus have it aliased.)

>	Any help would be most appreciated.

You are most welcome.

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

Date: 11 May 91 09:13:00 GMT
From: kibo@nuge107.its.rpi.edu (James 'Kibo' Parry)
Subject: D News Help Needed
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.misc

In article <1991May10.213707.6432@newshost.anu.edu.au> cmf851@anu.oz.au (Albert Langer) writes:
>In article <-09g55#@rpi.edu> kibo@nuge107.its.rpi.edu 
>(James 'Kibo' Parry) writes:
>
>>	I'm having trouble getting D News to run on my IBM PS/2 Model 95
>>under MS Windows 4.0a.  
>
>With D News there is no need to specify your particular hardware and
>software configuration when reporting problems. All that configuration
>nonsense is now handled properly and any remaining problems are
>application specific rather than configuration specific.
>
>>In particular, the 'D-Con' file that controls
>>how embedded graphic animation sequences within multimedia articles are
>>displayed, is what's been puzzling me.  How do I set the D-Con file up
>>so that users have a choice of using two-dimensional or
>>three-dimensional displays in either color or grayscale?
>
>Just delete the D-Con file entirely and D news will default to 
>displaying things however the user prefers. (Users rotate sequentially
>through available possibilities until they accept one to become
>permanent). The D-Con file is only needed for RESTRICTING the user
>options to emulate what is available under earlier software.

Well, I removed the D-Con file and its alternate-universe shadows, and
then ran pmpdipmumpzipopulos -x1Xa -y772b -cC -Cc -G'wox' </dev/n >/dev/iant
and D News modified itself extensively.

It now works just fine.

Problem is, it now insists that it is "E NEWS", and it requires all
users to prefix each key press with a low-voice chant of "Master E News,
Lord of the Network, Ultimate News Software of all Reality, I humbly beg
your forgiveness as I request that you..." with eyes averted, and users
who do not do this are instantly vaporized by a blast of microwave
radiation from their terminal screen.

How do I turn off E NEWS?

[The answer was, "you don't".  --spaf]

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

Date: Sun, 12 May 91 15:03:06 -0700
From: bostic@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Subject: Poppy on line:  Hail to the chip
To: /dev/null@okeeffe.Berkeley.EDU

Poppy on line:  Hail to the chip
	Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe

(printed in Minneapolis Star-Tribune April 30, 1991)

Has it occurred to anyone that we are entering one of those dangerous
moments in our country's history?  I am not talking about the mounting
deficit, or the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.  The scariest fact
of the hour is that the commander in chief of the United States is
about to boot up and log-on to the computer world.

Poppy at the keyboard?  A mouse in the House?  Bush as a beginner in
BASIC?  George and the user-friendly software?  Do I see another
children's book in the making or a horror story?

Just a few weeks ago, urged on by the First lady and her Magical Lap
Top, the president vowed to end his computer illiteracy.  He declared
in a public statement that "no one's ever too old to learn."  So, on
Wednesday morning he began, undeterred by the fact that his tutor
didn't show up.  The president turned the computer on, pushed a
button, gave it a command and declared it "fun."  Having pressed
Execute, he joshed, "I was worried what might happen up there."
HE was worried?

It seems to me that there are only two things to be concerned about
when the leader of the Western World starts trying to interface with
his new computer:  (1) He won't learn.  (2) He will.

By my own calculations, the number of PCs that have been bought and
abandoned in the past decade slightly exceeds the number of yogurt
makers.  This is because the first lessons in computerese are like
total immersion language classes in Hungarian.  The language barrier
between those who know and those who would learn remains enormous.

In the absence of a human tutor, the president would be left, like the
rest of us, with a user-hostile instruction manual.  The majority of
these texts include in their welcoming remarks such questions as:
"Do you have an IBM Binary Synchronous Communications Adapter
installed in your system?"  Giving these texts to the computer
illiterate is like giving a how-to-read book to someone who doesn't
know the alphabet.

What if, on the other hand, George begins to learn.  Remember back to
those wonderful yesteryears of Computer I?  Excuse me while I push the
SAVE button.

It is one things to lose a day's work if you're a reporter.  It's
quite another to accidentally delete the Secret Service.  It's one
thing to push the wrong button and wipe out your company's sales
records.  It's quite another to push the wrong button and wipe out
Bulgaria.  And you were worried about the red phone.

Of course, these things don't really happen.  We are all backed up to
the last K.  Why, it's almost error-proof these days.  Which is why
the word "glitch" has its origins in computer-speak.

If the president becomes accomplished at the keyboard, he may spend
his days dashing off his famed personal notes through the electronic
mail.  If, however, he becomes a master, he might enter the advanced
computer space of "virtual reality."  Washington is already out of
touch with the country; the horror show begins at the edge of computer
Fantasyland.

There is also the business of security.  Last year, an Esquire
magazine writer followed some teenage hackers as they broke into the
White House computer system.  It was a piece of cake.  Imagine what
Kitty Kelley could do with that sort of access.

I for one hope that the new kid on line doesn't choose Poppy as his
password.  I also hope that he doesn't choose something so obscure
that he'll stand there in the middle of an international crisis
trying to remember whether it was LQ2VR or PNB8Y.

Finally, as George Herbert Walker Bush joins the community of the
computer literate, we should all quake a bit about accountability.
The computer has become the scapegoat of our era.  These days, the dog
doesn't eat the homework; the computer does.

When his handy new toy kicks on, the presidential motto may have to be
changed from "The Buck Stops Here" to "The Computer Did It."

Lesson one, Mr. President:  Blame the user, not the computer.  Don't
confuse Nintendo with Pentagon war games.  And when you leave the
office at night, Sir, remember to log off.

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

Date: 15 May 91 11:49:20 GMT
From: fsspr@acad3.alaska.edu (Sean P. Ryan, Hardcore Alaskan)
Subject: Silly Newsgroups time once again
Newsgroups: alt.config,alt.stupidity,alt.tasteless,misc.misc,news.config,news.groups,news.misc,rec.humor,talk.bizarre

You may have seen this before, you may not have.  But at any rate, I am
once again posting the Official List of Silly Newsgroups.  Hope you
enjoy it if you haven't seen it before.  Also wanted to make mention of
the fact that I will be conducting a poll of your favorite silly
newsgroups as found in the list.  Select your 10 favorite groups, and
e-mail them to me ONLY.  I will not accept any ballots that are posted. 
I will award points based on a 10-9-8-7-etc. etc. point system.  I will
continue to accept votes until an arbitrary point that I decide.  Then I
will post a 24 hour notice, after which I will close the balloting and
post the results.  Anyhow, enough of this, here's the list!

alt.beer.like.molson.eh
alt.biff.is.god
alt.bill.wisner.die.die.die
alt.c.is.for.cookie.that's.good.enough.for.me
alt.castration
alt.child.star.coke.coke.coke
alt.conspiracy.sean
alt.decapitation
alt.dolly.parton.d.d.d
alt.eric.olson.doesn't.exist
alt.fan.charles_manson
alt.fan.dave_del_dotto
alt.fan.david_duke
alt.fan.henry_kissinger
alt.fan.louis_farrakhan
alt.fan.robert_tilton
alt.fan.ted_kaldis
alt.fan.whitekeys
alt.finns.on.irc.who.hate.americans
alt.flame.anyone.but.ted.kaldis
alt.flame.fuck.you.jack.i'm.alright
alt.floyd.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi.hi
alt.fubar
alt.get.a.life
alt.he's.dead.jim
alt.hitler.is.alive.and.running.a.brothel.with.roy.orbison
alt.i.know.roger.carasso
alt.individualism.rand.is.god.and.kant.and.hegel.can.suck.my.dick
alt.kibo.angst.angst.angst
alt.mud.jason
alt.multi-level.marketing.scam.scam.scam
alt.nkotb.die.die.die
alt.nodies.conspiracy
alt.pro-wrestling.davey.boy.meltzer
alt.pyramid.scams.amway.amway.amway
alt.rap.eazy-e.threw.up.on.the.alpine.in.his.six-fo
alt.rap.i.did.it.with.a.wiffle.ball.bat.so
alt.rap.yeah.boyeeeee
alt.romance.chat.barf.barf.barf
alt.romance.chat.wombat
alt.rtfm
alt.sex.bestiality.muppets
alt.sex.bestiality.tijuana.nightclubs
alt.sex.chairlift
alt.sex.cowpatti
alt.sex.falwell-robertson.child.pornography.inc
alt.sex.four.sisters.on.thumb.street
alt.sex.george.and.barbara
alt.sex.hey.little.girl.want.some.pez
alt.sex.june.cleaver
alt.sex.maps
alt.sex.masturbation.chainsaw
alt.sex.moral.majority
alt.sex.necrophilia
alt.sex.pastry
alt.sex.pictures.polaroid
alt.sex.pressure
alt.sex.rent-a-can
alt.sex.robotics
alt.sex.twisted.coat.hanger
alt.sex.vms.no.wait.that's.fuck.vms
alt.sex.withdrawal
alt.sex.900-lines
alt.sig
alt.suicide.child.star
alt.suicide.usenet
alt.traci.lords.suck.suck.suck
alt.tv.al_sharpton
alt.wombat
comp.equipment.bonfires
comp.my.amiga.is.better.than.your.mac.nyah.nyah.nyah
comp.org.kkk
comp.os.holy-wars
comp.sys.terminal.dumb.dumb.dumb
comp.we.don't.need.no.stinking.vaxes
misc.forsale.life
misc.misc.misc.misc.misc.misc.misc.misc.misc.misc
news.god-given.right.to.post
news.lists.cowpatti.and.kent
news.masturbation
news.newusers.questions.rtfm
news.why
pdx.fan.bob.the.weather.cat
pdx.fan.sister.paula
pdx.only.at.tom.peterson's.the.happy.place.to.buy
rec.abortion
rec.arts.culinary.spam
rec.arts.dog.shit
rec.arts.poems.jim_morrison
rec.arts.poems.vogon
rec.arts.swedish.erotica.pork.pork.pork
rec.arts.there.had.better.be.brie.at.this.reception
rec.arts.tv.i've.fallen.and.i.can't.get.up
rec.discrimination
rec.drugs
rec.drugs.acid.floyd
rec.drugs.acid.gdead
rec.drugs.acid.tangerine_dream
rec.euthanasia
rec.food.spam
rec.humor.quayle
rec.mag.hustler
rec.menstruation
rec.music.cd.cheap.cases
rec.music.debbie.gibson.is.the.antichrist
rec.music.gdead.fans.not.on.acid
rec.music.gdead.keyboardists.die.die.die
rec.music.gdead.masturbation
rec.music.tiffany.still.sounds.like.shit
rec.pyromania
rec.sca.members.who.are.too.busy.playing.muds.to.read.this.group
rec.sport.baseball.it.will.be.a.cold.day.in.hell.when.pete.rose.ever.returns
rec.sport.boxing.babes
rec.sport.fan.riots
rec.sport.flatulation
rec.sport.masturbation
rec.sport.uaa.hockey.lose.lose.lose
rec.suicide
sci.burnt.styrofoam
sci.let's.bore.the.average.user.to.death
sci.masturbation
sci.med.abortion.retroactive
sci.med.coat.hanger.abortion
sci.med.ganja
sci.med.gynecology.amateur
sci.traffic.light.synchronization
sci.transportation.go.see.cal
soc.culture.bestiality
soc.culture.billionaires.living.on.the.streets
soc.culture.chilkoot-charlie's
soc.culture.dykes.on.bikes
soc.culture.east.saint.louis.illinois
soc.culture.industrial.slumlords
soc.culture.inner-city
soc.culture.international.falls.minnesota
soc.culture.lifeless.net.geeks
soc.culture.motley.crue.groupies
soc.culture.northwest.territories
soc.culture.pucksluts
soc.culture.space.station
soc.culture.third.reich
soc.culture.tijuana
soc.culture.unborn.gay.whales
soc.culture.virgins
soc.feminism.castration
soc.feminism.pms
soc.motss.bestiality
soc.motss.bill.and.eric
soc.motss.jesse_helms
spam.baked.beans.are.off
spam.bloody.vikings
spam.canoe
spam.culture.spenard
spam.humor
spam.lovely.spam.wonderful.spam.spam.spam.spam
spam.spam.spam.spam.baked.beans.and.spam
spam.synthetic.vaginas
talk.abortion.twisted.coat.hanger
talk.homophobia
talk.nymphomania
talk.politics.nuke.nicaragua.now
talk.politics.supreme.court.justice.nominees.bork.bork.bork
talk.religion.bhagwan.shree.rajneesh
talk.religion.bob
talk.religion.c.programmers
talk.religion.hare.krishna
talk.religion.net.gods
talk.religion.not
talk.religion.rastafari
talk.religion.sun.myung.moon
ua.fat.ugly.native.bitches.trying.to.get.laid.on.the.vax
ua.flame.but.don't.flame.melanie.back
who.is.john.alt

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

Date: 15 May 91 10:30:03 GMT
From: stevec@bu-pub.bu.edu
Subject: The Ninja Master
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny

	This story was originally posted to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, a group
that consists of stories of a dystopia of high tech and street violence based
on William Gibson's novel "Neuromancer"....

	"I see a fat man with a white beard lying in the alley, tiny reindeer 
chewing at his corpse.  I see a dead reindeer, rats tearing at it's flesh.  I 
see a dead rat, maggots crawling over it.  I see a maggot that is looking a bit
under the weather.
	"I see the stringy sinews of the gleaming puss from the running sore
of Christmas...."
	The carol continued to play on the televid monitor on the wall above
the bar.  For hours the visuals had consisted only of a log burning in a 
fireplace, but the fire had gotten out of control and spread into the studio, 
engulfing the video equipment.
	A man with a long black ponytail and soft black clothing sat at the 
bar.  His name was Soo Ni Buffalo.  He was of Japanese and Native American 
origin, a heritage that bequeathed to him extraordinary quickness, agility, and
balance.  At a large public university in upstate New York, he had become 
expert in the ancient art of hand combat, Kung Pow.  Such was his mastery that 
he was chosen to wear the outfit of his school's mascot, the Kung Pow Chicken.
	Soo Ni Buffalo had taken the path of Kung Pow, a weaponless art.  His 
brother Soo Ni Stony Brook chose to study the new technologies of combat.  He 
had once created the ultimate adhesive, but he couldn't get it out of the 
bottle.  Then he created a monofilament strand of diamond so strong and yet so 
thin that it could cut through any substance when a very slight pressure was 
applied.  Unfortunately, the weight of the monofilament strand was enough to 
create a very slight downward pressure, so the strand cut through the table, 
the floor, the foundation, and the bedrock.  As far as anyone knew, the strand 
was still oscillating about the gravitational center of the earth.  Soo Ni 
Buffalo eschewed his brother's gadgetry in favor of instinctive human ability.
	On the monitor, he watched fire destroy the video studio until the 
visual signal turned to static.  Then he pressed a button on a hand-held
transmitter, which emitted a small burst of radio waves.  The burst was picked 
up by one of the many transceivers of the I'veFallenAndICan'tGetUpNet, sent up 
to their comsat, bounced off their lunar repeater installation, boosted down 
to the Very Very Very Large Antenna Array, and relayed to the monitor that 
Soo Ni Buffalo was watching, where it caused the channel to change.
	The monitor now showed a man in a gray suit and ceramic hair, speaking 
to the camera.
	"Around the world in 30 seconds, this is CNN Headline News.  Tonight's 
top stories:  Police crack down.  Leaders urge restraint.  Comment sparks 
controversy.  Costs overrun estimates.  Committee issues call for action.
Candidate claims mandate.
	"In business news:  Supply interacts with demand; Wall street panics.
	"In sports:  Oh, how the mighty have fallen.  
	"And finally, we happened to notice this story:  Even in this day and
age, some people still do something the old-fashioned way.
	"To recap tonight's top story:  Events transpire."

	While Soo Ni Buffalo watched the monitor, two hyped-up street-hardened 
razorboys came up behind him.  Their arms and legs were padded by heavy slabs 
of black rubber armored underneath by steel belts.  The slabs were embedded 
with metal studs and had angry angular patterns like long lightning bolts 
gouged deeply into their surface.  Chains had been strapped to the surface of 
the slabs.
	Soo Ni Buffalo's 360-degree peripheral vision warned of the two figures
behind him, and he turned to them slowly.  He recognized the uniform of 
The Radials, a tough gang that lives on the street.
	One razorboy screamed, "Change the channel back."
	Soo Ni murmured evenly, "The previous channel had no picture.  It was 
only snow."
	The razorboys growled, "We like snow!"  
	Then they went for it.  They made their play.  They made their move.  
They stepped over the line.  They tossed the dice.  They cast the die.  They 
cast two dice, and then tossed them.  There was no turning back now.
	Soo Ni slid off the bar stool, assessing the weapons they'd drawn:  
Triple rotary, floating heads, 800 rpm, sideburn attachment.  Cartridge-loaded 
double-bladed disposable safety, lubricating strip.
	One fighter leaped at Soo Ni.  He ducked, and the attacker jumped over
him.  He sailed over the bar and into a rack of bottles, where the broken glass
caused severe tire damage.
	The remaining fighter charged.  Soo Ni could have ducked again, but
then no lesson would have been taught.  He blocked the weapon away, reached
into the attacker's mouth, pulled out his heart, stuffed it with cheese, put it
back, and watched him die of arteriosclerosis before he could make another 
move.
	Soo Ni Buffalo remounted his bar stool.  The room was silent except for
the audiovisual monitor.
	"Tonight's top stories:  Dictator appeased.  Fears quelled.  Arson 
suspected.  Dozens injured.  Gaps widen.  Deficits loom...."

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

Date: Wed, 15 May 91 10:46:30 CDT
From: one of our correspondants
To: yucks-request

IBM is currently trying to implement "6 Sigma Quality" and recently
distributed a poster extolling the virtues of 6 Sigma Quality.  In the
picture is a clam shell containing two objects, which are a "6" and a
lower case "sigma" fashioned to look like pearls.  The caption reads
"Hard to find, but worth the effort."

Pearls come from oysters, not clams.  This may explain why it is so
hard to find!

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

Date: Thu, 16 May 91 10:07:41 -0700
From: brian@UCSD.EDU (Brian Kantor)
To: spaf

Picked up for you from the Daily Telegraph (16.5.91)

A man appeared before magistrates at Alnwick, Northumberland,
yesterday, charged with indecency with a dolphin. Alan Cooper, 38,
of Gorton, Manchester, was committed for trial at Newcastle. He
is alleged to have committed an act of lewd, obscene and disgusting
nature with a dolphin named Freddie, at Amble.

P.S. I have no comments from Freddie.

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End of Yucks Digest
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