Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 22:54:16 -0400 Subject: Re: I apologize for all the recent cultural obscurantism. In alt.religion.kibology, Kibo wrote: I recently offered to explain an article. Andrew Pearson was the lucky ninth caller who got to be the only one to vote for an article. So, happy understanding, Andrew! [for purposes of this rather complicated article, things I'm quoting myself saying are ">", and things various other people said are ")" or "]".] <-- (but things enclosed in "]" and pointed at by "<" are also me.) [Incidentally, this article would sound best if you imagined Ben Stein reading it aloud, because I talk just like him, except that I doubt he knows anything about typography.] Andrew Pearson (apearson@pt.lu) wrote: ) ) James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: ) > ) > And inside every little twirly windmill an atheist typeface designer ) > is spinning in his grave while Ben Franklin is on his way across the ) > Atlantic to rent the corpse for use in practical jokes. ) ) Eh what? It's not Eric Gill because he was particularly religious. I read ) part of his autobiography once, and have hated him ever since. No Gill Sans ) for me! I got you beat. I've read Edward Johnston's biography and two of Hermann Zapf's seven autobiographies!! ) I used to live quite close to the village where he had his community, which ) was also fairly near the farmhouse where Virginia Woolf lived (which was ) theoretically open to the public but in practice always closed). Apparently ) Sussex used to be kook central before usenet was invented, with novelists, ) artists and typographers rampaging across the downs on all sides. ) ) But I digress. Give us a clue? Okay. Here is the entire article in question, with my own glosses for my own glossy prose, followed by two related articles. I apologize for the bumpy ride, but I wrote most of this article on the subway, and it gets bumpy on those trains that travel below ground but over the homeless. Also I missed my stop on the #39 bus because of this article. It would be interesting if someone drew a flowchart of this article. ////////// begin attempts to explain ////////// On May 6, James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > Sian Massey (massey@altricm.demon.co.uk) wrote: > ) > ) David DeLaney (dbd@gatekeeper.vic.com) wrote: > ) ] > ) ] James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > ) ] > > ) ] > Oh, dear. You have no idea of the evil ideas you're giving me: > ) ] > ) ] But we're about to! Yay! > ) ] > ) ] Do they make diapers with dancing bears on them, by the way? And/or > ) ] tubas? > > Why would they make a tuba with dancing bears on it? Here we are clearly discussing one of my favorite tropes to use when posting followups to silly articles: The dancing bears who parade around whenever I can't think of anything to say because any other possible response would be too obvious, or when the thing in question was too silly for me to be able to respond to it like a normal human. So sometimes you may see "The Dancing Bears Of Obviousness", and other times you may see "The Dancing Bears Of 'Hey, Kurt Stocklmeir Is Talking About Being Forced To Disco Against His Will'" although I don't know which of the two is represented by the above. The dancing bears are sort of my all-purpose "Unable to proceed from this point, so I will PULL ROPE TO DROP WALLS!" (The latter, of course, is a reference to Bob Hope's movie "Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number!", in which his tool shed has a rope hanging from the ceiling with a big sign saying "PULL ROPE TO DROP WALLS", and you'd never guess what happens next!) > Dancing bears belong on things like old-fashioned swim caps. The ones > they wore in the olden days, with the chin strap with the buckle the size > of an eight-track cassette. And on the cap each little bear is wearing > their own tiny swim cap with a tiny giant buckle! I respectfully decline to explain this one because if you could have gotten the reference you would have already, unless your cat knocked the key to your handcuffs under the sofa. > ) YES!!! I am happy to say that here in the UK our childrens' nappies > ) have dancing bears holding little twirly windmills on them. > > And inside every little twirly windmill an atheist typeface designer > is spinning in his grave while Ben Franklin is on his way across the > Atlantic to rent the corpse for use in practical jokes. > > DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY OF DELIBERATELY OBSCURE ARTSY-FARTSY CULTURAL > REFERENCES ABOUT LONG-DEAD TYPOGRAPHERS: 0.99! (Not even Umberto Eco > has ever achieved more than 0.93!) Okay, here's the big story. I think I've told this before, but it clearly hasn't propagated to Andrew over there in .lu (LutheranLand?*) so I'll tell it again. John Baskerville was a self-made man and artisan of the highest caliber, circa the time of the American Revolution. He lived in Birmingham, England. At the time, most printers in England or those newfangled "United States" were using William Caslon's typeface. This was in the days before you could mail-order thousands of fonts from a catalog, pretty much everyone used the same style until tastes changed. Everyone either used Caslon, or cheap knockoffs cast from molds made from Caslon fonts, or cheaper knockoffs of the knockoffs. Anyway, Baskerville, being the Kubrickian control freak he was, built his own printing press, invented his own kind of paper (the first smooth white paper ever), invented his own ink to go with it, and... horror of horrors... he... designed... his... own... typeface. To the untrained eye, the Baskerville font seems only slightly different from the Caslon font, but Baskerville's was just different enough that even the untrained eye can see that Baskerville's is a little cleaner, a little rounder, a little more sparkly. There was nothing wrong with either man's design, and they were both variations on the same theme, but one was New & Different. Ben Franklin, being a typophile, had been corresponding with people such as Giambattista Bodoni (who was way out on the avant-garde of type design at the time) and Baskerville. Baskerville sent him a specimen of his fancy-schmancy new typeface, and Franklin loved it. But, when he showed it around town, the other Philadelphia printers all hated it.... because everyone used Caslon, therefore Caslon was perfect, and any improvement on it was BAD! So, Franklin took a printed a sample of the Caslon typeface and showed it to people, telling them, "Hey, here's a new typeface designed by MR. BASKERVILLE", and they fell all over themselves complaining that it was horrible and evil compared to Caslon's typeface, because people are bozos. Especially people looking at typefaces. One guy, upon staring at the mis-labelled authentic Caslon, told Franklin that his eyes were suffering from "Baskerville pains". Baskerville's type did go on to be world-famous -- and even became the dominant form, albeit after Baskerville's death -- largely because Baskerville printed some beautiful books with it. His combination of his slick new typeface, bright smooth white paper, and sharper ink allowed him to produce some really stunning-looking coffee-table books, such as a giant Bible. However, there were still reactionary people, such as the typographer who wrote something along the lines of "Mr. Baskerville's types shall be the cause of the blinding of all the people of the nation." Baskerville eventually died (a natural death, unlike certain other famous typeface designers I could mention**) and, when they read his will, it said something about how he didn't believe in that God guy, so they couldn't put him in the cemetery with the good Christians. Instead, they propped him up inside a windmill in his back yard. A while later, the windmill mysteriously caught fire and was damaged enough that it had to be torn down, and his corpse became homeless. Eventually he turned up in the back room of the village smithy who charged people a pence or two to gawk at a mummified human corpse. And now you know the REST of the story! Oh, wait, I forgot the asterisks: (* "Luther" was an early name for the character who eventually became "H.R. Pufnstuf" -- except without arms -- but Sid & Marty Krofft had to change the name of the show to something other than "Lutherland" because the TV executives told them it sounded too much like "LutheranLand".) (** Francesco Griffo, who cut the beautiful typeface that Aldus Manutius used circa 1500 to print Pietro Bembo's writings, is believed to have been hanged for the murder of his brother. A.M. Cassandre -- whose real name I can't remember -- killed himself after losing a typeface design contest to Adrian Frutiger. And Hermann Zapf was nearly executed during World War II by Tunisians, who captured him upon his release from a POW camp and couldn't read his discharge papers, but fortunately he had learned a single sentence in Arabic -- "A good man does not kill another good man" -- and so he was able to return to Germany. Incidentally, the others in the Nazi army didn't respect him much because he spent the whole war drawing pictures of flowers and practicing his calligraphy.) ...and I also forgot the part about Umberto Eco. You see, Umberto Eco is a novelist (author of "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum") who writes densely (nothing happens for the first 200 or so pages of "Foucault's Pendulum") and makes references to lots of facts that most people won't know. (In other words, he's exactly like me except dull.) "Foucault's Pendulum" has an entire subtext about typeface designers, mostly those from Renaissance Italy. You see, Pietro Bembo -- remember him from asterisk number two? -- gave Aldus Manutius an ancient Greek coin with a dolphin coiled around an anchor, and Aldus used this image as his printer's mark, thus the colophon was invented (to the great joy of those of us who want to know 500 years after the fact who typeset what.) This mark was, of course, imitated by most of the other printers of the day, and even some up to the present day, because, as the Ben Franklin story shows, there are a lot of people who are doing typography under the philosophy that change is bad therefore plagiarism is good. This stuff about Bembo (who eventually had a font named after him by Monotype, based on the one cut by Griffo, the murderer) is important to following the secret hidden other plot of "Foucault's Pendulum". In fact, most of Umberto Eco's characters have names taken from great typographers or typefaces. Sometimes they're disguised slightly. For instance, "Belbo" in "Foucault's Pendulum" represents Bembo, but this becomes obvious once the coin with the dolphin and anchor shows up in the book. If you are a postmodernist AND paranoiac AND typographer -- and let's face it, that is the intended audience for this novel -- you can make up some more associations which Eco probably didn't even intend, for instance, the character of "Diotallevi" can be "Diotima", a typeface by Gudrun Zapf von Hesse (Mrs. Hermann Zapf), although it's more likely Eco was simply choosing the same Hebrew root word she did. "The Name of the Rose" (which I haven't read) apparently features a character named "Baskerville". So you see, that Baskerville is the namesake the Scottish guy in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Hound Of The Baskervilles", which lets you get from Umberto Eco to Arthur Conan Doyle in one simple surrealist association (the way you make one of those, according to surrealist poet Bill Knott, is you make two associations and then throw out the middle one: "apple"->"taffy"->"puller" becomes "apple"--->"puller".) So the above several pages are the simple explanation of my sentence about how Ben Franklin pulling practical jokes, a typographer's corpse, and the author of a novel about a conspiracy of printers ties the windmill to Umberto Eco even better than Umberto Eco could. And also I've already explained the bit where I tied Umberto Eco to Arthur Conan Doyle even though I haven't even quoted it yet. You have now learned more from this one alt.religion.kibology article than you could from an entire season of "Win Ben Stein's Money", and I haven't even started yet! Now back to the paragraph in question: > ) No tubas though. > > That's because the people of the world would not be able to withstand > THE TERROR OF TODDLER TUBAS AT TOIDY TIME!!! > > A film starring Billy Barty, the Hermine Midgets, and Linda Hunt. > > (0.78) "The Terror of Tiny Town" was a classic all-midget film (before they stopped making all-midget films and switched to making all-little-person films.) Billy Barty was, of course, Hollywood's most famous and beloved and accomplished little person (he was Sigmund The Sea Monster for Sid & Marty Krofft, although I don't know if he was a Lutheran), the Hermine Midgets were a troupe of midget who appeared in such exploitation vehicles, and Linda Hunt's kinda like a shorter version of Rhoda's mom. Linda Hunt was on "Space Rangers" with Clint Howard, who was on "Star Trek" with a glass of pink grapefruit juice and a bald wig designed to make him look like an alien midget, which was the opposite from the subsequent episode "Miri" in which a little person played a child, and only partly opposite to the episode "Plato's Stepchildren" in which a little person played a little person. He was Michael Dunn, who was best known as "Dr. Loveless" on "The Wild Wild West", before he was replaced by evil Paul Williams as the son of Dr. Loveless in the TV-movie "The Wild Wild West Revisited", and then by the top half of Kevin Kline in the movie "Wild Wild West" because movies can no longer exploit little people by telling us that midgets are evil, but it's still okay for all people in wheelchairs to be evil. Incidentally, "The Terror of Tiny Town" was much more entertaining than "Wild Wild West". I don't recall whether Billy Barty was in "The Terror of Tiny Town", but if he wasn't, he SHOULD have been! The film, incidentally, starred Billy Curtis and someone named "Little Billy", which must have been demeaning for him: BILLY CURTIS: Hi, I'm Billy. What's your name? LITTLE BILLY: Little Billy. BILLY CURTIS: Ha ha you're short! LITTLE BILLY: I wish the 20th century would hurry up and end so that people will switch to picking on people in wheelchairs! BILLY CURTIS: And meet my friend, Benny Hill. He's gonna be stealing your act as "Big Benny". And he'll spend lots of time beating up a guy named "Little Jackie Wright". > ) I think we count as deadheads with children, because we went to > ) the Dead's last UK concert. I'd be happy to buy childrens' stuff with > ) dancing skeletons on. My older son would think that was cool. > > Must... resist... urge... to... link... "The Code Of The Dancing Men"... > to... John... Baskerville... surrealist... segue... too... easy... > > (Narrowly avoided scoring 0.33, which would have put me in the Robert Fish > category.) (0.84) Ding! The time-reversed callback to the explanation of this line now pays off! Now that the gun has been fired, I can hide it under Syd Field's armchair with the imploding dynamite! Unless I make a mistake and hide it under Syd Mead's armchair, which looks the same except for the hundreds of unlabelled glowing pushbuttons glued all over it! Eek, now I gotta explain that. But instead I'll get distracted and explain that Robert L. Fish wrote a series of "Sherlock Holmes" parodies about a guy named "Schlock Homes", har-har-har, Earth humor. He is not to be confused with Edwin Carp, old-time radio raconteur most famous for the poem about the man who attempted the thing that couldn't be done. That poem was, of course, ripped off by Benny Hill, but that is true of all other comedy of the first half of the 20th century. You may recall Edwin Carp once performed it on "The Dick van Dyke Show", which was originally conceived as a sitcom starring Carl Reiner, but Reiner was replaced with van Dyke because Reiner was "too Jewish", hence in another article I intimated that Rob "Meathead" Reiner was the replacement for Larry Matthews, who played Richie Petrie (see, Meathead was the son of the guy who was replaced by the father of Larry Matthews.) You need to know this to get the reference I made to the Be operating system. More later. > ) He thinks clowns are scary, though, once again proving childrens' innate > ) kibological nature. > > I don't think clowns are scary! Not as long as they keep their clothes on. > > -- K. > > Now, Blue Man Group, they're > scary whether they're nude or not! This is because I keep trying to convince people that once a year Blue Man Group surprises the audience by just coming out on stage NAKED with their bodies painted blue and exposing themselves a while, like the guy in "Huckleberry Finn", but nobody ever believes me, just like they never believe me when I claim that the three guys in Blue Man Group are not the real ones but an officially-licensed Bozo-style franchise, because Blue Man Group are performing nightly in Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, and several other cities at the same time. At least Cirque de Soleil was honorable enough to give each of their performing troupes different scripts and different titles for their performances. They kind of had to, given that there are two different Cirque de Soleils performing every night one block apart in Las Vegas. But they charge more and don't even rise to the entertainment level of Blue Man Group performing marshmallow fellatio. Frankly, I prefer the Jordan's Furniture commercials. Now THAT's wit! Incidentally, Cirque de Soleil's "O" is not to be confused with the upcoming movie titled "O" which is not to be confused with "The Story of O" which is not to be confused with Oprah's ego-tastical magazine, "O", which got sued for being legally confused with another magazine named "O" in a court of law, the latter featuring lots of photos of women writhing around in strange shiny elastic outfits, while Cirque de Soleil just features gender-ambiguous people writhing around in strange shiny elastic outfits. And only one of the two has ever featured pictures of bathing caps covered with little embossed pictures of women wearing little bathing caps covered with little embossed bathing caps. ////////// another article to be explained ////////// On April 20, James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > "Lulu" (hhobbie@hotmail.com) wrote: > ) > ) James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > ) > > ) > And IRAC's mobile data terminal, aka "Rover", is beyond pathetic. > ) > ) How can you say that? If it weren't for Rover, Wonder Woman would > ) never have been able to save that blonde girl who does her hair like > ) Judy Strangis (aka Dynagirl) and has a photographic memory which enables > ) her to do spectacularly at "Sea Wolf" (remember that arcade oldie? > ) With the periscope?) and also to win big at blackjack, but then she > ) stumbles into the room where the bad guys are and "sees too much" > ) and they try to kill her but they can't because Rover and Wonder Woman > ) save her! Rover rocks! > > But Rover couldn't climb stairs, so it was more pathetic than the > average Dalek because it wasn't even armed with a fire extinguisher > OR a toilet plunger. > > When my toilet clogs, if I have to choose between Rover and a Dalek, > I'll hire the Dalek any day. Okay, in the "Wonder Woman" TV series starring Lynda Carter (replacing Cathy Lee Crosby, who was in the pilot) the show started out with her fighting Nazis and the Japanese in the 1940s, but then when the show hopped to another network after its first season suddenly she was in the late 1970s. Lyle Waggoner didn't age a bit (they just claimed he was his own son) but the show was otherwise updated with super-modern technology, such as "IRAC", which was a computer represented by a screen covered with black cardboard with some Lite Brite pegs stuck in it and a single light bulb behind them, not to be confused with "ORAC", the super-awesome computer from "Blake's 7" (spelled "Blakes7" onscreen) which was a fishtank with random handfuls of perspex and Christmas lights inside, not to be confused with "Slave", the other super- awesome computer from "Blake's 7" made from two colanders. IRAC's sidekick was "Rover", a crappy little robot dog that made wheezing noises, not to be confused with "K.9" from "Doctor Who". I think K.9 was not in any of the episodes featuring the evil Daleks, which were evil mutant guys in wheelchairs with a bumpy shell around them that made them look like big saltshakers. The Daleks, like all super-evil alien invaders, were completely invulnerable except for one large and obvious and easily-exploitable weakness: They couldn't go up stairs. Also they went insane and exploded if you hung your hat on their eyestalk. And they could only pick up objects that could stick to their toilet plunger. Lyle Waggoner was "Steve Trevor" on "Wonder Woman". He quit "The Carol Burnett Show" to take that job, and so Carol Burnett replaced him with Dick van Dyke. At the time, van Dyke was in a serious career slump -- he was getting old but not old enough to appeal to the elderly the way he does now, and also he had a bit of a drinkie-drinkie problem, but it wasn't as funny as his pretending to be drink on "The Dick van Dyke" show. There, he was married to Mary Tyler Moore, who eventually got her own sitcom -- she was supposed to play a newly-divorced woman, but the network insisted that it be changed to her being stood up at the altar, because they thought we'd think she dumped Dick van Dyke and apparently that would have been bad to have her be divorced from the wrong fictional character. Then eventually, her character's best friend, "Rhoda" (Valerie Harper) got her own spinoff, but became progressively less Jewish, probably because the network felt she had been contaminated by the Carl Reiner -> Dick van Dyke -> Mary Tyler Moore -> Valerie Harper chain. However, her mother -- the giant version of Linda Hunt -- was allowed to remain Jewish until she was on all those paper towel commercials, because everyone knows that anti-Semites use lots of paper towels. (The modern KKK makes their robes out of 'em for easy disposability and kinky tear-off costume games.) As far as Judy Strangis goes, she was an extremely over-the-top "actress" who played "Electrawoman"'s sidekick "Dynagirl" in "Electrawoman and Dynagirl", which was Sid & Marty Krofft's "Batman" knockoff that they made after they said "Hey! Let's make something like 'Batman' except with women, and this time, let's make it RIDICULOUS!" It co-starred Norman Alden as "Frank", who was drunk out of his mind in every scene, even though the character wasn't written that way (working for Sid & Marty drives people to the bottle. Perhaps Dick van Dyke secretly worked for them inside one of the hats on "Lidsville".) They drove around in a car shaped like a Pringle's chip, made from a gussied-up golf cart. As they came out of that same Bronson Canyon cave that was used for the REAL Batcave, the film was accelerated to double speed just like on "Batman", with the effect of making the Electracar look like it was going almost six miles an hour. Dynagirl was sort of like Robin only dumber. Most of her dialogue was "ELECTRA-WOW!" or "ELECTRA-OH-NO!" because she was Electra-Tarded. The other subtle difference between this show and "Batman" was that between scenes, instead of a Batman logo, they showed the word "EW" on the screen and all the kids at home screamed, "EW!!!!" at the sight of Judy Strangis. > ) > And let's face it, Lyle Waggoner's acting ability pales in comparison > ) > to Burt Ward's. > ) > ) But Lyle's teeth and eyes are twinklier than Burt's. Plus he did penance > ) for his meager acting skills by serving time on "The Carol Burnett Show." > > That was before he was on "Wonder Woman". When he left to do "Wonder Woman", > they replaced him with Dick Van Dyke. And I don't think Lyle Waggoner's > painful existence on "The Carol Burnett Show" can be justified as penance > for something he not only hadn't done yet and would result in the collateral > damage of torturing poor Dick Van Dyke. Also, Lyle Waggoner appeared with his whole head painted silvery-white in "The Time Travellers", a movie more bozotic than, and funnier than, "The Terror of Tiny Town", and not even for the fact that 90% of the special effects were done through stage magic and 10% through repetition, but because Lyle Waggoner's fellow highly-evolved bodypaint person was a bald woman played by an actress named Poupee Gamin. "The Time Travellers" is not to be confused with the stultifyingly dull "Creation of the Humanoids", which Andy Warhol claimed was his favorite movie because enjoyed tricking pretentious art fans into renting really bad movies. It starred Dudley Manlove with his whole head painted silvery-white as an overacting robot. You may recall him as the leading overactor in "Plan 9 from Outer Space", in which he played "Eros". Sadly, Dudley Manlove died before he and Lyle Waggoner could team up as "Very White Man Group". (Their act would consist of eating black marshmallows.) > ) We must all be kind to Lyle. > > I would prefer to be kind to Dick Van Dyke, even if he may have gotten > his job as a result of the network's anti-Semitism. "The Dick Van Dyke Show" > reminds us that anti-Semitism has a wacky, zany side. You know, if Hermann Zapf had tried just a little harder, he could have gotten the rest of the Nazi army interested in calligraphy and then instead of rounding up the Jews they would have just gone around forcing everyone to use lots of swashes. > -- K. > > I probably would have liked the > original version of the show with > Carl Reiner just as much. But if the > network couldn't fire him for being > "too Jewish" then they would have > had to kick Woody Allen off the > "What's My Line?" panel instead, > and then the funniest part of "Everything > You Always Wanted To Know About Sex" > would never get made. Woody Allen did indeed appear on "What's My Line?" in the days of black and white television -- the Game Show Network aired one of those episodes the day I wrote the above. His movie of "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex" contains a funny parody titled "What's My Perversion?" in which the panelists ask basically the same questions. The segment ends with Rabbi Chaim Baumel getting to live out his fantasy, which is for a dominatrix to tie him up while he watches his wife eat pork on network TV. Whenever I write about wacko religious cults, I like to refer to L. Ron Hubbard's "The Creation of Human Ability", which has much the same picture on its dust jacket, except the woman is on stage instead of on TV, and she's wearing a furry teddy bear costume while she's eating the pork chop. Does this mean that Woody Allen is a Scientologist slipping covert R-6 Bank Implant imagery into his ALLEGEDLY silly movies in order send secret messages to the Operating Thetans in the audience? ////////// a third article to explain ////////// On May 6, James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > Joshua E Millard (pulp@WPI.EDU) wrote: > ) > ) James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > ) > > ) > everyone loves Bac*Os. <-- SARCASM. NOBODY USES BAC*OS. > ) > ) Kibo Makes Baby Jean-Louis Gassee Cry! > > Hey! He was funny back when he was on "All In The Family"! > Well, no he wasn't, but I'm sure he would have been if "All In The Family" > had been funny and if he didn't have to stand behind Sally Struthers in > every scene. > > LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY OF SEGUE: 0.97, PLUS EXTRA AGGRAVATION POINTS BECAUSE > THE MISSING LINK IS BARBARA BAIN. This has nothing to do with the dumb game show "The Missing Link", which is exactly like "Survivor" plus "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?" only with a host more obnoxious than Regis Philbin and Jeff Probst combined. Incidentally, Regis Philbin was in the "What's My Perversion?" sketch. He also played the emperor in a 1993 version of "The Emperor's New Clothes", in case you want to think about him being naked. BRRRRRR! > -- K. > > Barbara Bain helps Kibo be > surreal to make the Jewish > Richie Petrie cry. I believe I already explained this one in advance, so it's not obscure at all. Except for the part about BeOS. Joshua was intimating that BeOS sounded like Bac*Os, and as we all know, nobody uses either the maroon aquarium gravel or the operating system that has the friendly user interface of UNIX with the power of Mac OS. It's the OS that's popular with people who won't use Linux 'cause it's not alternative enough and who can't afford one of the new Amigas. You see, as my favorite Barbara Bain movie, "Spirit of '76", begins, a two-hundred-year-old man (played by Carl Reiner, not that other guy) lies dying, and he's the only one who remembers the principles of the Founding Fathers of the U.S.A. because all recorded history was accidentally degaussed. So three time-travellers are sent back to 1776 to bring back a copy of the Constitution, but because their time machine has the same technology as the silly car in "Back To The Future N+1", they wind up in 1976, the lowest point in the history of American culture. Disco and polyester were huge, but "Star Wars" and "Saturday Night Fever" hadn't happened yet because everyone was too busy partying all year for no reason in an effort to scrub a major energy crisis and Watergate from their brains. Anyhow, the time travellers infiltrate a self-help seminar being given by a guy who is clearly a parody of Werner Erhard (you know, the EST guy, also played by David Letterman on "Mork & Mindy".) played by Carl Reiner's son, Rob "Meathead" Reiner. Barbara Bain is his brainwashed, zombie-like disciple, who is wearing a blouse with the Constitution printed on it. The important fact is that Rob Reiner is ranting about self-actualization, he is in front of a big sign that says "BE, INC." which is also the name of the computer company owned by French former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, the computer magnate with the gassiest-sounding name ever. If he and Poupee Gamin would do a movie together, with Benny Hill, Blue Man Group, Billy Barty, Dudley Manlove, Hermann Zapf, and Ben Franklin, I'm sure that hilarity would ensue. -- K. I was also going to explain the article about the two "Steppenwolf"s, but I don't want to get Ayn Rand mentioned in the same article as Virginia Woolf, especially since I don't know who Virginia Woolf is. Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 17:13:06 -0400 Subject: Re: Laptop Waterloo In alt.religion.kibology, Kibo wrote: Regarding my article explaining my other article: Stefan Elisa Kapusniak (stefan.kapus@zetnet.co.uk) wrote: > > Sherilyn (621@sherilyn.org.uk) wrote: > > > > [...] and Dick Van Dyke, > > Kinky and/or possibly illegal sexual practices Okay, I forgot to explain that before Stefan said it. You see, for some reason, TV Guide (the American equivalent of the UK's Radio Times) once printed a picture of Mary Tyler Moore riding Dick van Dyke like a pony, and they were both in leather, and she had a riding crop, and the world's widest mouth as ever. I swear the two of them really posed for an S&M picture for TV Guide for no apparent reason. (Those of you who were alive in the 1960s may recall that she once caused a scandal by wearing pants on TV. Of course, Lucille Ball wore pants all the time, but that was okay 'cause she was always falling down, whereas Mary Tyler Moore was supposed to be intelligent so she was required to do the housework in a cocktail dress. Eventually it was agreed that she could wear capri slacks in one -- but only one -- scene per episode. Incidentally, her previous TV role had been as a disembodied pair of legs on a detective show. She was Dick Diamond's secretary and in every episode, she answered the phone from the waist down, va-va-va-voom!) I also forgot to mention that you can get from Ben Franklin to Diana Rigg via the Hellfire Club, which also means that Diana Rigg in leather dominatrix gear links to Mary Tyler Moore in leather dominatrix gear, which links back to "O" magazine, closing up one of the shorter loops in our graph of the history of typography. And I forgot to mention that "Frasier"'s Jane Leeves was one of Benny Hill's bimbos. I'm not sure how she ties in with fine typography, although she does have the same accent that Dick Van Dyke was trying to do in "Mary Poppins" and/or "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", one of which co-starred... Benny Hill! AAAAIIEEE!!! WE'RE TRAPPED IN A CLOSED LOOP OF BENNY HILL!!! The movie also co-starred Gert Frobe, who can be tied into Blue Man Group and all the other bodypaint fetishists under discussion because he was "Goldfinger", although I still think he looked like Gerald Ford, who had nothing to do with Ford motorcars, whose logo was designed by Paul Rand, who had nothing to do with Random House, which was run by Bennett Cerf, who was replaced on "What's My Line" by... Woody Allen! All the loops in the conspiracy close up if you just do a little more research. -- K. Incidentally, today is the 25th anniversary of Paul Harvey saying "And now you know... the REST of the story!" I swear I would have thought it was more like the 40th or 75th but my TV says 25th, and TV is never wrong about anything, although they come close whenever they talk about typography.