From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: ne.general,alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Ethics violations. Boston Public Library. Followup-To: alt.sex.fetish.head-librarian Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 16:10:04 -0400 In three equally important newsgroups (ne.general, alt.journalism.newspapers, and alt.religion.kibology) Don Saklad (dsaklad@nestle.ai.mit.edu) wrote: > > It appears that our Boston Public Library executive officers have > violated the ethics of reference desk services, readers advisory and > information services by requiring that enquiries be directed to our > BPL President's Offices only to be stonewalled. Public libraries > clientele have a right to legitimately public information even if that > information would be background information about City of Boston and > agencies of the city or Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Don, if it's _public_ information, why are you trying to get it from the library? Public information is everywhere! You should just go read a bathroom wall, or better yet, read the New York Times, which is the newspaper of record, and therefore contains all the news that's fit to print. They even have just enough space left over to print that little box that tells you that they contain all the news that's fit to print, although they don't have enough space to include a comics page to tell you that World War I was won by a beagle. Also, for information about Massachusetts, maybe you should try going over to the library at the State House. That's the library in the big building that has a more rational class of crazy people obsessed with it. > Cc: Board of Library Commissioners > Intellectual Freedom Advocates American Library Association > Inspector General Commonwealth of Massachusetts > Committee on Ethics Massachusetts Legislature > Bernie Margolis Boston Public Library. > Ruth Kowal Boston Public Library > BPLPSA Boston Public Library Professional Staff Association > Editors The Real Sheet newsletter > Mayor's Office Don, you're supposed to be keeping your official Enemies List secret, because if these people see it, they'll just change their names. -- K. Bernie Margolis just changed his name and says you can only reach him by picking up the phone and yelling into it, "OWAH TAGOO SIAM" three times. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Crazy people and retail Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 19:18:13 -0400 Rox (roxanne.gray@worldnet.att.net) wrote: > > Speaking as a former Borders Books employee (from the World Trade Center no > less) I can tell you members of that breed of weirdo have some serious time > on their hands and so spread the kook around. Retail employees bear to > brunt because they don't have bouncers at the door. > > But for your possible amusement I present 2 of my favorite loons > > Example 1 > > A guy walked up to the info desk I was working to ask if we had any foreign > language dictionaries because he needed to translate something. I said sure > we do, what language do you need...at which point he informed me he had a > letter from Jesus Christ at home, he wasn't sure what language it was in and > he needed to know what it said. I must have gotten the "back away slowly" > look on my face because he hastened to tell me that he was NOT crazy--he > didn't think Jesus had written to him personally. I told him we didn't > have any Aramaic dictionaries but I would be happy to try and order one for > him. That seemed to make him really happy, until we looked up the prices. > He decided to try the local library. I wonder why Don never posted the results. > Example 2 > > We had a guy who visited us regularly. We never found out his name but we > called him "The Happy Buddha" because...well he looked the part. He used to > drink those 16 oz frozed mocha nasties like they were shots of Cuervo, three > at a time. His car's interior was covered in tin foil. I never knew if > that was to keep something out or to keep something in. Oh and he also used > to read the Calculus books while quietly giggling to himself. I wonder why Archie never posted the results. > I'm sure he was thinking "Silly Humans and their 'Mathematics'." Puh-lease! What we nutty people are actually thinking is "Silly Earth humans and their primitive Earth 'mathematics'." I mean, it doesn't even have a factor for crispiness, and therefore is useless for calculating the tensile strength of a house made of bacon! > The toy store next to us had to ban him from coming in there because > he used to walk in and stare at the children. Hey! I only did that once! And it was because the first assignment in the "Writing Children's Literature" class was to "go somewhere where there are children and observe the children"! I got ejected from the very same FAO Schwartz store that inspired the book "Toys That Don't Care". Now I can't buy the $200 "Trend Forecaster Barbie"! > And I haven't even mentioned the customer who stalked me, even tracking me > down when I transferred to another state. I hear that you can keep stalkers from coming to your state by wrapping the entire state in aluminum foil. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to translate a letter from Christo. -- K. But if I mistakenly translate one from Crisco, I'll start wrapping baked potatoes in a thousand miles of aluminum foil. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Side order of ribs. Hold the SARS. Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 19:21:11 -0400 Tamara (tamaraharris@sprint.ca) wrote: > > Yesterday I received fantastic news that the Tularemia that has plagued me > for over 7 months is finally gone. Fool was *so* excited by this news that > he rushed home from work and picked me up and hugged me really hard, > spinning me around and around. > > And fracturing 6 ribs in the process. > > We got home from the ER at Western Hospital at around 5 in the morning. He > feels *absolutely awful* about this. At first I just thought it was just > bruising but then it REALLY started to hurt. He broke 'em. 6 of 'em. 4 on > one side, 2 on the other. Good thing it wasn't 4 on one side and only 1 on the other because that would have caused you to change gender, like in the Bible. Also note that pain didn't exist in the Garden Of Eden, so Adam didn't really mind the whole rib thing, except that Eve kept complaining that S&M didn't work right in this allegedly fun-filled painless partyland. > Today he didn't go in to work, considering we were up all night in the ER. > He's doing a run to the pharmacy in a few minutes to get my happy-pill > prescription filled. Tell him to say hi to Kevin McDonald for me. Also tell him to give Harry Stinson a biiiiiiiig crunchy hug. > So, as for SARS. Well first of all, they didn't even let Fool into the > waiting room at the hospital. They stopped him at the door and told him > he had to wait outside. It's frikken COLD out and we all know how slow > things move in Emergency Rooms. It's something like eighty degrees here now. But I'm on the Green Line so things even out because I'm not moving nearly as fast as an Emergency Room. Also, the local hospital doesn't have an Emergency Room, it has an Emergency Department, because they got tired of jamming hundreds of people into the same broom closet. > By the time I was released, he pretty much looked like Frosty the Snowman. Well, serves him right for eating nothing but Tim Horton's doughnuts while he was waiting until he got really fat. Also Charles Nelson Reilly wants his corncob pipe back. > Remember, this was in the wee hours of the morning. Nothing near the > hospital was open so he just hung around in the parking bay, freezing > his tushie off. > > I was greeted by nurses who might as well have been wearing Hazmat suits. > They put a mask on me and whisked me in where I was examined by someone I > believed was Darth Vader. I was then taken to Radiology where I was met by > even more people wearing silly get-ups. Also, Charles Nelson Reilly wants his green latex bondage hood back. > What is so fucked up about this is that I was at the Tropical Diseases Unit > at General Hospital YESTERDAY MORNING. NOBODY was Hazmatted. And the TD > Unit is a place that specializes in curing people who have really weird and > wonderful germs. I was going to make up a TV show about The Wondrously Wonderful World of Wonderful Germs (sponsored by Dolly Madison Zingers) but I just looked up and didn't recognize the environment and said to myself, "That's odd, I don't remember there being a rail yard before the last stop," and realized I was locked inside an empty Green Line train just past the end of the line. So I had to wait a few minutes for them to let me out. You are the first person ever to have made me miss the last stop. Now I don't think germs are so wonderful any more. > I guess the germs at Western Hospital are bigger and stronger and able to > beat up the germs at Toronto General so everyone has to be extra careful. > > Anyway, I survived. I'm really sore. Coughing is torture. I won't even > begin to describe how much sneezing hurts. > > Dan's gonna be my slave for a very, very long time. About two weeks ago, I was on a Red Line train (a long trip returning from a shopping plaza in Braintree) and there was this crazy guy who went through the whole train and yelled at each passenger individually, "I'M GONNA KEEP YOU IN BONDAGE!" But I ignored him because he didn't look a thing like Diana Rigg. He also shouted "I LOVE SURGERY!" a few times and rambled on about how people in Washington D.C. could beat up people in Boston because we all owned our own houses. So, anyway, you should remind Dan "I'M GONNA KEEP YOU IN BONDAGE!" every day. And if he gives you any guff, you can borrow Charles Nelson Reilly's green latex hood again. And if anyone asks, you love surgery, and your germs can beat up Boston's germs. -- K. If they hadn't let me out of the train, I'd have had to ask alt.religion.kibology for help. And then people would've laughed at me! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Side order of ribs. Hold the SARS. Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 21:37:18 -0400 Joseph Michael Bay (jmbay@Stanford.EDU) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > About two weeks ago, I was on a Red Line train (a long trip returning > > from a shopping plaza in Braintree) and there was this crazy guy who > > went through the whole train and yelled at each passenger individually, > > "I'M GONNA KEEP YOU IN BONDAGE!" > > That's funny, because about two weeks ago my advisor told > us we had to stop using so much straw in the bricks we make. I'm pretty sure the quote was "I'M GONNA KEEP YOU IN BONDAGE!", not "I'M GONNA MAKE YOU MY APPRENTICE!" Also, how much skill is involved in making bricks other than knowing how much straw to put in (some) and how many Gummi Bears to put in (none)? I can't imagine that as a brick-maker's apprentice your master would have many excuses to whip you. Unless you mean you're apprenticed to the Lego corporation, in which case I imagine men in white coats are hovering over your shoulder with 500-item checklists and micrometers, because those Lego bricks are made with so much precision that if the Danes made cars they wouldn't have to use door hinges, the doors would just pop in and out due to submicroscopically perfect friction-fitting. -- K. Someday I'll have some apprentices of my own. Sooner if they start selling them at Wal-Mart. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fan.beable Subject: Re: League Update Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 19:22:19 -0400 Beable van Polasm (beable+unsenet@beable.com) wrote: > > Team P W D L B For Agn Pts Diff > 1 Raiders 6 6 0 0 1 181 108 14 73 > 2 Roosters 7 5 0 2 0 187 111 10 76 > 3 Knights 7 5 0 2 0 180 134 10 46 > 4 Warriors 7 5 0 2 0 184 152 10 32 > 5 Broncos 7 5 0 2 0 160 141 10 19 > 6 Sea Eagles 6 3 0 3 1 134 134 8 0 > 7 Storm 6 3 0 3 1 150 156 8 -6 > 8 Dragons 6 3 0 3 1 124 142 8 -18 > 9 Panthers 6 3 0 3 1 131 156 8 -25 > 10 Bulldogs 7 3 0 4 0 164 128 6 36 > 11 Cowboys 7 3 0 4 0 151 192 6 -41 > 12 Eels 7 2 0 5 0 146 168 4 -22 > 13 Sharks 5 0 0 5 2 92 156 4 -64 > 14 WstTigers 7 2 0 5 0 112 179 4 -67 > 15 Rabbitohs 7 1 0 6 0 148 187 2 -39 > > Prima facie, it looks like the Rabbitohs are at the bottom. But check > out the "W" for "Wins" column of the Sharkies. Yes that's right, all > the Sharks's points so far have come from Byes, and therefore John > "Sharky" Burrage's team is coming LAST!!! HAW HAW! I have no idea what the logos and jerseys of any of these teams look like, so I'm just going to criticize their imaginary graphic design. Raiders -- Using letters so large that they had to split the team's name across two lines is bad enough, but why did they have to use extra-large lettering for "DERS"? Also, the picture of the spray can shooting a cloud of soccer balls at a cartoon roach isn't as funny as it thinks, unlike most sports logos which are more funny to me than they are to their designers. Roosters -- The googly eyes in the twin "O"s are not working for me. Perhaps they should stop putting little motors in the shirts just to make the eyes spin. Knights -- It's a fine drawing of a knight, except that they'd drawn the suit of armor backwards on him. You can tell by the way he breaks his knees every time he bends his legs. Warriors -- Oh, you can tell they just pasted Mel Gibson's head onto someone else's body. Broncos -- It was cute when the Albany River Rats put the front of the rat on the front of the jersey and the back of the rat on the back of the jersey. The Broncos should do that, or at least use the front of the horse on both sides, because we really don't need to see the horse's hinder from all directions. Sea Eagles -- The speech-balloon where the bird is saying "BLUB BLUB" has to go. Storm -- A mean-looking thundercloud zapping people with lightning and dousing them with water is a great idea. But why is the water so yellow? Dragons -- I really like the fire-breathing dragon, although the mysterious blotch above him fails to completely conceal where the words "DUNGEONS &" used to be. Panthers -- Do the rules permit the pink panther to play while he has a hankie sticking that far out of his pocket? Bulldogs -- Too literal. It should be a picture of a dog, not half a bull and half a dog. Cowboys -- I would think it would cause too many injuries to have real spurs stapled to the jerseys like that. Eels -- I think the main problem here is that the logo includes the motto "WE'RE SLIMY!" Sharks -- I like the logo, but I think the players would play better if the jerseys weren't so uncomfortable -- they should switch to polyester instead of real sharkskin, or at least wear it right-side-out. WstTigers -- Sheesh, win some games and then maybe you can afford to buy a vowel to fnish yr lgo. Rabbitohs -- They clearly just copied their jerseys from a cereal box. Also, nobody wants to see a rabbit making the "oh" face. -- K. I'm rooting for the Rabbitohs even though I don't know what they are. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Don Saklad Does this Better then Me Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 19:44:34 -0400 "Lots42 bomb vice president" (lots42@aol.comaol.com) wrote: > > The local library has, for some reason, taken to not locking up their > normal dumpster. So when I can, I peek inside. No boxes of rejected > comics yet! But I hope. Maybe instead of looking in the Normal Dumpster you should stick your head into the Special Dumpster, unless Don Saklad is sleeping in that one. If you wake him up, it won't be pretty. You can learn more about this by playing the children's educational board game, "Don't Wake Don Saklad". (Just to make the game less fun, I'll warn you that he pops up after precisely thirteen turns of the crank every single time. Mechanical pseudo-random number generators work fine only until you learn to count.) I used to read some of Lyndon LaRouche's nutty, nutty "news" magazines in college because the library kept throwing them away (every library in the world was given a free subscription then sent a renewal notice for $500/year.) Sadly, those were the only thing they ever threw out. And LaRouche's political cartoons have never been as funny as even the world's lamest comic book (they usually consist of a drawing of Prince Charles wearing a diaper and a toe tag that says "PRESIDENT BUSH" and a caption of "LOOK! BUSH IS WEARING A DIAPER! HAW HAW WE DRAWED A DIAPER! P.S. HE'S SUPPOSED TO BE BUSH.") Another place you might be able to find rejected comics is behind a comedy club. You could meet a guy whose whole act consists of going up on stage and saying "I like airline peanuts," and then standing there silently for the next five minutes. -- K. Just watch out for any rejected comic who says "LOOK! BUSH IS WEARING A DIAPER! P.S. I'M SUPPOSED TO BE BUSH." ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: you know those 5 food groups ?? Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 20:51:39 -0400 [concerning the government's "food pyramid" designed to trick children into eating pyramids] Jacob W. Haller (spog@jwgh.org) wrote: > > Some criticized this as a cynical playing of politics in a bad way with > the health and nutrition of whoever pays attention of these things with > sort of negative implications, but in defense of revising the pyramid > others pointed out that pyramids are supposed to be three-dimensional, > ACTUALLY, and so the whole thing was STUPID AND DOOMED from the START. The best thing about the government's food pyramid is that most of the awful food the government feeds to our children cannot be classified and seems to come from somewhere on the back side of the pyramid, where there is a block for "runny, vinyl-like slurry dipped in silicone lube". I hereby repost an article about elementary school lunches from last year, merely because all the links still work. ////////// BEGIN RE-RUN ////////////////////////////////////////////////// From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: food that tastes as good as it looks Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 19:02:43 -0400 "talysman" (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > it's all paid for by your tax dollars (except for you). > > http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/taco-patty.jpg > > what, pray tell, is a taco patty? Looks like half of a hamburger puck, probably with some paprika sprinkled on it to make it as flavorfully exotic as school cafeteria food ever gets. Note that it does not include lettuce or cheese, but they give you a paper cup with some cole slaw and/or salad in it, suitable for future assembly, proving conclusively that a taco patty is an essential part of a completely awful meal. > and how come this teryaki bites? > > http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/teryaki-bites.jpg Now there's another great example of a complete meal: Some doggie treats, a biscuit, an eighth of an orange floating in Tang, and milk. Plus two napkins for fiber, including the napkin which is tucked under the biscuit to keep the under-biscuit grease from dissolving through the plastic tray. There is also a bigger, prettier version of the same one: http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/beef-teraki.jpg Maybe one is an entree and another is a buffet for two, or something. > why does "italian dunkers" look like pieces of bread and a cup of > tomato sauce? > > http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/italian-dunkers.jpg Another awesomely nutritious complete feast. Bread AND ketchup! Plus the exercise you get putting the two together to make them soggy! It always amazes me that the government runs so many asinine TV commercials telling kids to eat healthy snacks and obey the Food Pyramid and yet they allow children to be fed crap like this. (Don't even ask about what grade of meat is used in the ones that contain meat. Basically, kids aren't allowed to complain or sue, so they always get the stuff that CAN'T be sold to adults.) I poked around that Web site a while and here are some of my other anti-favorites: http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/baked-ham.jpg They must have done a lot of work to get the ham and the bread to be exactly the same color. http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/chick-sal-pita.jpg The color isn't accurate because the picture was taken when it had been out of the refrigerator for three days. For an accurate depiction, they should have waited another week. http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/bbq-meatballs.jpg Note that, for maximum efficiency, each entree has been assigned a code name, shown in the corner. "Mmm! This is the best-tasting BM I've ever had!" Of course, they can get away with that because only grown-ups giggle when asking for "a plate of BM", kids would never do that. http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/sliced-turk.jpg They're not even trying to disguise it as "Soylent Green" any more! Sliced Turk is people! It's people!!! Well, at least it's halal. (I'd hate to see the stretching machine that makes Turkish Taffy.) http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/taco-tub.jpg That taco tub would leave one heck of a bathtub ring. Eat one, take a bath, watch as the grease magically transfers itself from inside you to outside you through every pore of your malnourished body. http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/MVC-548S.JPG I know this nameless item can't be a novelty plastic barf, because plastic barf is more realistic looking. This barf has corners! http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/soft-taco.jpg To properly describe this entree, a new adjective must be invented: "diaprous". http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/ham-c-pita.jpg DIAPROUS MAXIMUS WITH GRAVY!!! Now back to what you said, now that we have the vocabulary to deal with it. > and for kibo, here's a nice cheezy meal: > > http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/water/2-lunches/cheese-s-shells.jpg That one's revolting but not diaprous. It's worse than diaprous. It's past vomitrocious and blecchsplosive. It's in the realm of grossness where there aren't even any nonsense words to describe it. What is that dirty, prolate item next to the slurry? My guess is that it's some clown's attempt to make a balloon-animal bacillus. I didn't mention the eight or nine different things which claim to be pizza (solid yellow rectangles with sparkly highlights from the grease pools) but I will quote this page of instructions for lunch ladies everywhere: -> Click "print" when you find the right picture -> -> After it prints... -> -> cut out the picture and laminate it. -> -> A card catalog is a great way to store them. -> -> Now your students will know exactly what they're going to get! "Yay, It's oozing yellow blob day! I wondered what color blob we were going to get, but now I know exactly, it's yellow blob day!" And the site also says, -> As with all material found on the Internet, teachers and parents -> should be very careful in allowing students to explore these sites -> unless direct supervision is provided. This is because the school hates having to pay for a psychiatrist to treat the kids who have come down with hysterical blindness after seeing the close-up of Taco Patty. -- K. I'd hate to see what this stuff looked like before they touched up the photos. ////////// END OF RE-RUN ///////////////////////////////////////////////// If you know of any other Web sites with big glamour shots of inedible school food, please let me know so I can express my outrage. Most elementary schools Web sites have menus without pictures, but I'm hoping to find more poster-size photos of Taco Patty, whatever it is. I've found a lot of other lunch menus but none with pictures. So far my favorite school lunch site is Utah's Olympus Junior High: => Welcome to the "ED Zone!" reads the sign in our school cafeteria.Ê We have => many food choices each day:Ê you can choose from the "Energy Zone," which => offers favorites like nachos, burritos, nuggets, and many others. Every => day the Energy Zone will offer a different item. The Pizza Zone will offer => two different kinds of pizza. The Burger Zone will offer cheeseburgers and => one other hot sandwich every day. And the Sub Zone will offer two => different deli sandwiches or you may chose a salad. With so many choices => to choose from, we are sure to please even the pickiest eaters!Ê So try => school lunch, get excited and hungry!! Note that it's not "chicken nuggets", but just "nuggets". Barf Zone. If I were a kid, I wouldn't be excited just because everything in the school was a "zone" of some type. Although I would enjoy violating the rules by walking through the Burger Zone with a burrito to contaminate it with FOOD FROM BEYOND THE BURGER ZONE. Also note that like too many other places in the U.S., all burgers are cheeseburgers. Here's Hawaii's Sacred Heart School's lunch menu for Thursday, April 23, 2003: -> Cheeseburger -> tossed salad -> oven fries -> Pine tidbits Ê Mmm, wood becomes so much better in tidbit form. And the Hanson School in South Dakota offered this for Wednesday, April 2: => Chicken Stripes => Mashed Potatoes => Carrots-Gravy => Coleslaw => Bread => pumpkin Bar => Milk I'm not sure if the chicken stripes are just printed on one of the other items, or if they just mean that it's a diseased chicken. But at least you get to pick out your own pumpkin from the pumpkin bar. Because nothing is as appetizing as the inside of a raw pumpkin! Except for everything else in the Universe. Two days later they had someone even more frightening: => Cheese Pizza => Lettuce/Dressing => Green Beams => Jello/ Fruit => Milk That's good because green's the one which kills you instantly, whereas orange beams set your whole body on fire. Then the next Wednesday they had: => Chicketti => Cuke Salad => Green Beans => Bread => Milk I don't like the sound of "Chicketti" and I certainly don't like the sound of "Puke Salad". Other entrees that month included "Mr. Rib/Bun", "Brat/Bun", "Pizza Cass." (who choked to death on a ham sandwich), and the groovy "Scalloped Pot/Ham". Somewhere in my book collection is "The School Cafeteria Handbook" from about 1951. It has veal recipes and lots of photos of kids in crew cuts and dungarees washing their hands in trough-shaped steel sinks. I also obtained a copy of the secret cookbook from one of the colleges I attended, which revealed that the "meat" was a mixture of 50% ground turkey and 50% "meat mixture", the end result being that it was 75% turkey and 25% beef at best, although if time allowed they could increase the recursion depth to get 99.9999999% turkey with a homeopathic level of beef. -- K. Interestingly, "Zillions" (a "Consumer Reports" magazine for kids) did an on-line survey about school lunch items and the kids rated veggieburgers slightly higher than real burgers. But what got the highest rating were Oscar Mayer Lunchables (stale bread in a fancy box.) ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: you know those 5 food groups ?? Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 20:15:02 -0400 Wiblur the Once (jchapman@aros.net) wrote: > > When my kids were in elementary school, they always complained about > "bad food" (implying more than just poor quality). I always kids of > brushed it off as part of their ongoing campaign to complain about > everything known to man. One of the things I learned at the three colleges I've attended is that all college students complain about how their college has the worst food in human history, when really the stuff isn't significantly worse than Denny's or Swanson's -- not good, but edible. Elementary schools, however, feed kids Grade Z rancidities because they know the kids don't vote or pay taxes, and will forget about it before they do, except for those of us special people who bear grudges from thirty years ago. > Then one day, I went along on a field trip as a parental unit supervisor > choosing the option of bringing our own lunch, as opposed to paying $2.50 > for a mystery meat surprise provided by the school district kitchens. I think that when I was a kid, Mystery Meat Surprise was only $0.75. Also, it was before Textured Vegetable Protein was invented, so because they couldn't put TVP in the MMS, the MMS was all meat, but oh boy what meat. TVP has actually increased the quality. > At lunchtime, we settled in at a park for some munch, when one of the > tykes who had opted for MMS yells: "Yuck, my sandwich is moldy!!!" Sure > enough the meat-like substance had a lovely layer of mold for extra flavor. > All the MMS sandwiches were checked and the majority of them were mold- > encrusted. Most of the teachers sandwiches were moldy as well, which > seemed somewhat satifying, in a perverse kind of way. > > It fills me with pride that the gubment is watching out for the health > and nutrition of our young piples. Also, my daughter and I enjoyed our > nice, fresh sack lunches and only felt mildly guilty about enjoying our > yummy repast as the children of the mold eyed our every bite with envy. Do I have to repost my story about Arby's and the moldy potato? If you people are really good I will open an Army Meal Comma Ready-To-Eat (MRE) right now and describe all the glorious kinds of awful our soldiers endure. -- K. Assuming I don't miss my train stop at the MRE store right between Condom World and the bookstore with a wall of incense vapor blocking the entrance. (One hour later:) The "surplus" store (mostly camping stuff and Nike, a small amount of surplus) was out of all MREs except one vegetarian noodle one that wouldn't be worth reviewing because I think we all know what squishy old noodles with dried peas taste like. I left without buying anything, although the $70 riot shield (still with its original protective plastic film) was attractive. So I checked out the recently-installed underground "C"-shaped Trader Joe's across from where the "L"-shaped Star used to be, then followed the trail of green blobs to the new Shaw's, where I bought some dinner. To get from the old Star to the new Shaw's, there's a trail of green leafikins (the apostrophe from their logo) along the sidewalk, except that the trail ends at Lord & Taylor because Lord & Taylor said "Screw you, you're not defacing our sidewalk just for your non-gourmet suuuuuupermarket." The shape of the Shaw's is still incomprehensible to me -- it's some sort of multiply-concave enneagon, plus a split-level wine department -- but I don't think it's an English letter. Possibly one of the ones Claudius added to the Latin alphabet just so that he'd be famous enough to get his own TV series. But he doesn't have a deli item named after him at Shaw's, unlike "Hail Chicken Caesar Twister" (which is also known as a "c-section") and the even scarier "Buffalo Bob Twister" (Howdy, no! Wood must not eat flesh!) ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: you know those 5 food groups ?? Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 01:26:20 -0400 Pugg (pugg71@hotmail.com) wrote: > > See, here's the thing, Salisbury State University (which recently > shortened its name to Salisbury University to stop untalented stand-up > comics from saying, "Hey it's great to be here at Salisbury STEAK > university! You must eat a LOT of tee-vee dinners! HAR! HAR! HAR!" > like we hadn't heard *that* a hundred times) actually had pretty good > food. I mean good food. I mean, better than the local restaurants. I > mean, for example, folks from town could (and did) pay $7 a head to > come eat in our cafeteria. I saw nothing unusual about that at the > time. My only complaint was that the cooks, being natives of the > Eastern Shore, substituted "Old Bay Seasoning" for any spice in any > recipe. What is Bay Seasoning, and how moldy was it? > That, and the line for the waffle bar at Sunday brunch was usually too long. We called them "French toast sticks", not "waffle bars". I don't know anything about where Salisbury State University is but I assume it's in the Soviet Union if people had to wait in line for a single French toast stick covered with rancid Bay Seasoning. -- K. And of course people only ever make French toast to get rid of expired bread... ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: you know those 5 food groups ?? Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 21:43:23 -0400 Stacia (stacia@world.std.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > But he doesn't have a deli item named after him at Shaw's, unlike > > "Hail Chicken Caesar Twister" > > My beloved Food 4 Less sells a line of dressings, bagged lettuce, and > salad toppings with a Caesar theme. My favorite product is "Et Tu, > Crouton", boxed stale bread bits with artificial everything. I always > thought the brand was national but no one else I know has ever heard of > it. And now I find out Shaw's has stolen the idea! For shame. "Et Tu, Crouton"? Holy cow. That's one of those things that is only a pun if someone hits you over the head with a brick right before saying it. It's one of the least pun-like attempts at a pun I've ever heard. It's positively Ess Pee Que Arful! I will assume other products in the series include "Veni Vidi Vinegar" and something about something being divided into three parts and something with people lending ears of corn, but I don't have the stamina to think of the names of the last two. Also, I'm not sure how to decline "crouton", other than to say I'm not hungry. (The dictionary claims it comes from the Latin word "crusta", so the proper Latin for "crouton" might be something like "crustula", leading to the possibility of a garlic-flavored cereal named Count Crustula. Or maybe it would be "crustella", which would be a garlic-and-hazelnut spread. I don't know the rules for Latin diminutives so I don't know if it would get "-ula" or "-ella".) > I'm glad the fruity British store won't let them put leafy apostrophes > on their sidewalks. It's great, because if you follow the trail of leafikins, it goes right to the front door of Lord & Taylor and then stops. Possibly the apostrophe-leaves just got confused by the way the "&" or sometimes "+" keeps changing shape. Then the trail resumes on the far side of Lord & Taylor, so if you really can't find the supermarket (it's one block from its previous location, and it's darn big) the interrupted trail of leaves isn't going to help you any. -- K. (I dare you to go to the supermarket, hold up a box of "Et Tu, Crouton", and yell "HOW MANY CROUTONS DO YOU HAVE IN THE VOCATIVE CASE?") ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Today's disturbing TV commercial. Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 02:54:19 -0400 A woman is sitting on a hard park bench. But because she's taken a Dulcolax stool softener, the park bench turns into a big armchair. This is the first commercial aimed only at people who are so senile that they think that drugs make puns come true. -- K. Too bad Philip K. Dick's not alive to see it. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,rec.arts.tv,alt.fan.tom-servo Subject: Re: Today's disturbing TV commercial. Followup-To: alt.religion.kibology Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 20:13:14 -0400 "Live from his Deathbed Mr. Hole!" (holefamily1@webtv.net) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > A woman is sitting on a hard park bench. But because she's taken > > a Dulcolax stool softener, the park bench turns into a big armchair. > > I haven't seen it. How do I know you aren't making this up in an attempt > to be silly like Don Knots? First off, I don't know who Don Knots is, unless he's the guy who sells rope-bondage videos as a front for the Mafia. I assume you meant Don Knotts. Secondly, if I made that commercial up, it would be just as stupid, but there would a subtle clue that it was meant to be stupid and not just accidentally stupid in the way that toilet pill commercials are. Mine would be directed by Ben Stiller and involve Jack Black saying, "Wow! My ass didn't explode today!" and then there would be a close-up of Doctor Don Knotts nodding his head and a star-shaped sparkle would go "DING!" on Don Knott's hypodermic of effervescent Dulcolax (now in lime.) In any case, I realize that I could never make up something which is actually as stupid as the stuff on TV. For the past year, I've been worried about this new "Battlestar Galactica" mini-series, about which I've heard lots of details, all of them stupid. They're trying to double the audience by chicking up the show, so that instead of just manly men shooting at alien space robots, it will now be women shooting at alien space robots (this is akin to how they tried to add girl appeal to hockey by making pink rainbows come out of the puck.) And, believe it or not, Commander Adama spends most of her time coming to terms with breast cancer. That's right, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA IS ABOUT BREAST CANCER. Breast cancer is a serious issue, but shoehorning it into a show about planets blowing up isn't going to raise the quality level. I have nothing against shows about breast cancer, and in the proper setting it would work fine -- the sitcom "Murphy Brown" could have pulled off its season about Murphy's breast cancer if it had attempted it about four years earlier before it got desperate for filler, and Linda Ellerbee did a fine job talking about breast cancer on Nickelodeon. But adding breast cancer to "Battlestar Galactica"... well... that's bad. Even in the context of reviving "Battlestar Galactica", that's bad. I'm sure the producers think this somehow makes it more sophisticated than the original, which was a well-made rip-off of George Lucas's even better-made rip-off of "Flash Gordon". Either that or the "Galactica" producers recently discovered a rough cut of "Star Wars" which contains this scene: GRAND MOFF TARKIN: "Now, Princess Leia, we will blow up your home planet. Lord Vader, we are within firing range." DARTH VADER: "My prostate hurts! Stop the war, let's talk about my prostate problems for an hour!" PRINCESS LEIA: "Did I hear you say you have prostate issues? I have some pamphlets you can read. Also, you're welcome to join the Rebel Alliance's Space Prostate Problem Support Group." DARTH VADER: "Ow! My prostate just got bigger!" Bear in mind that the last time "Battlestar Galactica" was brought back from the dead ("Galactica 1980") the _best_ episode was the two-part epic where they had to rescue Wolfman Jack (as Wolfman Jack) from one and a half Cylons who were trying to overthrow a local radio station very slowly. That was the _best_ episode. Yet, the idea of making "Battlestar Galactica" a show about spaceships fighting breast cancer is the all-time winner in the competition to see who can think up the best way to ruin "Battlestar Galactica" for all genders, ages, and intelligence levels. I've thought and thought and I can't do better than that. I tried adding a flatulent chimp and a superintelligent dolphin to "Battlestar Galactica", but that didn't dumb it up enough. So I tried adding a naked Ed Begley Junior and having Wolfman Jack tell all the viewers they should register for the draft even though no teenager would know who he was, but that didn't make it stupid enough to beat the breast cancer. I tried replacing every word of dialogue with the word "centon". I even tried telling Patrick Macnee to do the opening backstory narration in a sarcastic tone of voice. No matter what I do, I can't come up with an idea stupider than spacemen dressed as King Tut battling killer robots and breast cancer. -- K. Hmm, maybe I could add Matthew Broderick getting a dozen enemas from Hannibal Lecter wearing dime-store gag teeth... No, still not stupid enough. Unless the enema gives him breast cancer in outer space. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: sci.physics,alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: more more more Followup-To: sci.physics Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 03:30:51 -0400 Last week, in sci.physics, Kurt Stocklmeir (kurtstocklmeir@worldnet.att.net) wrote: > > I do not like pigys, slimeys, foolys and ideitys But how do you feel about the letter "y"? -- K. This is our insane asylm. Notice there is no u in it. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: I still haven't gotten over my previous jury duty. Please help. Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 20:11:55 -0400 [when last we left, Kibo wanted alt.religion.kibology to be entertaining during jury duty] "Lots42 bomb vice president" (lots42@aol.comaol.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Please give me something to read tomorrow morning other than the > > weather map on "Good Morning America". > > Thank you. > > You know how some electrical devices come with computer manuals? How you > open them up and there's pieces of paper lined up with each other and > words are on them? Well, imagine if someone did that but instead put > fiction in them! You know, how some webpages have stories that aren't > true. Imagine if they printed them out in computer manual form! > > What a world that would be, huh? Well, it's TRUE. Yes, wonders like this > already exist. They are called books and there are thousands of them. Like > stories about space battles? Some books have them.What about time travel? > Yes, that too. Or even those cool guys and gals from the tv show 'Buffy > The Vampire Slayer'? Yes, books with original stories of them are out > there also! > > Gosh, the excitement. I think I have to sit down and cry with joy. Well, you see, "Lots42 bomb vice president", if that IS your real name, I considered sitting in the jury pool room (which has no pool) trying to translate "Beowulf" in that unventilated atmosphere surrounded by codgers constantly complaining at full volume about the heat, but it's really hard to do so while someone three inches from your ear is yelling at you: "IT'S TOO HOT! IT'S TOO HOT! THEY OUGHTA FIX THE CONSTITUTION TO DO SOMETHIN' ABOUT THIS! IT'S TOO HOT! WHY ARE YOU IGNORING ME, I SAID IT'S TOO HOT!" Just try working out which of Hrghatharghaeiouy and Hrthaghathaeiouw is Beowulf's grandfather's wife's cousin's thane under those conditions, keeping in mind that if you slip up, the whole story is ruined, because while the sissy Vikings spent all their free time carving cute, cartoony chess sets, the Anglo-Saxons devoted all their energy to trying to confuse people. Also "Beowulf" is hard to read because it's an out-and-out rip-off of "The Lord Of The Rings" but with more stuff happening per page. So you see, the anti-intellectual atmosphere of jury duty causes me to seek out forms of stimulation requiring only partial cognition. The choices are watching "Good Morning, America" (because TV is stupid) or reading "O" magazine (because Oprah is stupid) or reading alt.religion.kibology (hi, Lots42!) Of course, there is the drawback that having a laptop computer causes strangers to want to talk to you. Although having a pad of paper and a pencil doesn't make people come up to you and demand to know what you're writing and to whom you're writing and how often you've slept with her, having a laptop computer seems to entitle these people to (a) read over your shoulder and (b) inquire the precise nature of your private business. Wearing a "Red Sox" jersey is a signal that you would be happy if people walked up to you and asked you whether you think the Yankees suck more or less than they used to. Carrying around a cat is a signal that you wouldn't mind people talking to you about kitties. But typing on a keyboard is NOT an advertisement that you can carry on a conversation while you're tying. (And these people act as if I'm the rude one when I give them the brush-off while I'm trying to type. Sheesh, go buy a cell phone.) Back when I had a digital camera but not a portable computer, when I would be reviewing photos on the camera's little screen to kill time on the train, people would ask me, "Is that a DIGITAL CAMERA?" and I'd tell them, "No, it's a GAF Viewmaster with a TV screen in the side of it," but that sort of interruption isn't a big deal compared to people talking at you when you're trying to read or write. Although "Beowulf" can't survive that level of intrusion, alt.religion.kibology is robust and can thrive in even the most idiot-filled environment, although it does slow down my typing. -- K. This article will be reprinted in next month's issue of "O". ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fan.beable Subject: Re: Good to see celebrities finally doing something sensible Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 22:25:41 -0400 Beable van Polasm (beable+unsenet@beable.com.invalid) wrote: > > It's good to see celebrities finally doing something sensible instead > of the usual nonsense they get up to. > > In http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/30/1051381998660.html, > "AAP" wrote > > -> Elle 'lined baby's cot with lead' > > I hope she's got her alfoil beanie on. Make that an alfoil brassiere, > because she's got to protect her greatest assets. I've never heard it called "alfoil" before. But it does save time just to use the abbreviation right from the periodic table. What would be the equivalent contraction for tin foil? "stfoil" is hard to pronounce, so I'd suggest "stanfoil". And for lead foil, "pbfoil" is completely unacceptable, but "plumbfoil" has more letters than "lead foil", so we may not be able to do anything about lead foil. > -> Supermodel Elle Macpherson has reportedly lined her baby's cot with > -> lead to shield him from cosmic rays on planes. > > This is totally sensible, because scientists (of SCIENCE) have > never detected any ill effects to babies from lead. That's why > the finest baby eating utensils are made from solid lead. These > weighty implements also build up the muscles of the weak little > buggers. Sure, it'll give him super-strength, but it'll give him eyestrain whenever he tries to see through it. Also, I hear that from flying around above the clouds so much, all that cosmic radiation's made Superman super-sterile. This is why nobody gets pregnant when he sleeps with 47 women in one night. > -> Macpherson, 40, allegedly also used foil blankets to shield herself > -> and sons Flynn, five, and Aurelius, 12 weeks, from radiation, > -> British newspaper The Sun said yesterday. > > It's not just the baby she's shielding! Oh no! She's shielding her > whole family, who will no doubt grow up totally well-adjusted, having > avoided being bombarded with weirdness-inducing cosmic rays. A lot of people are a little out of touch with popular culture and give their kids names which were in fashion several years ago, but in this case, "Aurelius" is about two thousand years too square. "Hi! I'm Elle MacPherson, fabulous supermodel, and this is my dorky son Aurelius! His name makes me seem even more beautiful!" But the kid would get teased even more if she had named him after Marcus Aurelius's son, Commodus. "Ha ha! You're a toilet! And you run around in fast motion like Benny Hill and you're the only Roman emperor to have an Australian accent and you make it clear that the Oscars are rigged!" "How ridiculous and what a stranger he is who is surprised at anything which happens in life." -- Marcus Aurelius, eighteen centuries ago, trying to warn us not to be surprised when supermodels start wrapping their babies in the same stuff used for Caligula's drinking-water pipes. > -> The lingerie designer is said to have spent thousands of pounds on > -> the custom-built cot, > > which weighs thousands of pounds, > > -> which Macpherson's partner Arpad Busson carried aboard a British > -> Airways flight from the Bahamas to London recently. > > Arpad Busson is a well-known weightlifter and strongman. That's why > Elle chose him, because he can heft those chunky lead cots. It's just a shame that she either couldn't afford gold shielding or else she's not culturally sophisticated enough to have seen the "Salvage One" episode where Andy Griffith explains that gold is the best possible shielding from cosmic rays, which is why they have to launch their converted cement mixer into orbit to retrieve a solid gold satellite. (That episode used to play as a "CBS Late Movie" called "Golden Orbit".) > -> Macpherson told BA staff that the cot was designed to deflect > -> radiation from the sun and cosmic rays at high altitude, the paper > -> said. > > And it's not at all to deflect the security machines' x-rays from > penetrating to find her secret stash of nail scissors, oh no. Just > forget that I said that. Supermodels NEED to have neatly trimmed > nails! Take a look at your nails. Are they all chewed and ratty > looking? YOU'RE NOT A SUPERMODEL! [...] I think she could solve all her problems by using silver instead of lead to shield baby's soft spot from the mind-control lasers, because then she could chew on the silver to spare her nails from being chewed, and then she'd get argyria and turn a pretty shade of teal, and her fingernails would get silvery-blue, and then she'd get even more attention for being the only world-famous jet-set supermodel to have a skin color from "Star Trek". > -> "She explained she was worried radiation could harm her little > -> boy," it quoted a fellow passenger as saying. > > -> But BA said it already met requirements to protect passengers. > > -> "Cosmic radiation is all around us - on the ground or in the air," > -> BA health chief Sandra Mooney told the paper. > > This is PROOF that astronauts never went to the moon: > 1. Cosmic radiation is everywhere > 2. The Van Allen Belt stops the radiation from reaching the earth's surface > 3. The Van Allen Belt doesn't reach to the moon > 4. Faraday cages are required to be earthed to be effective > 5. The earth strap connected to Apollo 11 snapped on liftoff, so they > just did a few orbits around the Earth hoping nobody would notice > 6. SOMEBODY NOTICED D00DS! > 7. Q.E.D.!!! > 8. Q!E!D!!! > 9. Don't talk about Fight Club > 10. DON'T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB! > 11. It's okay to make a movie about Fight Club but. It's okay, the Van Allen Belt burned down in the "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea" movie. Well, they put it out when it was only half-burnt, but then Irwin Allen cut up the movie and used it as part of the pilot for the TV series "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea", and then used it again at least once a year, so after three or four times, you can be sure the Van Allen Belt got burned away completely, thanks to Irwin Allen, who ironically does not have any form of deadly radiation named after him. > -> "There's no evidence to suggest a need for special arrangements for > -> babies." > > British Airways has now removed all baby change rooms from its > international flights, because "there's no evidence to suggest a need > for special arrangements for babies". I think they just meant you did not have to pile all the babies on the plane up in the shape of a pentagram to keep the Druidic runestone in the cargo hold from freezing the plane solid in mid-air like they did in that movie where William Shatner helped them put lipstick on the doll as a sacrifice but it didn't trick the magic runestone vapor, or whatever, I couldn't really figure out the plot because I was mesmerized by William Shatner as the defrocked priest who may or may not have had a lead-lined hairpiece to keep the script from beaming deadly stupidity rays into his brain. The title was "Horror at 37,000 Feet" (not to be confused with Shatner's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" or Lithgow's "Nightmare at 30,000 Feet") and it also starred Chuck Connors, Buddy Ebsen, Tammy Grimes, Lynn Loring, France Nuyen, Roy Thinnes, and Paul Winfield (who shot himself rather than assassinate Shatner in "Star Trek II") and as TV-movies go, it was unusually entertaining, because although it was super-tarded, it at least had stuff happening (like the guy getting trapped in the little elevator between decks of the 747 while ghost freeze gas seeped in) unlike the average TV-movie, which doesn't have anything happening, ever. Maybe if we're lucky, Elle MacPherson will do a TV-movie where she goes around wrapping babies in lead foil to protect them from a laser pistol wielded by Robin Curtis (who played Not Kirstie Alley in "Star Trek III", and went around shooting babies in "The Unborn II" -- I've never seen the first "Unborn", but I'm assuming it was an equally despicable movie.) -- K. Geez, I wish there were more good movies. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Good to see celebrities finally doing something sensible Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 01:31:47 -0400 Rich Holmes (rsholmes+usenet@mailbox.syr.edu) wrote: > > [...] > > What *is* scary is that according to Google, my article was the first > and (aside from your reply and this counterreply) so far the only use > of the phrase "is this the line for" in the entire a.r.k archive. > > Aw shit. Now I'll have to make that into a meme. > > Is this the line for making "is this the line for" into a meme? I'm not sure. Whose line is it, anyway? (Kibo puts a traffic cone on his head.) LOOK AT ME I HAVE A TRAFFIC CONE ON MY HEAD! (Buzzer sounds because that was the funniest thing that's ever happened and now the show can end on a high note.) -- K. Is this the line for explaining to Drew Carey why having eye surgery made him stop being famous? ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fan.beable Subject: Re: Eat More Sugar? Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 22:57:54 -0400 Beable van Polasm (beable+unsenet@beable.com.invalid) wrote: > > In http://www.witness.co.za/content%5C2003_05%5C14976.htm, > "GWYNNE DYER" wrote: > -> > -> Last Wednesday in Rome the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the > -> UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) jointly launched an > -> independent expert report on diet which stated, among other things, > -> that free (that is, added) sugar should not exceed 10% of the > -> calories in normal daily food intake. The U.S.-based Sugar > -> Association has gone into overdrive to discredit the report, > -> [...] > -> > -> You have to admire the cheek of industry representatives who can > -> maintain with a straight face that it's perfectly all right for 25% > -> of the average person's calories to come in the form of free sugar, > -> even as they have watched an alarming proportion of the > -> U.S. population turn into blubbery, lumbering Michelin-tyre men and > -> women over the last generation. > > Do you think that Gwynne is being too harsh? It depends. Which version of "O" magazine was he writing this for? Also, it's usually Germans who like to dress up as Bibendum, not Americans. (But, Salvador Dali did have a life-size Bibendum in his garden in Spain.) > -> But then, if the pay was right they'd probably be willing to argue > -> that 25% ground glass in the diet was all right. > > Let's form the "Edible Ground Glass Institute" (EGGI)! There is heaps > of useless glass around - it's not worth recycling it. If we can grind > it up and add it to food for a couple of bucks a kilogram, we can make > squillions of dollars! They already add lots of silicon dioxide (sand) to powdered spices in order to keep them from clumping. And sand is about the same thing as glass, except that it hasn't been cooked. I think what's more important is that we should try to find a way we can leave the more expensive ingredients out of spice jars and just sell the sand without that damn tarragon. > I think that the EGGI, in conjunction with the "Eat Rat Poison It's > Good For You Institute" (ERPIGFYI), can really bring about a > renaissance in food technology. Rather than having people eat things > like "potatoes", or "beef", we can feed them a mix of 25% sugar, 5% > salt, 2% rat poison, and the rest inert filler (sand). Sand is not filler! It's a structural component! > If we add a few grams of vitamin C per kilogram, then we can put a > large banner on the packaging which says "Contains 200% of the > Recommended Daily Intake for Vitamin C!". ...or 1% of the recommended daily intake recommended by wacky Linus Pauling. AND NOW HE'S DEAD! > It sure will be a lot easier to just mix together a bunch of ingredients > in a factory rather than having to grow spuds and raise beeves. You could just have one farm if you cross-breed the spud with the cow to grow beefatatoes. They would be like hash, only natural! > And if people start dying excessively quickly from this new diet > (and HA! What's the chance of THAT happening?), we can just replace > the inert sand filler with Soylent Green. Know what makes me sad? The cover story for Soylent Green (which was not a lie, in the short story, novella, and novel which preceded the movie) was that it was soybeans plus lentils plus some green seaweed (it also came in yellow and red flavors, I forget what was added instead of seaweed.) Well, the artificial meat we're getting now is just made from cheap soybeans, with none of those yummy lentils! And I really like lentils (especially the teeny little orange ones from the Indian grocery store) so it depresses me that we're living in this bleak world of the future where we're getting food that's lamer than Soylent Green. Also, we're not speaking Esperanto, we haven't yet put any Aztecs in a giant spaceship, and George Washington's descendants still haven't built a Transatlantic Tunnel! Does Harry Harrison ever get tired of being wrong? -- K. And how come in 1993 they didn't start selling Soylent Clear during that year that people wanted artificial food with no color? It could have clear sand in it! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: More about disgusting elementary school lunch menus from the Web. Date: Thu, 01 May 2003 23:41:00 -0400 I think this article is somehow lacking, but I'm going to post it anyway just to justify all the research I did. I only ever found that one menu with photos, but there are a zillion others in calendar form. These are notes I took while looking at all of them. You can see me gradually figuring out what a Crispito is. [notes begin] For Tuesday, April 15, Lodi Primary School (Wisconsin) had a "Walking Taco". Brr! Tacos with legs! And on the 4th, they had "Cinderella Cake". CINDERELLA CAKE IS PEOPLE! PRINCESS PEOPLE! Holmen Elementary (also in Wisconsin) seems to be within walking distance, as the "Walking Taco" has strolled over there. It even walked all the way to Mason City, Iowa to visit Newman Catholic. Albion Elementary (Indiana) is the only case I've seen of someone actually renaming "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries" to support America's war against France. Well, technically, they renamed "French Fries" to "American Fries" and then later the same month they renamed "American Fries" to "Freedom Fries" because Albion Elementary is full of Commies who don't like the word "American". Pioneer Regional School (Indiana) has this menu for October 15, 2002: -> Good Luck -> Panther Cross Country -> Harrier Hamburger on Bun -> Spur'em on to Victory Carrot Sticks -> Fast French Fries -> Sure to Win -> Sugar Cookies ...it's accompanied by a picture of a box of French fries with arms and legs. For October 31 they had accurate descriptions of everything: -> Happy Halloween -> Frightening Fr. Toast Sticks -> Scary Sausage Links -> Pumpkin Face Potatoes -> Applesauce -> Yogurt AAAAAAAIIIIIEEEEE!!!! YOGURT!!!!! Pioneer's April menu also has one holiday-themed day, but they ruin the joke by explaining it too many times: => April 1 - Tuesday => Possum Stew => Muskrat Salad => Polecat Pudding => * April Fools!! APRIL => See April Fools Day FOOLS (At the bottom of the page the other asterisk admits it's really a hot dog and macaroni and cheese.) Elsewhere on the page, for Friday the 4th and Friday the 11th: => Jr. High Band Contest => Silvercrest Match => Spaghetti w Meat Sauce => Garlic Bread => Time of Triumph => Tossed Salad w/ Drsg. => Dreamscape Pudding => High School Band Contest => Main Street Celebration => "Sub Sandwich" => Noisy Wheels of Joy "Lettuce & => Tomatoes" => Potato Chips => Semper Fidelis Strawberry Yogurt ...but they only bring out such luxurious food on band contest days. For Friday the 25th: => Sub Sandwich => Lettuce & Tomatoes => Pretzels => Graham Cracker Sandwich "Sorry, kids, the band's not playing today. Shut up and eat your pretzels and cracker sandwich. Dr. Kellogg says these crackers will keep you out of puberty, I mean, out of trouble." The only other oddity during the month is Tuesday the 22nd: => Fine Arts Festival => Pianissimo Taco w/ => Salsa & Sour Cream => Crescendo Corn Chips => Paintbrush Carrot & Celery Sticks => Abstract Applesauce The concept of "abstract applesauce" hurts my head. They also have a special day called "breakfast for lunch" (many schools do this) but Pioneer serves a "Panther MacMuffin", which is not only frightening but a trademark violation. And they like to serve something called "No Bake Cookie", which is what Frank Oz yelled when Ernie got fed up and pushed Cookie Monster into the incinerator. Williston (North Dakota) has made-up entrees such as "chili crispitos", "super nachos", "hobo casserole", and "slushburger". I doubt hobos make very tasty casseroles (even if you wash them) and the concept of a "slushburger" is beyond the ability of my brain to comprehend. Maybe it's a sloppy joe (barbecue sauce plus crumbled beef) or maybe it really is just some frost scraped off the freezer walls soaking into some stale bread. St. Robert School (in Flushing, Michigan) has "Galaxy Cheese Pizza" and interesting spellings for all their Mexican-style items, such as "corditas" and "qassadeas". They also have "crispitos" whatever they are. Jefferson (Dubuque, Iowa) has "French Dip With Au Jus", so I suppose they also have chili with con carne with meat, topped with con queso cheese. Ashe (North Carolina) serves a "Pork Chopette" which I am assuming is like "Taco Patty" without the taco part. Memorial (Elkhart, Indiana) has the "Crispito" again, along with a "Wet Burrito". Really. No, I don't know either. What the hell? Morgan (Illinois) offers a "Taco in a Bag". This is so that the cafeteria workers can crush it without getting their hands dirty. Bald Eagle Area Elementary (Pennsylvania) has "Hearty Shin-On Fries". Each item has an adjective attached, from "Golden Chicken Patty" to "Tender Chicken Nuggets". This will teach the kids about adjectives, and about lies. Frenount County School (Wyoming) lists "Broccoli Trees" and the Duchampish "Chicken And Nood". Well, at least that's more appetizing than "Turkey Club Bage". Most of the schools always specify "cheeseburger with bun" because this food is so cheap that sometimes it might not have a bun. (It's called "salisbury steak".) Saboe (in New Jersey) also specifies "fluffy rice" so that you won't think they're serving rice pudding with every meal. They also have "Egg-N-Cheese on Pretzel" and "Rib-A-Que". Not "Rib-B-Que", "Rib-A-Que". The winner must be Sleepy Eye Schools (yes, that's their real name, they're in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota.) They offer high school students the dreaded "Taco Patty" and "Chili Crispitos" as well as "Tator Tot Hotdish" and the horrifying "Fish Nuggest". No, wait, Minnesota Valley Lutheran also has the "Taco Patty" and "Tater Tot Hotdish" in addition to "Tri Tators" and "Beaked Beans". OW! THE BEANS PECKED MY EYE OUT! And as if that wasn't bad enough, a misspelling by Grand Valley High School (Parachute, Colorado) reveals how gross this stuff really is: -> Chicken Nuggets -> or -> Cheesebuger -> or -> Chicken Sand -> or -> Max Pizza Mmm, booger. Mmm, sand. Mmm-m-max Pizza starring Matt Frewer! Remember, these people who can't spell "Skin", "Bagel", "Nuggets", and "Burger" are running your local school. Now to see if I can figure out what these things REALLY are: A Web search on "Crispito" turns up a Tyson Foods corporate page. They come in flavors such as "Very Cherry Crispito", "Chicken Pot Pie Crispito" and a "Chicken Pizza Crispito". Anything pot pie flavored which isn't a pot pie sounds bad. Especially in an egg roll wrapper, since a Crispito is just an egg roll with bad stuff inside. In the case of the dessert flavors, it's just a low-quality blintz (in the same way that the old stamped-out McDonalds pies were low-quality versions of grandma's.) => These tightly rolled flour tortillas are stuffed with a => variety of delicious fillings. They're oil blanched so => they'll be lightly browned and ready for the fryer, oven => or microwave. Crispitos are ideal for breakfast, lunch, => appetizers, desserts and dinner entrees. In the future, all meals will consist of Crispitos. The children are already being indoctrinated. Those that refuse to worship the Crispito will be oil-blanched. (To find lots of school lunch menus just search for the word "Crispito".) Other Tyson products which will be showing up in schools all too soon, according to the Tyson site, are "Chick-A-Ditos" and "Cockadoodles". (The same people who put "Chicken Sand" on the menu will soon be telling kids to enjoy the great taste of "Chicken Cock".) Chick-A-Ditos are triangular chicken nuggets with ranch-flavored breading, and Tyson shoved them in my face while telling me, -> Take a look at the new triangular chicken chunks only kids -> could think of. Cockadoodles are completely different, because they're rectangular chicken nuggets with maple-cinnamon sugar cereal breading, -> Introducing a morning of delight only kids could think of. One of my nightmares has always been that little kids will take over the agribusiness conglomerates. Soon everything will be covered with peanut butter and jelly and blue dinosaur-shaped sprinkles. The photo of Cockadoodles is especially disturbing, as they've posed the stick-shaped chicken nuggets amid a pile of blue and purple stick-shaped artists' pastels. A "taco patty" search found a meat packing company that told me I could get half a hog made into a large quantity of Taco Patty, provided I answered a few questions about disposition of the meat by-products: => Liver:Ê Would you use the pork liver as liver?Ê Or would you => like it made into liver sausage? -- K. And do you want the eyeballs made into Eyeball Taco Patty or just regular Taco Patty? ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: More about disgusting elementary school lunch menus from the Web. Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 01:20:54 -0400 Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > St. Robert School (in Flushing, Michigan) has "Galaxy Cheese Pizza" > > and interesting spellings for all their Mexican-style items, such as > > "corditas" > > Mmm, flatbread-wrapped meat infused with essence of gunpowder -- the > smell of victory in the morning. I always prefer the brand "Jet-Axe" to "Cordite" when shopping for exploding string, or at least I would if someone would let me implode an abandoned warehouse once in a while. "Jet-Axe" is a cool name because it suggests the awesome manliness of chopping a building down with an axe, Viking-style, with the high-tech power of a supersonic plane, to give you something which is as cool as a Viking flying an F-16 while leaning out the cockpit to slash you with his axe. "Cordite", on the other hand, just sounds like a made-up word with an "ite" put on the end of another word to make it sound geological, like the way if Taco Bell said their burritos were "filled with igneous burritoite" to make them sound like they were _meant_ to contain rocks. 'Cause you can't sue Taco Bell for accidentally putting rocks in your burrito if the rocks are meant to be there. Also, can the Viking be dropping bombs on gym teachers who are buried up to their neck in fire ants? That would increase the kid appeal. Add some TIE fighters and tanks and SWAT guys too and make all the gym teachers cry and say "I'm sorry I gave you that wedgie from now on you can have Oscar Mayer Lunchables for lunch!" because I know what kids really want. > > and "qassadeas". > > Interestingly, the items called "quesadillas" sold at the Hispanic > market nearest to my old apartment were little cakey things, not even > vaguely similar to the tortillas-with-melted-cheese-onions-and-meat > concoctions sold as appetizers at the sort of restaurants whose walls > are covered with faded old metal signs, rusty farm implements and > black-and-white photographs of amateur baseball teams from 1938. I > still haven't figured that discrepancy out. Hmm. I don't think any of the bodegas down the street from me sells fresh warm quesadillas, although it's not like I've actually looked for quesadillas because I don't like queso or armadillos. But I don't live near a good barrio -- my neighborhood isn't like that neat area near MacArthur Park where people sell grilled vegetables on hibachis they set up on the sidewalk. My neighborhood just has lots of canned Goya products, which only barely makes it Hispanic. (South of me is mostly bodegas and iglesias, west of me is Russian and kosher, north of me is hospitals, and east of me is art museums. But I don't know what ethnicity the food in the hospitals and museum cafeterias might be, because I've never been to those hospitals and I like to buy my art in book form so I can look at it while I'm watching TV. Plus the piece of art I'm currently studying is over in Scotland, and no way I'm going to travel that far and find out what a museum-cafeteria version of haggis would be.) (Actually, now that I think about it, a museum-cafeteria version of haggis would probably be a White Castle burger.) > > Memorial (Elkhart, Indiana) has the "Crispito" again, along with > > a "Wet Burrito". Really. No, I don't know either. What the hell? > > Ooh! Ooh! I know what a wet burrito is. It's "wet" because it's > covered with sauce and cheese and thus eaten with a fork, instead of > being a hand-held entree where the dry tortilla is the exterior. So you mean the other kind of burrito can be called "a dry enchilada"? I prefer tamales, myself. Except it's always such a pain having to eat that stuff on the outside that tastes like corn husks. > Actually, the only place I've ever seen "wet burrito" on the menu is > at El Mexicano, a small chain of fastfoodish Mexican joints in the > D.C. suburbs. El Mexicano's signage consisted of the entire name in > uppercase red backlit letters, except for the "l" in "El", which was > green and shaped like a cactus. For this reason, the first time I > beheld the sign it took me a second to realize the cactus was supposed > to be an "l" and that the place wasn't called "E MEXICANO" with a nice > little cactus in the logo to make it prettier. I suspect that when you say "shaped like a cactus" to most Americans, they think of saguaros shaped like a "t", because that's the shape all cacti are in TV cartoons (after all, it's easier to injure yourself on one of those.) So I'm envisioning a sign which says "Et Mexicano", which means they might serve Stacia's favorite "Et Tu Crouton", and their specials of the day would be written on a silver board named the "Et Chasketch". > They could likely have avoided this problem by making the whole > logo green and using lowercase letters except for the initial caps, > or perhaps putting the "E" and "M" in red and using lowercase > green letters for everything else, or maybe by putting a strip of > grass or dirt or something sticking out rightward from the bottom > of the cactus to make it look more like an uppercase L. At least > I assume so. I've often said: Things that are not letters should not be used as letters. Things in the real world are not shaped anything like letters, so to make the visual pun you have to mangle stuff so badly that either the letter won't look like a letter or the other thing won't look like the other thing. My favorite local example is a Vietnamese restaurant that uses a map of Vietname as the "S" in "Saigon", but I can think of at least three other letters or digits that look more like Vietnam than "S" does. For instance, the restaurant could be named "3aigon". In fact, I have no proof it isn't -- I'm simply assuming it says "Saigon", but I suppose I shouldn't, because only bozos assume they know what bad signs say. > Anyway, the food at El Mexicano is actually pretty darned good, > considering that it's cheap fast stuff; they even have the laminated > menu in both English and Spanish because they get a fair number of > Latino customers. What's Spanish for "taco"? > I recommend the Chicken Fiesta platter. > > You might think it's strange to imagine that a place might be called > "E MEXICANO", but then you've probably never been to Altoona, > Pennsylvania, where there's a breakfast-oriented restaurant that I'm > told used to be called "Waffle King" until some legal reason (new > owner? threat from another Waffle King?) forced it to change its name. > So it became "R-Waffle King". > > Really, "R-Waffle King". Altoona is a strange place. Now that my local RFC is out of business, maybe I should see if I can convince them to open an RHOP to serve Roxbury-style waffles. Incidentally, I still haven't found out what local restaurant Lamb-Weston's "02120" model French fries were created for. Their part numbers appear to be ZIP codes, and I live in 02120, but I can't think of any restaurants here which would be classy enough to have their own kind of fries. Maybe it was the RFC. They could have wanted fries that had eleven Roxbury-style herbs and spices instead of Kentucky ones, but I don't know what eleven Roxbury spices would be. Maybe it would be like the New Kids On The Block (they were from Roxbury) plus the Spice Girls but that still leaves one unaccounted for. Oh no, maybe it's me! Maybe I should tell Lamb-Weston I've moved to some other city just so that they'll start putting seasoning based on me in fries somewhere else so that I won't have to think about it any more. But that would involve lying to a tater company and if I got caught they'd get a restraining order saying I couldn't come within 500 feet of any restaurant or store that has potatoes. > > Most of the schools always specify "cheeseburger with bun" because > > this food is so cheap that sometimes it might not have a bun. (It's > > called "salisbury steak".) > > Strange that the meat quality at schools is so bad that hamburgers, > normally a safe choice in most situations, tend to be the most awful- > tasting thing they serve. Or at least that was my experience. The > best thing they served at my high school was the turnover-shaped > burrito-oid thing, ostensibly because had a little bit of seasonings > in it to cover up the taste of the meat. I agree, schools manage to find ways to ruin hamburgers, which is quite an achievement when you consider that I love White Castles. Once when I was in college (at a place which had reasonably good food) I took a survey of what the least popular food item there way, and the winner was "salisbury steak". For those of you who are in countries that don't make up random phrases like "salisbury steak", it means "a hamburger patty served by itself because buns cost money". A salisbury steak is not topped with expensive ketchup and mustard, just with brown gravy (and if you don't have brown gravy in your country, just imagine gravy which tastes brown.) -- K. The one I always hate: "American chop suey". It doesn't taste that bad, but the concept is offensive for multiple reasons: 1.) "chop suey" IS an American invention (San Francisco), 2.) "American chop suey" has nothing to do with "chop suey", and 3.) it's something nobody has ever eaten outside a school cafeteria, unless you count the icky canned version, "Beefaroni". ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: More about disgusting elementary school lunch menus from the Web. Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 03:12:36 -0400 talysman (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Hmm. I don't think any of the bodegas down the street from me sells > > fresh warm quesadillas, although it's not like I've actually looked > > for quesadillas because I don't like queso or armadillos. But I don't > > live near a good barrio -- my neighborhood isn't like that neat area > > near MacArthur Park where people sell grilled vegetables on hibachis > > they set up on the sidewalk. My neighborhood just has lots of canned > > Goya products, which only barely makes it Hispanic. > > oh my, you didn't mention before that people in your neighborhood > like to DEVOUR THE HEADS OFF CHILDREN! I didn't say I lived in Cannibaltown. That's over near South Station. Also, I'm not sure if my neighborhood has any dyslexic homophobes, but I'll keep an eye out for people fleeing the bodega yelling "NOOOOO! I DON'T WANNA EAT GAYO REFRIED BEANS! THEY'RE THE REFRIED BEANS THAT ONLY GAY PEOPLE CAN EAT!" > [...] > > incidentally, I have solved the problem of why the cheese on > "cheese" pizzas in school cafeterias doesn't look like cheese. > IT ISN'TS! IT'S MARIGOLDS! Then why does it still taste as awful as cheese? > http://4hgarden.msu.edu/tour/29.html > -> > -> Pizza is the most popular choice on the school > -> lunch menu in the United States. Plants growing > -> here in the Pizza Garden make up the ingredients: > -> tomatoes, onions, peppers, parsley, basil and > -> Greek oregano. The marigolds around the outside > -> represent the cheese. > > I would suggest getting all your pizza at the local grade school > from now on, for that fresh flowery taste! Well, that Tyson Chicken corporate site emphasized that they let little kids invent all their new products, so little kids are obviously great cooks, and therefore all grownups should demand that their pizza be made by little kids from now on. Plus it's real easy for the kids these days because they can just buy a Play-Doh set that makes pizzas. The one to have is the Chuck E. Cheese brand Play-Doh set where the cheese comes out the mouse's nose. I am not kidding. Chuck E. Cheese paid good money to the Play-Doh company to teach kids that their pizza cheese is made from rodent boogers. -- K. Also, how come there aren't any plants to represent the pepperoni? Pepperoni would be a great plant, especially for people who don't like vegetables! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: More about disgusting elementary school lunch menus from the Web. Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 00:33:54 -0400 Stacia (stacia@world.std.com) wrote: > > The sad, sad thing is that my current employer no longer shows pics of > their food, and it's on the Intranet so you couldn't get to it anyway. > But I managed to save a few of the pics which were truly horrific, and I > will post them tomorrow if I remember, which I won't. > The thing is, this cafeteria manages to have food which tastes decent, > but *always* gives you a stomach ache. You could have their salad, or a > baked potato, or ice water, and you get a stomach ache. Fruit Loops do that. And Trix. And Skittles. And all other artificial rainbow-colored candies. I've never been able to figure out precisely which ingredient of these cereals and candies makes my stomach hurt. Does your cafeteria serve mostly blue food? > And every Friday? Tator tot casserole. Yes, it's spelled "tator". > Every Friday. > Tator. ver SATOR TOTI AREPO R EHORS TENET O ESTO OPERA T !!!!!ROTAT ROTATOR TATOR!!!!! T AREPO OWAH O TENET TAGOO R OPERA SIAM ROTAS bum ...imagine that spinning around really fast while zooming in and out as the "Batman" theme plays and you will have seen the inside of my mind. -- K. [15][14] ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: More about disgusting elementary school lunch menus from the Web. Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 00:34:00 -0400 talysman (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > ver > > SATOR TOTI > > AREPO R EHORS > > TENET O ESTO > > OPERA T > > !!!!!ROTAT ROTATOR TATOR!!!!! > > T AREPO > > OWAH O TENET > > TAGOO R OPERA > > SIAM ROTAS > > bum > > > > ...imagine that spinning around really fast while zooming in and out > > as the "Batman" theme plays and you will have seen the inside of my mind. > > > > -- K. > > > > [15][14] > > oh no! > > the inside of kibo's mind is actually the 15th and 14th enochian tablet! > and by spinning his head around on the tator axis, he has summoned evil > undead angels led by jack parsons and elrond hubbard who will usher in > the apocalypse by devouring pizza and fung-yuns! Now, suddenly, you understand why I carefully steered our discussion of food to elemetary school cafeteria food to the misspellings on school lunch menus to the phrase "tator tots". All specifically so that I could expose you to the horrors of The Whirling Tator Axis. Fun-Yuns are not involved in this vision of the apocalypse. But Death-Yuns are. Don't eat the Death-Yuns! Unless you have lots of clam dip. Clam dip can smother evil, but only if the evil is in one of the many forms made by Frito-Lay, and only if it's not one of the evil brands of clam dip. (Clam dip made from the fried clams they sell at the White Castle across from the Empire State Building should be safe, because those aren't even clams.) > I think we need to seal the 11:11 gateway using translated evocations > from the voynich manuscript illustrated by luigi serafini! I like the Codex Seraphinianus page where it shows how salami is made. Or am I reading the book BACKWARDS to see the UNMAKING OF ALL SALAMI? EVIL! EVIL! EEEEEEVIL! > quick, someone hand me that emblem of the $25,000 pyramid! That was the second most demonic game show of all time, after "Magnificent Marble Machine". I mean, the power of the Magnificent Marble Machine caused that guy to split his pants. You don't see that happening on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?". -- K. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go swap the cases of all the "HŠxan" and "Incubus" DVDs at Blockbuster. EVIL! And worse, I'm going to switch the cases of "A Hard Day's Night" and "Head". EEEEEEEEEVIL! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: VERY Important Question (MEN ONLY) Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 01:51:35 -0400 phy (phy00x@yahoo.com) wrote: > > Why do mens underwear have a weinerslot? I always flip mine over the top. That's called an "atomic wedgie" and your arms must be very flexible if you can pull the waistband all the way over the top of your head like that. > Doesn't everyone do this or am I just weird? Someday they'll have underwear which is truly stain-resistant and then you won't have to use the slot _or_ pull down the top. -- K. EWW! PHY, YOU'RE GROSS! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Mister Rogers Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 02:18:38 -0400 Brian 'Jarai' Chase (bdc@world.std.com) wrote: > > [article from CNN] > -> > -> PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (AP) -- Mister Rogers now has an > -> asteroid named in his honor. Yay! Now I can go there and be the king of Planet Nerdo! Okay, so it's just an asteroid, not a planet. But "Asteroid Nerdo" takes too long to say. > -> "Misterrogers," formerly known as No. 26858, honors Fred Rogers, > -> creator and host of public television's "Mister Rogers' > -> Neighborhood." Rogers died February 27 at age 74. But that's not his name! He was either "Mister Rogers" or "Misterogers" (with a missing "r") depending on what graphic you were looking at. "Misterrogers" has an "rr" in it which gives it a piratical pronounciation, "Arrrr, me mateys, arrrrrr! Avast and storm the castle of Misterrrrogerrrrs!" Sophisticated people have eliminated the double and triple "r" from their box of phonemes, as indicated by my latest scientific research involving looking at people's foreheads on TV: CHARLES DARWIN'S THEORY OF EVOLUTION OF SOME PEOPLE by Kibo (8 zillion BC) Australopithecus --> "OY! ENERGIZER!" (7 zillion BC) Charlie Brown --> "AUGH!" (6 zillion BC) Cro-Magnons --> "RRRRR!" (5 zillion BC) Tie Domi --> "RRRR!" (4 zillion BC) Neanderthals --> "RRR!" (3 zillion BC) Gene Rayburn --> "RRR, BLANK!" (2 zillion BC) Pirates --> "ARRR!" (1 zillion BC) David Hasselhoff --> "KNIGHT RIDARRR!" (today) People --> "Hello." (1 zillion AD) Doubledomes --> "Let's go use our time machine to go laugh at pirates!" > -> "I doubt that there are many who have not been touched in some > -> way by the life and work of Fred Rogers," said John G. > -> Radzilowicz, director of the Henry Buhl Jr. Planetarium & > -> Observatory at the Carnegie Science Center, which made the > -> announcement Thursday. I should add that I think Mr. Rogers was somewhere between the people of today and the doubledomes of tomorrow. He hadn't yet evolved the giant eight-lobed brain they will have, but he had evolved beyond the capacity to be a meanie. Also his mind was so advanced that he could actually remember what it was like to be a small child, unlike most of the other people who try to host kids' TV shows. > -> The science center worked with Family Communications Inc., the > -> production company Rogers founded, to produce a planetarium show > -> for preschoolers called "The Sky Above Mister Rogers' > -> Neighborhood." The show now plays at 15 planetariums across the > -> country. > -> > -> "Misterrogers" can be found between the orbits of Mars and > -> Jupiter, and is about 218 million miles from the sun, which it > -> takes about 3 1/2 years to orbit. > > I'm imagining that, twenty years from now, Misterrogers will get just > the right nudge from some other asteroid, and will be sent on a > collision course towards Earth. The resulting impact will wipe out > 90% of the human population. Most of the remaining 10% will undergo a hideous mutation and become very small and floppy, requiring someone to hold them up from below and work their arms for them. However, those people will consider themselves lucky because they'll get to live in big blue castles, once they've eaten all the oatmeal that was in the can. > From the hellish cinder that was our world, a new order will emerge. > The shattered memetic fragments shall align themselves in such a way > that the science formerly known as astronomy will morph into a major > world religon. One of the pillars of this new religion will be that, > after death, people are reborn into the Land of Make Believe as giant > orbitting space rocks. But only if they can get a seat on the little trolley that goes there. Also... Before the apocalypse: The Bible. After the apocalypse: Picture Picture. Now let us watch the sacred film showing unto us the making of tubas. -- K. I had forgotten Mr. Rogers was dead until that mean astronomer reminded me. I'm taking him off my Christmas list and putting him next to Gene Rayburn. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Mister Rogers Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 03:39:24 -0400 Concerning proto-humans and deadly rocks, I just wrote: > > (8 zillion BC) Australopithecus --> "OY! ENERGIZER!" > (7 zillion BC) Charlie Brown --> "AUGH!" > (6 zillion BC) Cro-Magnons --> "RRRRR!" > (5 zillion BC) Tie Domi --> "RRRR!" > (4 zillion BC) Neanderthals --> "RRR!" > (3 zillion BC) Gene Rayburn --> "RRR, BLANK!" > (2 zillion BC) Pirates --> "ARRR!" > (1 zillion BC) David Hasselhoff --> "KNIGHT RIDARRR!" > (today) People --> "Hello." > (1 zillion AD) Doubledomes --> "Let's go use our time machine > to go laugh at pirates!" I forgot to mention: Yesterday New Hampshire's official state symbol, a big rock that happened to look vaguely like a Gene Rayburn when seen from the left side, disintegrated completely, and now all the New Hampshire quarters are worthless because they show a lie -- New Hampshire doesn't have anything that looks like that any more, they just have a very famous pile of rubble where A Rock That Looked Like A Thing used to be. Gene Rayburn could not be reached for comment, because he's dead -- coincidence? I don't think so! So if any other Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons fall apart in the next few days, it's New Hampshire's fault. Now let's go use our time machine to go pick up Gene Rayburn and take him to see The Old Man In The Mountain so we can tell him, "Look! New Hampshire has a huge, naturally-occurring monument to you! Let's skip ahead and see it fall apart!" My theory is that the rock just got tired of having thousands of people squinting at it to make it look like something. The rock finally dropped the charade and came out of the closet, saying "I'm rock, and I'm proud!" And now New Hampshire has no tourist attractions, because The Old Man In The Mountain disintegrated and Archimedes Plutonium moved to the South Dakota. -- K. "We always thought it was the hand of God holding him up, and now, He let him go!" -- park ranger ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Mister Rogers Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 23:29:36 -0400 Jacob W. Haller (spog@jwgh.org) wrote: > > [...addressing Talysman...] > At this point, I finally realized that you were talking about Gene > Rayburn and that I was thinking of Gene Ray, the timecube guy. Garry Shandling (as Larry Sanders) once said, "Scientists have discovered the gene that causes cancer. Unfortunately, it's Gene Rayburn." I apologize for mentioning Gene Rayburn and Garry Shandling in the same sentence, which might lead Conan O'Brien to do an "If They Mated" piece where they give birth to some craggy, wrinky face sticking out of the side of a mountain in New Hampshire, which then collapses, killing Jeffrey Tambor before he can mate with Oprah's pal Dr. Phil. > Kibo's posts in this thread are about equally wacky under either > interpretation. My posts aren't just equally wacky. All my posts are much wackier than all my other posts. The fact that my posts are a lot wackier than themselves leads to two inescapable conclusions: "A lot" is where you build a house and "posts" are used toti ehors esto. OH NO, IT'S A CALLBACK TO AN IMAGINARY WHIRLING HALLUCINATION OF THE ABSTRACT CONCEPT OF THE MISSPELLING OF TATER TOTS! -- K. I don't like either the term "posts" or the term "postings". I prefer to call my articles "adventures in awesomeness". ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Mister Rogers Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 04:21:39 -0400 Stacia (stacia@world.std.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > (8 zillion BC) Australopithecus --> "OY! ENERGIZER!" > > (7 zillion BC) Charlie Brown --> "AUGH!" > > (6 zillion BC) Cro-Magnons --> "RRRRR!" > > (5 zillion BC) Tie Domi --> "RRRR!" > > (4 zillion BC) Neanderthals --> "RRR!" > > (3 zillion BC) Gene Rayburn --> "RRR, BLANK!" > > One of my anthropology teachers was so enamored with Cro-Magnons that > she often spoke of liking men with huge jutting foreheads and eyes that > "peered out of the darkness". [...] Anyhow, she had the total hot > potatoes for Gene Rayburn. I admit, I do, too. But unfortunately, he's BLANK! (BWAMP! doo doot doo doo doot doot doo doo doot BWAMP! doo doot doo doo doot...) Today I saw one where the bonus question was "CUT THE BLANK", and everyone laughed for a while when the question was shown, but none of the celebrities suggested either of the two most obvious answers ("CHEESE" and "CRAP"), and the contestant guessed "MUSTARD", which is good because not one of the 100 people surveyed said "CHEESE" or "CRAP". Either that or "Match Game" was rigged. Which might mean that Brett Somers wasn't chosen to be an expert panelist because of her superior intelligence! How to tell if "Match Game" is rigged: Look for instances where one contestant is given "HAMBURGER WITH FRENCH BLANK" and another is given just "A BLANK". > > Yesterday New Hampshire's official state symbol, a big rock that happened > > to look vaguely like a Gene Rayburn when seen from the left side, > > disintegrated completely, > > I looked this up and discovered you are correct, The Old Man in the > Mountain went kaflooey sometime between Thursday and Saturday. I was > amused to find the state had been holding the monument together with > cables and epoxy. Epoxy? 47 metric tonnes of super glue? Yes, well, one drop will hold anything. 47 tons of it won't. The tube says to use just one drop and spread it thinly because in larger quantities, Super Glue is actually a lubricant. Also it falls off if you get it below 50 degrees, and it bonds skin instantly and is then a minor inconvenience during the three seconds it takes to peel it off easily. Trust me, I've tested it on every part of my body, and it never sticks to me. It's apparently one of my many superpowers. -- K. Things that stick to me better than Super Glue: Vinyl. Nougat. Post-It Notes. Lint. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Please tell me all about modern fashion. Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 04:29:46 -0400 I have three questions about what people are wearing. Please tell me what the deal is with all these people walking around in tight jeans with big white bleach stains on the butt. Did a whole lot of people sit on the same park bench even though it had a "WET PAINT MADE WITH 90% CLOROX BLEACH" sign? Or did they drink a whole quart of McDonald's new Swimming Pool Flavored Chlorine Bleach Shake and then poop their pants? Or is the actual truth even more horrible? What's the term for those finger rings which are so huge that they cover two joints of the same finger and have to have a hinge in the middle? Is there some reason William Shatner thought "Jake Cardigan" would be a good name for a tough detective? And are those books the reason kids don't wear cardigans all summer any more? -- K. And a fourth: If BVDs are "Y-fronts", what letter is the back? ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Please tell me all about modern fashion. Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 23:33:15 -0400 Joseph Michael Bay (jmbay@Stanford.EDU) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > What's the term for those finger rings which are so huge that they cover > > two joints of the same finger and have to have a hinge in the middle? > > Cesti. I asked what they were called, not whether they were moderately seasoned! It doesn't help me to know that they're zompletely cesti! I've often thought that the U.S. Government Of America should regulate the use of the word "zesty" for snack foods. The USGOA needs to pass a law legally defining "zesty", because nobody else has ever figured out what it means either, and they should also punish people who sell bland foods which are labelled "zesty", and relabel those foods "quasi-zesty", because I want to play that word in Scrabble someday (the hyphen is just a sideways "I", so the hyphen is only worth one point. But playing my other ten tiles along with the sideways one would get me a bonus of 350,000 points plus airline miles.) -- K. Do they have ones where the hinge connects two joints on the same finger, one joint on another finger, and the spinal column? ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Please tell me all about modern fashion. Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 23:31:48 -0400 Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Please tell me what the deal is with all these people walking around > > in tight jeans with big white bleach stains on the butt. > > This initially made me think of the white-pantsed woman whose visible > skid marks so traumatized Archimedes Plutonium when he was in college > that he had to invent a whole new technique of postdefecatory hygiene, > but then I realized that the people you're seeing are probably just > showing off how good their rear ends look now that they've acquired > the product with the most inspiring trademarked slogan I've heard in > quite some time: > > http://www.biniki-fashions.com/default.asp > > "Biniki(tm) is a butt Bra!!(tm)" "Biniki(tm) is a butt Bra!!(tm)" > That's the sort of lofty thought that'll get our spirits back up now > that we've lost the Old Man of the Mountain. "Biniki(tm) is a butt > Bra!!(tm)" "Biniki, we have to break into my boss's office to steal that letter you weren't supposed to mail him!" "Bibi da!" ...and then hilarity ensues with Bronson Pinchot, Mark-Linn Baker, and this week's chimp! If you say the slogan on a.r.k I'll say that, only probably with more of an episode attached, because I still have an entire unproduced "Perfect Strangers" script here somewhere. No, wait! I wasn't supposed to paste in the _whole_ message I mailed you last night! The last paragraph was secret! Oops, the most important conspiracy in human history is ruined! Now people know I'm not writing this by accident! I guess now I'll have to buy old magazines and cut them up with scissors and gluing them together randomly if I want people to think I'm creative. Either that, or maybe Biniki and I can sneak into every home in the world to steal all the copies of that paragraph... it's so crazy, it just might work, as long as we get back in time for our double date with those three supermodels who think the two of us are three Arab shieks... -- K. Someday I want to film an "In Search Of" episode where we look for the sunken island of Caspiar. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: The Talk Date: Mon, 05 May 2003 23:35:56 -0400 Matt McIrvin (mmcirvin@world.std.com) wrote: > > In Fairfax County Public Schools circa 1980, there was a weird, > exceedingly elliptical sex-education unit done as part of "Health," > which in turn was the classroom segment of Physical Education. It was > a sex-segregated course a few days long in which we young men saw > movies and filmstrips telling us what X and Y chromosomes were and that > nocturnal ejaculation was normal and that girls had periods. In sixth grade we had to get permission slips from our parents to see the films "Boy To Man" or "Girl To Woman" (depending on our gender) and they gathered all the boys from four classes together in one room and all the girls in another room. Then one of the other teachers came into the boys' room and gave us all a long lecture about how Communism is bad because in Russia they don't let you choose what you want to do when you grow up. I think he had waited the entire year for this opportunity to tell the boys and only the boys the secret of capitalism so that my gender could maintain its manly economic domination of Communists and girls. Am I the only one that got anti-Communist propaganda during the sex talk? I assume some other people, but not many, got the tail end of the McCarthy era mixed in with the start of the sex education era. Then the gym teacher (who apparently inspired Robert Picardo's character on "The Wonder Years") said that a jock strap was "a pouch you keep your testicles in" and I think half the kids wondered how tight you were supposed to tie off the drawstring and whether you should put the pouch in your locker or in your back pocket after putting your testicles in it. And I assume I'm not the only one whose gym teacher was clueless about sex and how to describe things made from elastic. -- K. Now I gotta go, the hockey game is on TV and I want to watch it just in case the players all escape from the arena and go beat up my gym teacher. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Comcast: More Evil Than Hitler And All Other Cable Companies Combined Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 03:41:40 -0400 About three hours ago, I wrote: > > Now I gotta go, the hockey game is on TV and I want to watch it > just in case the players all escape from the arena and go > beat up my gym teacher. Scratch "gym teacher" and insert "cable company". So here's what happened. I watched the Senators beat the Flyers (5-1) so that they'll go on to the conference finals (thanks in part to a very nice move by the Flyers goalie, who decided at a crucial moment to slide all the way to the blue line on his butt so that he would be a few dozen feet away from his net) and when I was done watching my recording of the game (it was on while I was at the office) I switched to live TV and... The "B" cable signal (the one which contains most of the worthwhile channels) was gone. Completely. All the "B" channels vanished sometime within 90 minutes after the game ended. You see, my evil local cable company (Cablevision) got absorbed into a slightly more evil cable company (MediaOne) who got absorbed into a significantly more evil cable company (AT&T Broadband) who was really pushy about trying to get us to switch from analog cable to more expensive digital cable, and then they were absorbed by a really, truly evil cable company (Comcast)... Comcast spent their first month mailing everyone lots of postcards about how they were going to work hard to be our trust, as if they wanted us to think that they realized AT&T Broadband had an image problem, and as if they thought printing their logotype in lowercase would fool us into thinking they were a fun & friendly conglomerate. Then they immediately started turning off people's cable without warning because they decided they wanted everyone to upgrade to the pricey digital cable _right now_. Also, they did it at that precise moment because they were sore the Flyers lost. (Comcast owns the Flyers.) Of course, if they had switched it off while I was in the middle of watching something, I'd be even more cross with them, but it's still pretty galling that they just decided to take my cable away in the middle of the night because I was happy with the affordable analog cable. So, my options now if I ever want to be able to see TV shows again are: 1.) Hook up the rabbit ears, and only get the lame broadcast channels, and everything would be super-fuzzy because I'm in a big city. (Some of the VHF channels are not watchable even though the transmitters are downtown. Cities are full of interference and echoes.) 2.) Switch to the only competing cable company, RCN. But they only have analog cable with more or less the same selection of channels I had, except they don't have one of my favorites, and I know they'd pull the same sort of forcible-switchover- to-digital soon, especially because RCN is another horrible evil corporation (namely, it's the local electricity monopoly's attempt to also also be a phone company and a cable company.) 3.) Get a digital satellite dish. I'd love to have a DirecTV dish hooked up one one of those dual-tuner TiVos (the satellite version of TiVo can record two programs at the same time) but from here, the satellite is at azimuth 236, and my apartment's balcony faces approximately azimuth 120, so satellite is impossible. 4.) Pay extra to evil Comcast to get back the cable signal they didn't want to provide me. For a level of service comparable to what I had (except with fewer premium channels) the bill will be something like $85/month, plus the cost of the installation they're forcing me to get. And I'll have to get one of those giant cable boxes Comcast uses, the ones where you have to set your TiVo or VCR to send three-digit channel numbers v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y so that it takes about fifteen seconds to change channels (digit... digit... digit... wait for digital picture to reassemble jigsaw-puzzle-style... wait for giant advertisement covering the picture to disappear...) #3 is not feasible because the satellite is hidden behind the building, but I seriously considered #1 and #2 before settling for paying the extortion money to the evil Comcast scumbags. They took my cable TV signal away without warning and now I have to spend extra money, and do a bunch of work, to get it back. I think I managed to put in a service order through their slow, broken, cryptic Web site so now all I have to do is move all my furniture so that they can screw around with my TV, get up early on the day the technician is supposed to come, and have a check in hand for the cost of installation and sign a stack of forms waiving all right to anything, and I should be able to see TV shows again in the middle of next week. At least option #4 gets me a lot of channels and they will look reasonably good (unlike Comcast's analog cable which is usually snowy) but I absolutely detest the fact that they've beaten me. I have absolutely no option for getting a TV signal other than to do whatever Comcast wants and pay whatever Comcast wants (unless I switch to RCN, which offers fewer benefits and I know from previous dealings with Boston Edison that they're also run by jerks.) I am really mad at Comcast right now, even though their team just got eliminated from the playoffs. And I think I'm going to get to catch up on my reading for the next week and a half. (Does anyone know any books with titles containing the words "Comcast", "Executives", and "Get Eaten By Dingoes"?) Really, due to this and other issues with my local cable company (under whatever name it had in any given month) I seriously considered option #1. That's how much I hate them. I hate them almost as much as I like TV. (I still have over a week to cancel the appointment for the installation if I decide I hate the idea of paying them $85 a month for service I shouldn't have had to order in the first place.) Have I adequately communicated that I am never going to be sending the Comcast corporation a musical Christmas card? -- K. And about my phone company, Verizon... they might be the least incompetent of the colossally evil utility companies here, but they're still at least as evil as half a Hitler plus one Fatty Arbuckle. Comcast, though, is a full baker's dozen of assorted Hitlers and Arbuckles (no two alike.) ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Comcast: More Evil Than Hitler And All Other Cable Companies Combined Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 21:13:57 -0400 Stacia (stacia@world.std.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Then they immediately started turning off people's cable without > > warning because they decided they wanted everyone to upgrade to > > the pricey digital cable _right now_. > > Our local cable company would refuse to fix the analog cable and just > let it rot until we were forced into digital. And the only way we could > get movie channels out the wazoo was with digital. AND they are the only > cable company out here. Mine's the only real cable company here (if you don't count the rinky-dink one run as a sideline of the electric company's attempt at being a telecommunications company -- yeah, like I want to get my E-mail from the power company) but because they keep changing their mind about which lies they want to tell people, it's hard to tell they're just one company. Earlier this week, I talked to someone sensible who had the same symptoms as me (the "B" channels all turned to static in the middle of the night) and who was told there was no more "B" cable, period, and they had to upgrade to digital. And then they took away my "B" cable, and I spent a bunch of time figuring out how to order digital cable from Comcast's Web site (which wasn't easy.) Today I got this E-mail: -> PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. -> James Parry -> Thank you for your interest in Comcast Digital Cable service. However, due -> to a past-due balance on your account, we are unable to process your -> online order at this time. -> -> Please contact us at 1-800-COMCAST to continue processing your order. -> -> Thank you again for your interest in Comcast. I'm interested in knowing why they feel they can send E-mail to me but I'm not allowed to E-mail them (would I really want to get a cable modem from an E-mail provider who feels this way?) and also in knowing why their Web site refused to tell me what my balance was even when I asked it (you can only see your bills _after_ being signed up with the Web site for a month, and then once you do that you can choose whether to get your bills via E-mail or via E-mail and paper, with no option to go back to not getting them mailed to you from people who tell you you may not reply) and why it allowed me to try to order service if I didn't meet their rules for buying from them (apparently because I didn't pay my April bill and it's now the first week of May, I can't sign up to get digital cable installed, even though they say I must pay the installer with a check or money order -- really!) So I phone 1-800-COMCAST, and answered a bunch of questions about where I was calling from, whether I was interested in getting cable or hockey tickets from them, and so on, then I was put on hold to listen to a recording which promised me that (a) all their operators were busy and (b) I can get through 24 hours a day whenever it's convenient for me, I waited and eventually got through to a person who allowed me to pay the bill that I couldn't pay on the Web site, and then she told me that I should sign up for automatic debit to forestall any future problems in not paying the bills the moment they're due (probably caused by me hating to give any money to this cable company to start with) but there is no way in hell I'm going to give these people the keys to take whatever money they want out of my bank account whenever they want to, particularly as the rates increase a notch every few months. Anyhow, I've heard all sorts of different stories from friends and neighbors about Comcast forcing them to upgrade to digital or lying to them about what services are offered (they like to deny they even support analog cable for existing subscribers, let alone current subscribers,) and normally I'd expect that when a bill is a week late they'd do something like give you a little more time or put up that splash screen on the cable box that shows ads for pay-per-view or turn off both the "A" and "B" channels or send out an E-mail (as they clearly know how to send out E-mail, even if I can't tell them not to or even reply) so the fact that they've instituted a new policy of being _really_ strict about bill payment and not communicating to the customers about what's going on is either part of their plan to trick people into ordering digital cable upgrades, or else they just don't give a rat's ass about their customers, and honestly, I don't think they're smart enough for the first of the two options. And now I'm not sure if my order for the digital cable upgrade is going to go through or whether it will be forgotten, but I'd better call them again and make sure it's cancelled. As to whether people were being forced to upgrade to digital (and I have sources who have told me that Comcast salespeople have said "there is no more 'B' cable" when their "B" channels have been deleted) I asked the woman at 1-800-COMCAST about this, and she said "we're not presently requiring upgrades" and then went on about the FCC ruling that says that people have to be switched over to digital broadcasting by 2006 so that Comcast would want me to go digital in 2005 or 2006 ("or possibly later".) I'm going to talk to people who have told me other stories about what Comcast has told them and try to start a collection of blather (I just don't get enough blather on the Internet.) For now I've got my analog cable back, and I plan to keep it until I eventually wind up living somewhere where I can get a satellite (and be able to choose what brand of dish and decoder to buy, subscribe to channels individually from content providers, record two channels simultaneously without needed two sets of equipment, enable or disable service easily via the Web, etc.) Although it is tempting to go digital now just because I know they'll probably pull the forced-switchover trick on me soon (after all, the woman on the phone suggested that such might happen in two years, and in other parts of my service area it's already happened) but that feels like I'd be letting them browbeat me into buying whatever they want to sell me. "Yo, we can do dis da easy way or da hard way. Just buy da freakin' digital cable. Capisce?" They have managed to inch my monthly analog fee up to the point where it's about the same as the monthly cost of digital, less the installation fee, and the value of all the time I'm wasted dealing with Comcast. > Until I moved to the hefty kewl trailer park, and we have a different > cable company. I just kicked their ass so you may get some comfort in > this story: > They were late setting us up, they screwed up the billings when we > voluntarily went to digital, they never buried the cable (so we've been > mowing over it since last fall), and then we get a late bill dated April > 10 saying we have to pay by April 11 or we will be disconnected. I call, > they are nice and explain they just got the billings straightened out and > I could pay on April 15. Ed goes home, discovers they've disconnected us > anyway. > Now, they couldn't manage to do anything else on time, but they > disconnect us early, and after saying they won't. > So I faxed my trailer park owners in Denver and the manager here in town > asking, please, let us have another cable company, because I have had it > with this one. > Immediately the cable company was contacted by the owners of the trailer > park and much ass was kicked. I got $100.00 off my bill and everything. > I actually felt guilty... But I still wish we could get another cable > company. Those bastards! They've broken your spirit! They made you feel guilty for taking advantage of their generosity in charging you a little less for the services they didn't install correctly, didn't bill correcty, and didn't provide! Just because you're a good person and they're incompetent, uncaring bozos is no reason to feel guilty. It's not your fault you're not an asshole! When the phone, gas, electricity, or cable companies are monopolies, and they jerk you around, at least you can assume it's the natural order of affairs. I live in an area where there is supposedly a choice of two phone companies, two cable companies (plus satellite), and so on, and yet all the companies still act as obnoxiously as if they had a complete monopoly on everything. "I'll tell you what you're gonna do. Yer gonna order all da channels in the Premium Electrum-Mithril Plus Deluxe Galaxy Of Rainbows Optional Tier or yer not gonna be allowed t' ride our subway again. Dis is a Comcast town now. You'll receive yer horse's head in da mail in six t' eight weeks." (You have to imagine that, in my head, the people who set policies at these companies are all actually the Dirty Frank puppet from "Jabberwocky". "Buy why wouldn't people wanna pay more t' get an extra channel about da history of making cardboard boxes? We should just tell'em dey wanna pay more, because we're allowed to do dat, it's free speech! An' if ya ever try t' E-mail us about yer bill, we'lll have ya rubbed out an' den we'll turn half yer cable off!") > That didn't help you at all, I know. I do have some 1950s RCA rabbit > ears with little red dealies on the ends. Very "My Favorite Martian". If I wanted any part of my home to look like Ray Walston, it probably wouldn't be the TV. Most likely something from the bathroom. > > [...] they're still at least as evil as half a Hitler plus one > > Fatty Arbuckle. Comcast, though, is a full baker's dozen of > > assorted Hitlers and Arbuckles (no two alike.) > > Hey. Roscoe Arbuckle wasn't evil, you n