Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 22:53:59 -0400 Subject: Re: Bizarre Australia Dream. Status: RO In alt.religion.kibology, mmcirvin@world.std.com wrote: In article , kibo@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) wrote: > > Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > I had this bizarro dream last night in which I was looking at a map of > > Australia and discovered that there was a really, really big island > > between the southern coast of Victoria and the northern coast of > > Tasmania. I was amazed because I had never noticed this huge island > > before, having always thought that there wasn't really anything of > > note in the waters between Tasmania and the Australian mainland. This > > island was at least twice the size of Tasmania and was shaped like > > kind of like a Stella D'Oro breakfast treat oriented with the long > > axis horizontal. The island had some kind of French name that I > > can't recall at the moment, but it had been heavily settled by > > computer nerds so some of its towns were named after programming > > languages (Perl among them) and other computery stuff. Most of the > > cities, roads and other development were on the northern shore of the > > island. I suddenly felt the need to go out and let the world know > > that this map had revealed to me that there was this enormous, > > Francophone-computer-nerd island between Tasmania and the Australian > > continent, but I was so amazed by the discovery that I was all but > > paralyzed. > > > > I swear I am not making this dream up. > > Attention Matt McIrvin: > > It is necessary for you to write an account of a voyage to Kerguelen's Land > by Tachypomp, as directed by Steven Spielberg. While breaking my fast I became seized with an unaccountable urge to fashion my bacon and eggs into the form of Klein's Bottle, or the Hankie of Croesus, so called because all the bogeys in the world live within it. Imelda, lovely creature, was having none of it. "Dear Richard, you shall destroy your waistcoat!" she said, fluttering her eyelids charmingly. "And if the genuine Antipodal carpet becomes soiled, the Professor will have you out on the street posthaste!" "Oh, the Professor," I said. "He hasn't even joined us for breakfast. Down there in the cellar, he'll never know the fascination of Klein's Bottle." "DO I HEAR MY NAME TAKEN IN VAIN?" boomed an enormous voice from an unseen source. "The Professor!" I said. "But how--" "He has piezo-electrical speaking-tubes cunningly inserted beneath the wall-paper in each room," said Imelda. "Thus he guards my virtue." Cursing my luck, I wished to have a harsh word or two with the Professor. Had he overheard me muttering of Imelda in my sleep? But the urge to twist the strips of bacon into a peculiar form, even one impossible in a space of three dimensions obeying the Laws of Euclid without cheating by baconistic self-penetration, kept pushing itself into the forefront of my mind. A strange celestial music seemed to play... was it but an idle reverie, or another of the Professor's piezo-electrical enchantments? Before I could finish the thought, a trap in the floor gave way and I plummeted into the cellar! Chapter Two: The Telephene! "Have you wondered," said the Professor to my disheveled and bruised form on the hard stone flooring, "how I came to obtain my genuine Antipodal carpet?" "I suppose that you bought it off some collector of imported antiquities," I mused, looking with unfocused eyes at the Professor's collection of half-working monstrosities: the Musical Boots, the Chromocycle, the Vibro-Everting Aetheric Portmanteau Antimacassar, all gathering dust from the looks of it... except for one shining engine made of coiled spring that I could not identify. "Not at all! Not at all! Do you take me for a rich man? The carpets of Lacaille's Land are not for sale. They are given only to the worthy! They put them on the ceilings, you know. Only sensible for an antipodal country, in which I have traveled extensively... Where was I? "Yes, yes. The people of Lacaille's Land model themselves upon the worthy Laputans of Dean Swift, and venerate the intellectual above all things. The trap-door flap in the rug already existed; in a Lacaillian home it would be used to observe the stars." "A singular country," I lamely replied, essaying to stand with a certain amount of groaning. "And you, young fellow, will see this singular country first-hand, by means of the device which I have constructed... the Telephene!" He gestured toward the glittering mystery in the far corner, which was, somehow, now surrounded by fog and flickering blue light. It looked like nothing so much as a shining brass sclupture of a Horn of Plenty: a cone of coiled cable perhaps three feet in diameter and five in height. Within it was mounted a padded chair. "The Telephene," said the Professor, "is modeled upon principles of recursive self-elaboration taught to me by the good Lacaillians upon my last trip to the Antipodes, three years ago. If you would be so kind as to direct your gaze to the very point of this Ouroboros of the Modern Age..." I looked. "The coil narrows to a thin, twisted cable, and runs back up to the top..." There was something strange about what it did there. "Where," said the Professor, "it becomes the very coiled cable of which the Telephene is made! The coil is made of a smaller coil, which is made of a smaller coil still, down to the Infinitesimal... and all of these coils are one and the same! If the Telephene were to uncoil, it would be of INFINITE LENGTH!" It was at this point that I noticed the red-painted, heavy clamp of cast iron keeping the Telephene together, under what looked to be tremendous stress; a clamp designed to be unlatched by the pull of a single lever!...And I had an uneasy feeling about the prospect of climbing into that padded chair. O Imelda, I thought, will I ever see your angelic face again? Whereupon the Professor, surely more thoroughly mad than even I had known before this fateful morning, called upon an unsuspected strength to haul me bodily into the chair. As he pressed a concealed electrical relay, a second trap-door opened above the first, in the ceiling of the breakfast-room, to let in the happy light of day; and then a tremendous shock and the loudest BOING Man ever heard knocked me insensible! Chapter Three: In Lacaille's Land! What I recall of my headlong flight as the Telephene uncoiled must necessarily be half dream or more, for I was not myself at that moment. It seemed to me that the air exploded from my lungs, that I would asphyxiate at any moment. The earth, blurred though it was, appeared as a great ball beneath me, painted up with continents like a drawing-room globe; and in a trice, as I was beginning to turn blue, there appeared Lacaille's Land, that scientificalistic oasis half-way between Australia and Tasmania, lit up with its sky-mounted tri-rails and electro-magnetic flares miles high. I endeavored to orient the Telephene such that the shock of landing would but cause it to re-coil. When it did so, in a broad marble square lined with statues of the most modern philosophers, I nimbly jumped from the chair-- only to find that, without the cast-iron clamp, the re-coil was followed immediately a powerful _recoil_, and the Telephene leapt bodily into space, never to be seen again. I was trapped in Lacaille's Land without a cent in my pockets! It was early evening here, on this opposite face of the globe, and the unfamiliar Antipodal stars glittered beyond the lights of the continent-city. As I gathered deep, thankful breaths, I was at first confused by the loss of the entire day without the passage of so much as ten minutes, and stared idiotically at the stellar display until I heard a voice behind me, in a broad accent like, but not exactly like, that of an Australian. "Ah, a stranger to our stars! We have, you know, re-named all the constellations of the sky along modern principles: gone, the mythical creatures of a bygone age! Abolished, the bestiary fancies of sailors. We Lacaillians espy the Constellation of the Retort, the L-Tube, the Difference-Engine, the Air-Pump, the Microscope, the Ladder of Jacob, the Automaton, the Electro-Static Machine! We write our poems to the Galactical Solenoid, the Stellary Table of Logarithms! Or we don't write them at all, for we have machines that can write them for us!" "Beg pardon," I said. "I'm new here and utterly lost. I answer to the name of N----, and hail from Boston in the East of America." "I figured as much when I saw you arrive on your Telephene. You're a friend of my good friend Professor H----. He must have perfected it by now." "Or almost perfected it, given the lack of a mechanism to retain it after landing....You know the Professor?" "He is my oldest and dearest friend," said the stranger, "and I would [Here, several pages of the July 1898 issue of _Trifles Magazine_, in which this story was serialized, were accidentally omitted by the printers, some say with the covert assistance of the Legion of Public Morality. We only have fragments from the author's notes of Chapters Four and Five, about the utopian social and economic arrangement of Lacaille's Land. Excerpts courtesy of the author's estate:] [...] "And so," said my gracious host Percy, "what were Capitalists evolved ineluctibly into Ventural Capitalists, great money-faucets from which wealth could be extracted until only the Men of Ideas had control of it. Thus we obtained our great wealth." "But how could such a system be sustained?" "Through Four-Dimensional Accounting. When Lord Arthur Ponzarelli [...] filled the Great Hall of Aethero-Harmonics. As its mighty Geissler tubes shone with the actinic lightnings of a thousand auto-compositions, the piezo-electric diaphragms in homes throughout the land-- of which the Professor's were, I now knew, merely a pathetic imitation, a toy!-- sang forth with the latest fruit of the Magnetic Brain of Freed Music. A thrilling tune it was, beginning with strains reminiscent of "The Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond" and proceeding imperceptibly into a variant of the sprightly American ditty "She'll Be Coming Around The Mountains." "And no man composed this amalgamation of delights?" I asked Percy. "No man, nor no woman either. It was the sole invention of the Magnetic Brain. In this way we have freed music from man; reduced it to its basic role as a force of nature. Thus we pull music from the aether itself. Melody wants to be free. But we are not above profit; when our Universal Staveorium of All Possible Songs is complete, we shall further our researches with funding extracted from royalties in the benighted countries of the remainder of Earth." But I listened no more to the Magnetic Brain, for a stranger music played once again in my mind, the same tune I had heard in Boston shortly before I tumbled into the Professor's study! Chapter Six: I Leap Into the Singularity! I should have been content in this strange city of wonders. Nevertheless, I still dreamt of the beauteous Imelda H-----, and in addition my strange dreams and urges of the Klein Bottle persisted still in Lacaille's Land. Before dawn on the sixth, I opened my chamber's window to the sweet zephyrs of the city's scented industrial exhalation. Far below, but still far above the phosphorescent parks where occasional lovers still strolled at this hour, trundled a dirigible-assisted cargo tri-rail. I know not what strange force possessed me to abandon Percy's hospitality and leap onto its humming bulk, but leap I did; and roughly I fell upon the canvas back of the center dirigible. There I lay a moment, wondering where I was going. But my solitary vigil lasted only a few minutes, for a guard with plumed shako soon came upon me in his patrol of the dirigible's top surface, and shook me roughly, saying: "Ahoy there! I know you! You're the fellow who jumped in by Telephene!" "So I am," I said. "And if you were to throw me in the hoosegow at this moment, I would not blame you." "Not at all... not at all! The tri-rail pulled along by this airship carries scientific cargo destined for the Klein Bottle on Edison Rock. We'd be honored to have you along-- it is your Professor's Telephene, grabbed in mid-flight by our aerial ace Smedley Octothorpe in his Dymaxion Insectopter, which forms the basis of the experiment!" Soon we moored at Edison Rock, near the forbidding, uninhabited south shore of the island, named in honor of my native land's own wizard of invention. There, on a wind-blasted, elevated plain surrounded by shining brass measuring-instruments of all sorts, stood a Klein Bottle easily a hundred feet tall-- the very Hankie of Croesus of my idle fancies! It revolved and swallowed itself in stately, fluid fashion, supported by nothing in particular, and how it managed to exist without self-intersection taxed my visual and mental faculties. And from it issued the mysterious song of my brain, which I now knew to be truly the Song of the Klein Bottle! "It came from out of space," said the Dirigible Guard. "We know not whence. We flatter ourselves to think that it wishes to share its elevated thoughts with we of superior human intellect. But it does nothing, nothing but play that infernal song. Some of our men have gone mad listening to that song. One did nothing for weeks but recite stations on the Boston-to-Cambridge tube line. But we persist." Suddenly I knew what they were going to do. "You plan to enter the Klein Bottle with the Telephene of Professor H-----?" "Indeed. Smedley Octothorpe himself was to ride it. The notion is that the Telephene may then propel one through time as well as through space, to a new Singularity of understanding transcending mere Mankind, in which ideas will accumulate faster than any man's ability to comprehend them. But old Smedley has called in sick today-- we can't figure out why..." A strange courage swelled in my breast. "I shall ride the Telephene." "You!-- But you're our honored guest, not an experimental aeronaut!" "I beg your pardon!-- Have I not ridden the Telephene on its maiden voyage to your land?" "I forbid it!" he said, and raised his fist to strike. But I was ready for his blow, having had some small experience brawling in the dives of my hometown, and soon got the better of the Dirigible Guard. "Sorry to do this, old chap," I said, and, wresting myself free of his grip, ran as fast as my legs would take me to the reassembled Telephene in its iron cradle, aimed squarely at the outside-in maw of Klein's Bottle. I leapt in the Professor's upholstered chair, grabbed the release lever, and gave a mighty pull! What Singularity awaited me, here in the mouth of Infinity?... Chapter Seven: Home Again! "He's coming to, the poor dear," I heard the lovely voice of Imelda say. "We thought you had passed all understanding permanently," said the Professor. I was back in Boston!-- in the Professor's guest bed, where I had stayed just before my trip on the Telephene! "But... the Telephene... Lacaille's Land... the Klein Bottle! Was it then all a dream, a fancy concocted after I bumped my head on the good Professor's stone floor?" I said, happy to be back but chagrined at the Professor as well. "No, no, my good man," said the Professor. "The Lacaillians told me everything. You reached the Singularity, traveled to Temporal Infinity, were transformed into a lambent sphere of coruscating flame in the laboratory of the Forger of Nebulae, and returned to reveal all the hermetic secrets of Creation to the good savants of Edison Rock. We thought we'd never get you back from that state, but fortunately my Professor H-----'s Patent Re-Incorporation Salts brought you round." "Thank heaven for that!" said Imelda-- and suddenly her eyes sparkled with a glow that no Klein Bottle's Singularity could muster. Yes, it was good to be re-incorporated! THE END -- Matt McIrvin http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/ Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 22:58:11 -0400 Subject: Re: James "Kibo" Parry's Explanafiction Maga-Article! Status: RO In alt.religion.kibology, kibo@world.std.com wrote: Parties unknown have redeemed an Explanation Certificate, so I'm now honor-bound to explain the references in the most obscure article I posted this week. Here is the explanation. All proofreading has been skipped because it slows down the explaining. Buckle your seat belts, it's going to be a backstory night! James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > I had this bizarro dream last night in which I was looking at a map of > > Australia and discovered that there was a really, really big island > > between the southern coast of Victoria and the northern coast of > > Tasmania [...] shaped like kind of like a Stella D'Oro breakfast treat > > [...] The island had some kind of French name that I > > can't recall at the moment, but it had been heavily settled by > > computer nerds [...] > > Attention Matt McIrvin: > > It is necessary for you to write an account of a voyage to Kerguelen's Land > by Tachypomp, as directed by Steven Spielberg. > > If you don't, I'll tip your house over through the fourth dimension > into Joshua Tree National Forest. > > [2] And, Joe, I apologize for taking out your footnote. Here is a > replacement footnote. Unfortunately, it points at itself, causing > the Internet to get stuck in an endless loop not unlike the Boston > subway system after they opened the Boylston Shuttle from the > lower level of Copley under the river.[2] > > -- K. > > I'd once again like to thank > Clifton Fadiman and his son, Rudy Rucker. As I have previously mentioned, the anthology "Fantasia Mathematica" (first published in the 1950s) had a great influence on me when I was very young. It was a collection of science fiction stories (some quite ancient) concerning weird mathematical topics. Clifton Fadiman edited it (and a followup volume, "The Mathematical Magpie". Many years later, Rudy Rucker edited a similar book titled "Mathenauts".) One of the oldest stories in the book was "The Tachypomp" (by Edward Page Mitchell, 1873.) Written in a florid style imitating Poe, it's a scientific romance in which a society gentleman attempts to win the hand of a woman in marriage over the objections of her eccentric inventor father, who has three big secrets: (1) He has stairs that can measure the height, weight, gender, age, and net worth of visitors with different sensors under each tread, (2) The visitors he doesn't want to see he tosses into a pit which extends down through the entire Earth, and they wind up bouncing back and forth in the Earth's core, and (3) he proposes high-velocity locomotion via the Tachypomp, a conveyance involving a tiny locomotive that travels along tracks mounted atop a small locomotive on tracks atop a medium locomotive atop a large locomotive atop a huge locomotive, so that when all engines are started simultaneously the traveller could reach speeds in excess of a hundred miles an hour requiring only a giant stack of enormous locomotives, the bottommost being at least half as long as the tracks leading to the destination. While the bottomless pit is a digression and not the main point of the story, it's the most interesting (and well thought-out) part, and the point we're concerned with is that Mitchell specifies that the other end of the hole is in some godforsaken place called Kerguelen's Land. This is an archipelago of weird little islands at a latitude between Australia and Tasmania (except at the wrong longitude, it's precisely west of the little gap between Australia and Tasmania) suggesting that Joe Manfre's brain is rewriting geography while he sleeps. Kerguelen's Land, which has a sort of French-sounding name, I guess, because it has three "e"s in one word just like "cheese", was visited by Captain Cook during his third exploratory voyage (the one where the Hawaiians killed him), and I quote from an authoritative source (i.e. a Web page): -> Nothing much of interest happened during the voyage from -> Kerguelen's Land to Van Diemen's Land [...] Cook called Kerguelen's Land the "Isle Of Desolation", which was also a rejected title of Lucille Ball's TV series. To this day nobody knows why Kerguelen didn't explore the archipelago instead of waiting for Captain Cook to come and insult it. Apparently the original discoverer was a Frenchman named Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec who called the main island "La France Australe" ("South France") and nobody liked that name so everyone called it by the least French part of his name. Another story in "Fantasia Mathematica" was "And He Built A Crooked House" by Robert Heinlein, where a poncy modern architect builds a house in the shape of an unfolded four-dimensional cube (it looks like a big cross standing on end) and because everyone is too stupid to point out that they're building this unstable thing in earthquake territory, a mild tremor causes the house to fold up into a tesseract and the people inside get trapped in the fourth dimension, but eventually jump out a window and think they've come out on another planet but it's just Joshua Tree National Forest. "Fantasia Mathematica" also included "A Subway Named Moebius", by A. J. Deutsch. In the original version, the London subway system became too complicated and trains started experiencing wacky time warps and trips into other dimensions, but when the story was brought to America (by "The Atlantic Monthly", published in Boston) all the names of London subway stations were replaced by Boston ones, except that whoever did the editing had no clue what shape Boston's real subway map was, so it became this extra-nonsensical story about how a train disappeared on a perfectly ordinary trip from the lower level of Copley station while going to Cambridge under the river in the Tube. (Copley only has one level, it's on a line that doesn't go to Cambridge, and there are no tunnels under that particular river.) My personal theory is that the reason Charlie got trapped on the MTA is not that he couldn't afford the extra five cents to get off but that he fell into the fourth dimension in a nonexistent tunnel, then a four-dimensional house fell on him. The MTA was renamed the MBTA in the 1960s, just to ruin that Kingston Trio song. There are still a couple stations where you have to pay extra to get out, but that stupid Charlie could have just turned around and gone back to downtown for free. One station where you have to pay to get off is Braintree, a city which is full of trees that are really giant green brains, but only in the fourth dimension. (I should add that that's sort of a Vonnegut reference -- in "Cat's Cradle" he gives the penis length of each of the male characters, and one of them is listed as having "a penis a mile long, but most of it was in the fourth dimension.") What does this have to do with Stella D'Oro Breakfast treats, which are awful, perpetually-stale licorice-flavored cookies sold at supermarkets, and seem to be the final stage of what happens to Twinkies when they actually do dry up after ten years? Well, the most interesting thing about them is that they're shaped like the letter "S", because the flavor and texture certainly aren't interesting. So they couldn't make them shaped like normal cookies or people would say "Eww! Stale cookies with bad licorice!" so they had to make them seem like some completely different kind of food. This resulted in one of the most obnoxious product placements of all time, in the original version of Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters". It went something like this: TERRI GARR Hey, I hear you saw a UFO. RICHARD DREYFUSS Yeah. TERRI GARR Was it a circle, or a square, or was it shaped like one of those delicious Stella D'Oro Brand Breakfast Treats, A Registered Trademark Of The Wonderful Stella D'Oro Corporation, All Rights Reserved, Buy Some Today? RICHARD DREYFUSS Geez, I wish I still had my harpoon gun. In the "Special Edition" of "Close Encounters", the annoying product placement was still there, except that Spielberg blanked out the billboards they were standing between and painted in different billboards, so that people could see exactly the same movie but with different ads blocking the scenery. Plus he added nearly a whole moment of new footage at the very end, when Richard Dreyfuss looks up and sees the big chandelier shaped like a sand dollar hanging over his head inside the alien Christmas ornament. Said sand-dollar-shaped chandelier was later turned upside-down so that Harrison Ford could land his flying car on top of it in "Blade Runner", in a city consisting of hundreds of other recycled models including a building shaped like the Millennium Falcon, except standing on end like Ralph McQuarrie originally designed it to be, not lying down like George Lucas had it. So you see, Joe Manfre's brain tied "Close Encounters" (1977) to "The Tachypomp" (1873) by mentioning both Kerguelen's Land and the shape of Stella D'Oro Breakfast Cardboard. Spielberg followed "Close Encounters" with "E.T.", a movie with even more obnoxious product placements (always feed your alien creatures Reese's Pieces, not M&Ms) which he also recently issued a very minimally re-edited version of, changing just enough seconds of film in order to raise the price on home video. Allegedly he threatened to digitally remove the Reese's Pieces unless the candy company paid again. He did have the evil Apollo astronauts chasing E.T. carry handheld phones instead of guns in the new version, presumably because he thought it would be a depiction of a saner world if killer Apollo astronauts were aiming cell phone antennas at people to give them brain cancer instead of just shooting them the way Apollo astronauts always used to do. He also took out the "penis breath" line, apparently because concerned citizens informed him that he should not be making light of this serious medical condition. And to avoid offending anyone, he changed the word "terrorist" to "hippie". Spielberg's a dope. But at least he didn't make "Mac & Me", an "E.T." rip-off (same movie, worse-looking puppet) with ten times as many product placements. In a now-related article: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > Kevin S. Wilson (rescyou@spro.net) wrote: > > > > [...] > > How do I break Joe [not Manfre] of his habit of sticking his lunch > > in my fridge? I've considered buying a couple cases of Coke and > > stacking them in the fridge, filling it entirely. That would be a > > message most people would pick up on. Joe is likely to slap his > > forehead comically and say, "Wow! That's a lot of Coke!" then > > remove a sixpack to make room for his lunch. > > I think he'd be more likely to say "Hey! Let's go to McDonalds for > a big break-dancing scene, then we have to help get you back to your > home planet, just like in 'E.T.', only with even more product placements > than even Steven Spielberg was creative enough to ram down the audience's > throats! Now hold still while I pile Hewlett-Packard office equipment > boxes on top of your wheelchair, and cover you with Skittles! Hey, look, > there's the furniture store logo that leads directly to your planet! > You've been saved by that logo! Now let's see special guest star > Ronald McDonald breakdancing some more!" That's pretty much "Mac & Me". It was the first film in which Ronald McDonald had a credited role (as himself), and yes, the movie does stop at one point so we can watch people and clowns happily breakdancing in a fast food restaurant. I was specifically referring to one scene where a kid opens the refrigerator and hundreds of Coke cans fall out (helped be a push from behind, for some reason) because the cute little alien has been somehow making cases of Coke materialize and then drinking them and then hiding the evidence in the fridge, because, as the kid explains, "it's what they drink on his planet". Absolutely every shot in the movie has a Coke can in it somewhere, a pack of Skittles, something that says "Hewlett-Packard", and a Big Mac box. The key plot point of the movie is, as I said, that they have to rendezvous at some place represented by a furniture company's logo, and they eventually realize that this means the billboard with the giant logo in their back yard. > > So you tell me what to do. Haz-Waste stickers would probably be too > > subtle. If he were a gurly gurl, I'd just put some earthworms in there > > and claim that I keep them there so I can go fishing in the river that > > runs behind campus. (Wait a minute. I _do_ keep worms in there. But > > he's not a gurly gurl.) > > > > So what will keep Joe out of my fridge, short of a padlock? > > A durian, if you turn the fridge's thermostat to "hot". Durians are an Asian fruit that smells like rotting gym socks filled with other dead things. In the early 1980s video game "Pac-Man", the symbols representing the special prizes start out as a series of fruits of increasing volume (cherries, strawberry, oranges, apples, and what appear to be durians) but then for some reason the durians are followed by space aliens from the game "Galaxian", because apparently only aliens smell worse than durians. But that has little to do with antique science fiction stories from "Fantasia Mathematica" and their relation to McDonalds, so we'll go on to the next relevant article: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > David Bromage (dbromage@omni.com.au) wrote: > > > > Dear Clown Face, > > > > I refer to your current promotion in Austria named "Spell to win > > Scrabble" in which sticky Scrabble letters are attached to value > > meals, which you have to then stick onto the tray mat to work words > > and hopefully win prizes. In particular, I take issue with the > > television ad which claims "the permutations are endless". > > > > Firstly, normal people don't say "permutations" in general > > conversation. > > No, but scientists do, especially when talking about McDonalds: > "Eating at McDonalds will give you a large chance of having five-eyed > children, but they usually only have a few super powers, at a low > incidence of powers per mutations." (Serious scientists leave off > the final "s" for extra science.) This is a reference to those commercials for "1-800-MATTRESS" where they tell you to "Leave off the extra 'S' for savings!" and idiots think they will get a special deal if they dial one of the two completely equivalent versions of the phone number because the phone company doesn't care at all if you play with the buttons after dialing the first seven numbers. Also, "S" is a number shaped like a Stella D'Oro Breakfast Treat. > > Secondly, if I bought every McDonald's meal over the next 2 months, by > > your own statistics I would collect no more than 27.7 million sticky > > letters. The number of permutations is the factorial of 27.7 million, > > which although a very large number is still finite. And even then I > > could only win up to 21 million prizes. > > This reminds me, I need to read that Kurd Lasswitz novel that's lying > around here. I should stop waiting for Willy Ley to check the math. Kurd Lasswitz wrote "The Universal Library", which is in "Fantasia Mathematica". It concerns a machine programmed to print out every possible piece of text. (Like Arthur C. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names Of God" but without destroying the Universe.) It was followed by an essay by rocket scientist Willy Ley, who had translated Lasswitz's story from German. Ley showed the readers the necessary calculations to prove that you couldn't fit all possible text (correct, incorrect, and otherwise) in the Universe, but people ignored him and invented the Web anyway. Lasswitz wrote one novel, "Two Planets", which I still haven't had a chance to read, but at least I own a copy of it and you don't. However, I worry that my copy could be one of the ten kazillion possible defective ones from the Universal Library, which would not only contain every possible good book but also every possible bad version of every possible book, as well as the Library's own index and every possible inaccurate index. And every possible index to where all the indexes were, although all of them would be wrong except one. > > [...] > > I trust you will pass these important issues on to your marketing > > people. > > [Insert picture of Stephen Hawking] <--- They must be at least this > > smart to invent their own branch of mathematics. > > I don't buy that. Archimedes Plutonium invented his own kind of math > even though he isn't as smart as a picture of Stephen Hawking. Plutonium Integers were the foundation of Plutonium Arithmetic. Apparently these were numbers which repeated endlessly in both directions, like "...3333333333..." and "...8888888888...", and apparently they weren't all equal even though they all looked like aleph-null to me. However, there would be aleph-one ways of representing aleph-null in Archie's system, not that he'd have heard of that. Georg Cantor invented that notation, and he also described an infinitely fine but irregularly-distributed subset of numbers, which would be the call numbers of all the accurate volumes of the Universal Library, ignoring all the other volumes. Although there are an infinite number of both accurate and defective volumes, there are a lot more of the latter. Also, everything I just said is wrong, because everything anyone knows about infinity is always wrong, and I shouldn't be talking about this because I know nothing about it (even though I know a million times more than Archie, who knows nothing about it, but it's a smaller kind of nothing.) The thing that makes Archie a lot less interesting than he used to be is that he's now coherent enough to be wrong, whereas Kurt Stocklmeir has attracted the attention of the Special Section of the scientific community with his wacky rants that aren't even wrong. (Wolfgang Pauli coined that phrase, but I can't have him and Stocklmeir in the same sentence due to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which says that bozos and non-bozos cannot occupy the same sentence without the Universe being destroyed before Arthur C. Clarke can do it.) James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > In sci.physics, Kurt Stocklmeir (kurtstocklmeir@worldnet.att.net) wrote: > > > > [...] > > It could be true girls do not completely understand what is a straight > > line. Some girls may say it is the most short path. But girl lizards may > > not like that. I have not ever run > > into any lizards but it is probably true girl lizards tend to be flat all > > over. > > You know, I've always wondered what would have happened if Albert Einstein > and Benny Hill got married and had a son who had Internet access and > accidentally posted ribald zingers. > > I'm still not sure. But, you remind me of the son of that man and Potsie. Benny Hill was a portly British comedian who somehow survived the vaudeville era by several decades. He would go on stage and tell incredibly ancient jokes with just a tinge of ribaldness, and then fake Keystone Kops and women in their underwear would chase him around in fast-motion. Fun fact: The word "vaudeville" was coined in a building in downtown Boston. This building now contains mostly a "Pac-Man" machine and a shady characters who will break my legs if I mention their familiar affiliations. "Vaudeville" was a phony French word (like "Kerguelen") made up by a theater impresario to conceal the fact that he only knew performers who couldn't be entertaining for more than two minutes at a time, so it's one of those phony foreign words made up by Americans to cover up recycled leftovers, like "chop suey" (leftovers disguised as Chinese food) and the more frightening "American chop suey" (elbow macaroni with spaghetti sauce served in school cafeterias.) > > Girl lizards may think that a straight line and the most short path > > on a not flat ball can have acceleration. > > Yeah, but, Kurt, I think I've found the perfect girlfriend for you. > Her name is... > > ************ > * * > * FANNY! * > * * > ************ > > (Boots Randolph drives an ice cream truck across the screen, playing > "Yakety Sax" on a music box at double speed, pursued by several large > fuzzy bears with fur of different fluorescent colors wearing only > bikini bottoms, followed by a marquis, a sheik, a fake Keystone cop, > various bald men, and Rita Webb. They run around at double speed for > a while, then the Universe ends.) Long ago, there was a tune named "Entry Of The Gladiators" designed to suggest the pomp of ancient Rome. This tune somehow got associated with circus clowns, as it's now played every time clowns are riding their tricycles around the Big Top. Then jazz musician Boots Randolph composed the peppy song "Yakety Sax", but apparently it was too short, so he pasted in five seconds of "Entry Of The Gladiators". But "Yakety Sax" was used as the music whenever the half-naked ladies were chasing Benny Hill around in spastic motion, and so now nobody knows the name of the song, they just call it "The Benny Hill Theme". And then it got Bill Clinton elected when he showed how hip (and bawdy) he was by playing it on his saxophone on MTV. Either he didn't know it had been co-opted by Mr. Hill, or else he really liked the idea of chubby, randy middle-aged men being chased by women in their underwear, but what are the chances of that? This musical odyssey of the tune from "Entry Of The Gladiators" to President Clinton proves that topic drift can happen in real life, which is why Boot Randolph is not a household name, because his tune got stuck to Benny Hill. And it didn't even come loose during any of those times that Benny Hill got smacked in the face with a two-by-four or the handle of a garden rake. > -- K. > > P.S. Super Dave Osborne > was the illegitimate > offspring of Albert Einstein > and John Byner. > > However, Dr. Bronner (the > soap whiz) was the son of > Albert Einstein and Kurt. John Byner was a Canadian TV comedy host type person who was like Benny Hill except that he was on Canadian TV instead of British TV, and therefore wasn't very good. His sidekick (and producer) was Bob Einstein, who was best known as the character "Super Dave Osborne". Bob Einstein is a nephew of Albert Einstein (the scientist). Dr. Bronner, who sold natural soap with complex two-dimensional patterns of fine print spelling out nutty manifestoes on every bottle, was also a nephew of Albert Einstein. On the other hand, Albert Brooks (actor/comedian) _is_ Albert Einstein -- that was his birth name, he was named after his famous cousin. So I would assume their family reunions would have gone something like this: THE REAL ALBERT EINSTEIN Hello. ALBERT BROOKS/EINSTEIN (thinking he's in that commercial for videotapes of Johnny Carson reruns) WOO! IT'S A POTATOOO!!! WOO-WOO-WOO!! DR. BRONNER POTATO STAINS CAN BE REMOVED WITH NATURAL ESSENE CASTILE BIBLE SOAP! LATHER! RINSE! DILUTE! DILUTE! SUPER DAVE OSBORNE Now I will jump off the CN Tower, to land in this small vial of soap... (He dies. It is not funny.) THE REAL ALBERT EINSTEIN My family sucks. I better finish my theory so I can invent a time machine and prevent myself from being born so that you guys won't be here to annoy me with your relativity to me. ALL Wow! We can make puns about "relativity"! THE REAL ALBERT EINSTEIN Forget the time machine, I'll just drink the soap. I like Albert Brooks (except on that annoying commercial for Carson reruns), his movies "Defending Your Life" and "Real Life" are enjoyable. And Dr. Bronner's soap was good mild soap that smelled nice (I liked the almond.) Bob Einstein, on the other hand, was the equivalent of Ed McMahon to a guy who was the combination of the less-funny half of Johnny Carson and the less-funny half of Benny Hill. James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Somebody needs to give Roger Kaufman some sort of prize for this bit > > in the LA Times: > > > > -> Although many critics have cruelly attempted to destroy it, "Star > > -> Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones" is actually a breathtaking > > -> cinematic achievement. [...] > > -> Just as Oscar Wilde skewered the hypocrisies of the Victorian > > -> bourgeoisie while providing them with irresistible entertainment, so > > -> Lucas has used his formidable imagination to show us that the supposed > > -> pillars of American culture have fallen into shambles, while a > > -> growing, unconscious group-mindedness, systematic wastefulness and > > -> destructive militarism are rising toward a terrible, inevitable > > -> crescendo. > > I thought Benny Hill already did all that. > > His version was better, though, because he had scantily-clad women > instead of Jar Jar. If Benny Hill had had Jar Jar, Elvis would have > risen from the dead just so he could go around shooting every TV that > ever showed Benny Hill pinching Jar Jar's fanny. If Benny Hill were still alive, he would be playing Jar Jar in sketches on his show. He might even work Jar Jar into his classic "Fad Eyed Fal" sketch, which was based on Benny's incorrect belief that the long "s" used 200 years ago was pronounced "f", a horrible typographic inaccuracy which ruined Benny Hill's reputation for factually-accurate wacky slapstick and fart jokes. > -- K. > > Also, "Star Wars" can't be great > satire, because Steve Oedekerk > was able to satirize "Star Wars", > and he's an idiot! Steve Odekerk has been making direct-to-video comedy spoofs such as "Thumbtanic" (like "Titanic" played by a bunch of fingers with creepy human faces superimposed on them) and "Thumb Wars" (like "Star Wars" except... oh, you get it already? Then you're too smart to like Steve Oedekerk.) He is not to be confused with the brilliant Bob Odenkirk, who is one half of the comedy team of Bob & David (as in "Mr. Show With Bob And David"), the David being David Cross, who once performed (when they were at Emerson college) with Mike Bent, who saw Steve Oedekerk's TV special "Steve Odekerk Dot Com" but I missed it, although we agreed that putting "Dot Com" after a name isn't nearly as funny as people like Steve Oedekerk think. Mike Bent is now best known for inventing something known as Zero Gravity, which is not to be confused with the British beverage known as Zero Gravity, which is an imitation of Orbitz, which is not to be confused with the airline reservation Web site named Orbitz, which is not to be confused with Orbitty, the Jetsons' second pet in the episodes they made in the 1980s. Orbitty is, however, suitable to be confused with Jar Jar. Oh, wait, I just realized that the article about the Tachypomp wasn't the one I was supposed to explain. Please ignore everything I wrote above, this is the article in question: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > Today, for the first time, Amazon.com told me: > > -> We're sorry. We were unable to find any titles to recommend after > -> looking at your purchase history. > > Apparently I have already bought everything they have and their executives > are sitting around crying, in a big pile of money, in the middle of their > empty warehouse down in Brazil. It is in Brazil, right? If not, it > should be, especially if it's the version where Robert DeNiro blows it up. Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" is one of my favorite movies, although that bozo Sid Sheinberg (the studio executive responsible for greenlighting "Howard The Duck") re-edited it with garden shears for television, pasting on a wildly inappropriate happy ending. In the real version, Jonathan Pryce flips out and hallucinates that Robert DeNiro has come to save him and blow up the bad guys. In the stupidified TV version, Robert DeNiro _actually_ blows up everything, and then everyone goes to live in this happy green valley that clearly couldn't actually exist in the bleak dystopia of "Brazil", which has nothing to do with the country of Brazil which probably does have some nice green landscapes, if they haven't all been destroyed as collateral damage in battles between Captain Planet and Duke Nukem (who is no relation to "Duke Nukem", the violent videogame.) > Now that Amazon.com has given up even trying to sell me anything, > I just need to compare my collection to King Jong-Il [...] > [...] "Outta Control" [...] Catherine Schell [...] Lenny Bruce Okay, this is where it gets complicated. Oops! This window is full. Because I've reached the 32k limit of this primitive Earth computer, I will have to start a new article. (To be continued.) Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 22:59:42 -0400 Subject: Re: James "Kibo" Parry's Explanafiction Maga-Article -- part 2! Status: RO In alt.religion.kibology, kibo@world.std.com wrote: (The explaining continues.) We left off when I had said: > Now that Amazon.com has given up even trying to sell me anything, > I just need to compare my collection to King Jong-Il to see if mine > is the largest or second largest in the world. Well, what do you know -- > we both have copies of "Pulgasari" but he doesn't have "Outta Control". > I WIN!!! > > Hmm, I should kidnap the directors of "Pulgasari" and "Outta Control" > and force them to collaborate on a movie about a monster eating > Saugus, Massachusetts. It could be called "Saugusari, The Monster > That Sounds Like It Comes With Sauerkraut But Is Actually A Scary > Monster And Help Kibo Has Kidnapped Me." No, wait, that's a dumb title > even for a monster movie that people were kidnapped to make. > Any suggestions? Remember, it must be a title Kim Jong-Il has NOT > already kidnapped people to force them to film. Nutty North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il really did kidnap his favorite director from South Korea and force him to make a "Godzilla" knockoff ("Pulgasari") but fortunately the guy was clever enough to make it a movie about how the monster crushes an evil dictator who likes to kidnap people. (The director eventually escaped to the United States.) The film "Pulgasari" is actually one of the best "Godzilla"-style movies I've seen (featuring a cast of thousands, because it was made by a dictatorship.) The monster suit from "Pulgasari" was also used in some North Korean TV series titled "Geophagus", which I haven't seen. I have been face-to-face with the actual suit in Forrest Ackerman's basement. Mr. Ackerman invented the word "sci-fi", and a lot of others which didn't catch on, like "magabook". He's a great guy, and has the world's greatest collection of monster-movie stuff, but unfortunately he's in the hospital and not expected to recover from a blood clot in his brain he mysteriously suffered shortly after I visited him. I hope it wasn't those Necco wafers I gave him. "Outta Control" I've described before, a "movie" found at a local video store shot with a camcorder during a slow drive through Saugus, Massachusetts. It's a lot like "Manos: The Hands Of Fate" but with more trees going past the car window. > -- K. > > Also, I have Roger Corman's > "The Fantastic Four", if King Jong-Il > has a bootleg of the "Justice League" > movie with David Ogden Stiers as > Martian Manhunter I'd be willing > to swap, providing he promises to > stop referring to Mr. Stiers as > "The most annoying of all those guys > we couldn't kill during that > eleven-year-long war." In exchange, > I will send him Jamie Farr in one > of Lenny Bruce's old dresses, and > the two of the three Father Mulcahys, > including the one who could turn into > the same things as Catherine Schell. Okay, this is where it gets complicated. "The Fantastic Four" was a live-action movie of the comic book, made by Roger Corman (who used to make monster movies over the course of a single weekend) which turned out so crappy that Marvel Comics paid him _not_ to release it, for fear that it would keep people from seeing the "Spider-Man" movie they planned to consider making a decade later. It was extremely bad. I obtained a bootleg of it (which was very blurry because it was a copy of a copy of a copy) and, well, obviously they weren't trying. Of all the movies made from comic books, it's the very worst, even taking into account the 1991 Corman/Golan production of "Captain America" where his only super power was that he could pretend to be carsick twice. The 1997 live-action TV-movie of "Justice League" couldn't have been as dopey as either of those, even though David Ogden Stiers played a green Martian. You may know him as Major Charles Emerson Winchester on "M*A*S*H", a show about the Korean War which ran for eleven years even though the real war didn't. The character of Charles Emerson Winchester has nothing to do with Emerson College, which three of the other people mentioned so far have attended, but oddly, none of those three fought in the Korean War, let alone for eleven years. Mr. Stiers, incidentally, has his name misspelled in the credits of George Lucas's "THX 1138", which is easily the most intellectual piece of science fiction directed by Lucas. I do not hold the misspelling against this film because I will probably misspell "Rene Auberjonois" before the end of this article. In "M*A*S*H", the character of Max Klinger (played by Jamie Farr), a wacky Lebanese guy who wore dresses to get out of the Army, was an obvious plagiarism from cutting-edge comedian Lenny Bruce, a wacky Lebanese guy who _successfully_ got out of the Navy during World War II when he got a friend to sew him a WAVE uniform. Lenny Bruce was quite brilliant, until he broke his brain during his obscenity trial and became completely obsessed with that one moment in his life (from then on, his "comedy" act consisted of reading the court transcript aloud.) As to Father Mulcahy (John Mulcahy or Francis Mulcahy depending on the year), he was played by Rene Auberjonois (that's a good French name) in the original "M*A*S*H" movie, then by George Morgan in the first episode of the TV series, then by William Christopher for the remaining 10.95 years (and in the sequel show, "AfterM*A*S*H".) Rene Auberjonois (whose name is French for "Randy Eggplant") went on to be one of the stars of "Benson" and played the shape-changing security guard Odo on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", a role similar to Catherine Schell as Maya on "Space: 1999", in that both people could change into stuff, violating all the laws of common sense (how do they change their weight?) and following different rules every week because the writers didn't really think out what these people could and couldn't do. (Maya once turned a pencil she was holding into a sword.) Catherine Schell (who was also in the movie "Moon Zero Two" which had some goofy-looking spacesuits which were later worn on "Space: 1999") is apparently not related to Maximilian Schell, the star of the equally deranged "The Black Hole". There is much disagreement on this point, with some claiming he is her father (although they list their ages as fourteen years apart) and others say they are siblings or cousins but the most authoritative source I can find (i.e. the longest Web page) says they are unrelated. In one particularly wacky "Space: 1999" episode -- the only one that was probably _intended_ to be wacky -- Catherine Schell as Maya was kidnapped by The Taybor, and to gross him out she turned into a character listed in the credits as "Slatternly Woman", who was played by the dumpy, irritatingly-voiced Rita Webb, who was best known as being one of the women who chased Benny Hill around with a rolling pin. One of the non-dumpy women who chased him around was Jane Leeves, who later became a regular character on "Frasier", a show which starred Kelsey Grammer, who was also an inept spaceship captain who rammed his starship into the U.S.S. Enterprise causing it to get stuck in a time loop, but it didn't collide with any of Boston's subway trains or even with Joe Manfre's footnote. I would try to explain why I omitted his original footnote, but it's your bedtime. Good night. -- K. Pleasant dreams! Or, dreams about Stella D'Oro products! ...but the pleasant kind are cheaper. Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 22:48:19 -0400 Subject: Re: James "Kibo" Parry's Explanafiction Maga-Article! Status: R In alt.religion.kibology, froggy@tachypomp.neosoft.com wrote: Leader Kibo explainified: : One of the oldest stories in the book was "The Tachypomp" (by Edward : Page Mitchell, 1873.) Which may be read in any room equip't with an Analitical Engine, piped electronically from The Library of Congress via the wonder of the Information Super-Railroad, part the first being at found at the bottom of the page herewith: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/ncps:@field(DOCID+@lit(ABP7664-0007-95)):: The remainder of the work in question being retrieved by setting one's electro-digital-browsifier to: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/ncps:@field(DOCID+@lit(ABP7664-0007-96)):: Should those infoadresses exceed the windowbandwidth of your AE display screen, one can instead electroaccess: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ncpsquery.html And enter the text word "Tachypomp" into the searchquery input box, although this will produce the story with the first page unfortunately removed, for Utopian perfection is not yet achieved even in this ultra futuristic year of 1875^H^H^H^H1960^H^H^H^H2002. -- F. * Froggy@neosoft.com ** "The Information Super-Frog" [dibs]* Turn JavaScript off and visit: http://www.angelfire.com/la/carlosmay/ ***"http://www" is pronounced "Hut-up Wow!". Hope This Helps!***