From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: The maze that will solve ALL world problems! Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 01:01:45 -0400 Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > The idea that instead of punishing bullies we should just have all the > > kids play in a giant Maze Of Tolerance is a very "Davey & Goliath" way > > of dealing with the issue: "Davey, he's only bullying you because > > he's lonely and doesn't have any friends. If you agree to be his > > friend, he'll stop beating you up!" Shyeah right. > > Actually, a look at the Web site of the people promulgating this > recess-defunning concept -- http://www.peacefulplaygrounds.com/ -- > seems to indicate it's largely an excuse to sell stencils for painting > things on the pavement: > > http://www.peacefulplaygrounds.com/stencils.htm Oh. Well, that's worse. Now instaled of the bullies extorting money from the wimps, now the stencil companies of the world are tricking schools of the world into spending money on stencils instead of on the kids' education. > Wow! The way those numbers and letters managed to be square and curvy > at the same time is vastly reducing the amount of spare energy and > unchecked aggression that fills my seven-year-old self! I have to guess what they look like, because I'm in a subway tunnel now and there doesn't seem to be any Internet here. Also, I'm sitting directly across from a guy who is staring at me while angrily muttering "STUPID! STUPID!" to himself, although I don't know whether he means me or him. I think this is where I change trains. Okay, now I'm in a place that has no Internet but also no "STUPID! STUPID!" so now I can concentrate on imagining the square, curvy letters. They could be rectangles with rounded corners... or obrounds (rectangles with semicircular caps on two sides)... or superellipses (the shape of TV screens)... or maybe just each letter is a pentagon with a blob growing out of one side. The possibilities are endless! For some reason, pavement stencils are never shaped like actual fonts. They're always these strange sub-typewriter-quality monospaced block letters. Why do they have to be monospaced? Small stencils are available shaped like actual printing fonts (Franklin Gothic, etc.) but big ones tend to be these blocking things (which are harder to read because all the letters are essentially the same shape -- rectangles.) > I can see that in a few years the net result of Peaceful Playgrounds > will be a bunch more of those mysterious playground-pavement markings > that are never used for anything, kind of like the ones at my elementary > school. TOYNBEE IDEAS IN KUBRICK'S "2001" RESURRECT DEAD IN SCHOOL PLAYGROUND > We knew how to use the little hopscotch courts, but lord only > knows what the series of rectangles going down the sidewalk, turning > around and coming back again, was supposed to be for. They show you how to get to the *N*E*W* supermarket which is somewhere inside Lord & Laylor's "misses" department. > And I've sometimes wondered if one of the tests for becoming a gym > teacher is that you have to be able to identify what every one of the > random colored lines all over the basketball courts is supposed to be for. I think what they do is just ask the guy "How many bases are on a baseball diamond?" and then no matter what he says, they try to start an argument about whether there are three or four bases and if the guy backs down he doesn't like sports enough to be put in custody of six-year-olds. Also he has to know which beer is the official sponsor of each sports league. > Another nice thing on that stencil page is the colorful map of the > continental U.S., on which they were careful not to mark down the > names of any of the states, either because the giant block letters > were too big to fit or because they didn't want to hurt Little Johnny > and Little Susie's self-esteem by enforcing a rigorous phallocentric > heterodoxy under which only one person's opinion about which state is > represented by which outline is the correct one, thereby oppressing > people who subscribe to other ways of knowing by crushing their > dissent and removing their First Amendment rights by dictatorial fiat. > Who are you to say Texas can't *be* Michigan, or South Carolina can't > *be* Uruguay, or Alaska and Hawaii aren't actually part of the Lower > 48, just because some dead Eurocentric males drew some lines > somewhere? Free your mind, man! They should also make all the states equal in area, like in the maps in "The State Of The World Atlas". Plus it would make them match the blocky stencil lettering once they all became dented rectangles. -- K. Plus I start too many sentences with "plus". Minus I have a grammar problem. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: The maze that will solve ALL world problems! Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 02:19:29 -0400 Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > Actually, a look at the Web site of the people promulgating this > recess-defunning concept -- http://www.peacefulplaygrounds.com/ -- > seems to indicate it's largely an excuse to sell stencils for painting > things on the pavement: > > http://www.peacefulplaygrounds.com/stencils.htm > > Wow! The way those numbers and letters managed to be square and curvy > at the same time is vastly reducing the amount of spare energy and > unchecked aggression that fills my seven-year-old self! Okay, I'm not on the subway any more, so I went and looked at that Web page. Joe, they trolled you! Those are the most obviously fake stencils I've ever seen! Not only are they made out of granite with bevelled edges, but the little triangle at the center of "A" is magically suspended by an invisible force field! Whoever drew those FAAAAAAAKE stencils didn't have the first clue what stencils look like. But they sure got you good! HEY EVERYBODY JOE GOT TROLLED BY A STENCIL COMPANY! Another way you can tell that the stencil pictures are fake is that they show letters in ITC Bolt Bold (a real font), whereas real stencils just use fake fonts (and the photos on the site, showing a referee applying stencils to pavement, do indeed show garden-variety block-letter stencils just like the brown cardboard ones you can get at OfficeMax. The kind that have pieces which can't levitate in the middle of holes.) My guess is that the Web site couldn't be bothered to take photos of the stencils so they just threw together those fakes and slapped a font into a rectangle, applied the "Emboss" effect, and gave up. (Someone seems to have gotten a discount on a Bitstream font pack, the one containing Bolt Bold and Ondine.) ITC Bolt Bold is best known as the font that Vulcans spoke in during "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", until the recent director's cut of the film changed the subtitles to a less illegible font. Bolt Bold dates from the early 1970s. Once I saw a phototype catalog from either 1972 or 1976 which showed two custom-designed fonts made exclusively for use at the Democratic and Republican national conventions -- the fonts were named "Democratic Party" and "Republican Party" and both looked exactly like Bolt Bold. I have no idea if that was the phototype company's attempt at political satire in font-catalog form, or just a reflection of the sad curvy blockiness of the 1970s. The two major political parties no longer use these fonts, because it was so hard for them to stencil the fonts while suspending the little triangles inside the "A"s telekinetically. -- K. BLOCKY CURVES FLOATY MIDDLE STUPID LETTER ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: The maze that will solve ALL world problems! Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 01:27:07 -0400 Rich Holmes (rsholmes+usenet@mailbox.syr.edu) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > So you're saying dodgeball would be fun if it didn't have any rules > > and the bad kids could hit you with baseball bats if they wanted to? > > If, when I was a kid, dodgeball hadn't had any rules, I would have > made use of the non-rule that says "Any player who wishes not to be a > player can leave the gym and go to the library and read or something." > > Of course, the other kids would have made use of the non-rule that > says "If you want to pound that dorky Holmes kid with a baseball bat, > the library is not out of bounds." > > As it was, dodgeball had rules, and our gym teacher kept making up new > rules to try to limit misbehavior and wildness like "If you fall over, > you're out", which I thought was a great rule because after that I > would intentionally fall over. And that is why you can never be in the NHL. The next time the L.A. Times and The Hockey News publish a joint edition shamefully listing the names of all the "johns" and "divers" mixed together on the front page, you're going to get a lot of phone calls asking which you are, and you'll have to explain that you're just one of the two. Either that or just change your name to "Rich Cousteau" to make it obvious. And if you do go find a prostitute, wear a wetsuit. Me, when I played dodgeball, I'd just hide behind something. And then at the end it would just be me and a couple of other weaklings on the opposite side, and the final part of the game would last for hours. But once I did get to bean someone really good when he decided to tie his shoe at center court in the middle of the game. I couldn't have used your strategy because I kept getting kicked out of the library, but that's another story. I think having to deal with irate librarians is a better way to toughen up your character than getting hit in the face with a rubber ball. Matter of fact, almost anything is a better way to build character than just getting hit with projectiles. Like, in baseball, it's supposed to be wrong to try to throw the ball directly at the batter, even though he's armed with a bat and wearing a hard helmet. Why is the point of dodgeball to throw things and unprotected people? Dodgeball might become fun if you were allowed to wear a Redman suit while playing it. Matter of fact, almost anything is more fun while you're wearing a Redman suit. -- K. After all, they must be cool and trendy if Andy Dick has one. His was blue, though. I'd want the original red one. And cleats, too. Gotta have cleats. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: The maze that will solve ALL world problems! Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 19:34:34 -0400 Gregory King (greg@flyingpawn.com) wrote: > > I think part of the reason I liked dodgeball is that my gym class didn't > own any standard inflatable rubber playground balls, so we always played > dodgeball with volleyballs. Although volleyballs are still pretty hard, > even when they are old and abused like the ones we used, they do have a > relatively low terminal velocity, so it's hard to throw it hard enough to > be undodgeable, and if you do get hit, it doesn't hurt so much, unless > you're like my friend Matt and your strategy is to put your face directly > in the trajectory of the ball and hope that your glasses protect you from > injury. Nowadays they're supposed to use softer (under-inflated) rubber balls with cloth covers to make them not hurt. Such a thing was unheard-of when I was a kid. Anyone of my generation lives in perpetual fear of those balls. Just go into any sporting-goods store, find a properly over-inflated playground ball (the kind with the nasty texture), bounce it on the store, and watch all the thirty-somethings cringe out of pure reflex. That sound strikes fear into the hearts of all those my age. It's a sort of "SMACK!" coupled with the sound of the deadly ball ringing like a bell to get "SPANGGGGG!" Really, try the experiment. Men's neck muscles will tighten up more than if they heard a gunshot. I imagine the cloth wrapper on the newer, softer balls may indeed reduce the size of the bruises you get on your forehead, but I doubt it would eliminate the horror of seeing the bigger kids hurling large objects directly at your face. BURLAP PELOTA JACKET CANNOT REDUCE OUCHIE > We also had the rule that catching the ball resurrected everyone who was > out on your side. This means that letting wimpy kids like me throw the > ball could have disastrous consequences, but it also led to a new ruse > for getting people out. If you lobbed a ball at someone in a high arc, > they would probably concentrate on catching it and not notice someone > else hurling a ball right at them. HA HA SUCKER!! It resurrected _everyone_? Geez, that would make the game go on forever. I suppose that was the point. The gym teacher could go phone in his football wagers while the kids did "Throw ball, get hit, repeat until bell rings." That rule would ruin any real sport (imagine if the baseball score reset to zero every time someone caught a ball) so it would _really_ ruin a fake sport like dodgeball, ringuette, or "Magic: The Gathering". > Oh, and I also never hated gym teachers when I was a kid. I think this > is because: > 1. I knew it wasn't their fault that I was fat and slow. No, but it was their fault the kids on the football team got a free lifetime supply of steroids -- the better to pound you with! > 2. They seemed to put a reasonable amount of energy into making sure > that the fat and slow kids only got picked on a little. > 3. I was too busy hating the MEEN kids who were good at sports. > 4. No one told me that hating gym teachers was fun. It's not fun, it's just the way it is, like the way you have dreams about going to school in your underwear even though it never actually happens. Two-thirds of boys spend all of fourth grade drawing pictures of tanks running over the heads of gym teachers who have been decapitated by ninjas that will be their friend, and the other third are the the kids who fantasize about beating up ninjas. I wasn't really in either group -- I fantasized about the two groups of kids beating each other to death so that I could be the class's sole survivor and inherit 30 times 128 crayons to become the Crayola King Of Schenectady. Assuming they didn't all have the _same_ 128 colors. -- K. SOMANY CRAYON COLORS INDESK STATUS SYMBOL ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: The maze that will solve ALL world problems! Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 23:11:05 -0400 Rich Holmes (rsholmes+usenet@mailbox.syr.edu) wrote: > > I never hated my elementary school gym teacher, Mr. Bogus (I don't > know if that's how it was spelled, but that's how it was pronounced). > Disliked, yes, perhaps even despised at times, but mostly he was just > doing his job which was to make me, personally, miserable. And then they made a movie about Mr. Bogus, and it made EVERYONE miserable! Especially when "Mr. Bogus" was shown in a double feature with "Drop Dead Fred" on the same screen at the same time! While the audience was pelted with dodgeballs! > And I don't even remember most of my junior and senior high gym teachers, > so I must not have hated them much, except the one I had in ninth grade. > He was the wrestling coach and his curriculum was: > > Week 1: Basketball, touch football > Weeks 2-37: Wrestling > Week 38: Baseball, volleyball > > And his philosophy of teaching wrestling to ninth graders was: find > the nerdiest kid in class, find the nastiest, wiriest, strongest, > meanest kid in the same class who weighs about the same, and pair them > off for weeks 2-37. > > When nerdy kid complains during weeks 3-37 that the other kid is > regularly beating the shit out of him, point out that they weigh about > the same and therefore are evenly matched and so nothing needs to be > done. > > I hated that guy. We never had to wrestle much, except that in elementary school there was way too much John Malkovich-style Indian leg wrestling. Incidentally, why does that bizarre non-sport get blamed on the Indians, and are they the Native American ones or the ones with the curry? > Karma didn't arrive until 12th grade, when instead of sticking all > boys in one gym class called "Phys Ed" and all girls in another gym > class called "Phys Ed", they had multiple phys ed subjects like > basketball, aerobics, yoga, etc., and you could sign up for what you > wanted, and some of those classes were COED and one of the ones I took > even had this HOT FEMALE BLONDE for a teacher. The whole scheme broke > all the rules of gym that have existed since time immemorial and the > school imploded into a black hole and we all died the enb. We got a choice of bowling or swimming. And then the second half of the semester, we had to do the other one. I think the bowling was only in there because the school was getting kickbacks from the bowling alley to brainwash us into loving bowling by exposing us to mandatory bowling. Didn't work. I really liked bowling before the class, but now I'm not so thrilled. The joy of bowling is lost when your gym teacher makes you do it. HOBSON CHOICE BOWLOR SUFFER TENPIN RUINED It's no fun to bowl in front of a guy who's grading you. Sometime I need to march into that old school and demand to see my permanent record to find out what my bowling scores were. I suspect the reason I didn't become valedictorian was that I threw a few gutter balls. Also they kept trying to teach square dancing in elementary school and -- ack -- ballroom dancing in high school. Even if an opportunity were to arise where I would need to know the fox trot today, I wouldn't be able to remember how it went twenty years ago. I think it was something involving trotting. -- K. Also it was a lot like ringuette, only without the ring. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: The maze that will solve ALL world problems! Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 03:33:35 -0400 > talysman (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > > > there was also a "let's take kids out to a mobile laboratory from the > > U of Urbana with big satellite antennas on top and make them > > manipulate a ball bearing through a maze" day, but that only happened > > once, and only me and a couple other kids got to do that, and I have > > no idea what that was all about. Testing you for telekinetic powers. Of course, we already know you aren't precognitive because you didn't announce that I was going to say that before I said it. So that makes _two_ things you're not good at! Although it's possible that instead of sucking at telekinesis you were able to move the marble with your mind but terrible at doing simple mazes, but that would still make two things, what with your nonprecognition. I bet if I flipped a coin a hundred times and you called "heads" or "tails", you'd be wrong 100% of the time! Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > Hey, one of the spacerriffic things we did at Space Camp involved > using a pencil to complete a simple maze on paper, except it was > situated in such a way that we couldn't actually see the maze directly > but could only look at it in an angled overhead mirror. This would > have made an excellent additional sport for high-school gym class, > particularly given that I wasn't very good at Mirrored Outer-Space > Maze-Doin' either. This whole area of "make kids do things backwards so that they'll all become ambidextrous" shows up in lots of places when you enter the world of avant-garde teaching. I remember some plastic toy sold to schools with a workbook -- it was a pane of translucent red plastic named "Miro", and the point is that you would set it up next to something and trace the reflection with your hand on the other side of the red thing. I'm really not sure what that accomplished. And then in a later grade the art teacher read "Drawing On The Left Side Of The Brain" and had us copy pictures that were turned upside down, which was actually a useful technique for people like graphic designers (turning a picture upside down forces you to treat it as a series of abstract shapes and shifts around all the optical illusions normally introduced by your brain, so you can concentrate on spotting asymmetry or lumps. When drawwing lettering, I often turn things upside down -- but only after drawing them -- because that's the easiest way to discover defects that my brain would otherwise ignore.) > Speaking of which, sometimes I wonder whether the only reason gym > class ever involved softball or baseball games was so the other kids > could signal their opinion of your athletic prowess by how far out in > the outfield they stood when you came up to bat. They let you go up to bat? Wow. You're a total jock. > You can add me to the list of Kibologists who had to do the run-under- > the-parachute thing in gym class. Apparently running under a > parachute was the Peaceful Playgrounds of the Cold War era, except > created by a military-surplus distributor rather than by somebody > trying to sell stencils. I'm just upset that the cafeteria didn't serve food as good as K-rations. And now I'm sad that I'll never know precisely what K-rations and C-rations taste like, because the local surplus stores just have MREs, most of which are less than five years old. (K-rations and C-rations were eliminated long ago.) > [...] we barely coordinated kids got to spend our time doing easier > things such as the crab walk and the Roly-Poly. The Roly-Poly might > have gone by other names in other jurisdictions; it was this thing > where you'd lay on your back and then hold your legs apart up in the air > and start rolling around that way, My precognitive abilities are telling me what Dave DeLaney is about to say. Unless he's already said it, in which case my precognitive abilities are doubly useful because they work on both the future and the past! > which would cause you to sort of flop around like a four-sided > Dungeons & Dragons die. I have no idea what this is supposed to accomplish, other than keeping the kids busy while the gym teacher's assistant helps Joe Friday search all their lockers for dirty joke books which he will then burn in the middle of the cafeteria while standing on a table yelling at the kids about how they've ruined their minds forever with those toxic dirty jokes. -- K. FRIDAY SWIPES ALLTHE EIGHTH GRADER HAZMAT ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: The maze that will solve ALL world problems! Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 23:29:44 -0400 Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > I'll always have fond memories of our elementary school "sports day", > which was the day each year when we got to spend the entire day > outside engaging in quasi-athletic activities. My favorite example > was Single-Pin Bowling On The Asphalt Basketball Court, which tended > to be followed up with Attempting To Toss A Softball Into An Old Tire > Hanging On The High Fence Around The Asphalt Basketball Court. I'm jealous. You got to grow up in Mayberry and I grew up in Schenectady, which doesn't even have a sitcom based on it. > There were a couple of unfortunate examples of actual athletic activities > we had to engage in during "sports day", such as relay races, but I have > mostly blocked those out of my memory in favor of the much fonder > memory of being rewarded with lots of those cheap customized plastic > ribbons such as you can find in the big barrel o' cheap customized > plastic ribbons at the Boston Children's Museum. This is because everyone's a winner! At least when they're children. It's around age 10 or so when they stop lying and admit that only two or three people in the school are good at sports. I notice those of us reminiscing about the unpleasantness of school gym classes are old enough that we didn't have to experience many of the "non-competitive" games they stress these days -- I did have to play one of the stupid run-under-the-Vietnam-surplus-parachute ones once, but for the most part I was only exposed to games designed to teach you that "sports" was synonymous with "trying to hurt people." > [...] But then, I managed to avoid taking gym class during my last > three years of high school (which was barely enough to make up for > the brutal punishment of having gym class for first period every day > in freshman year) My school scheduled all the gym periods either right before or right after lunch. Which leads to the dilemma: Would you rather not want to eat because you just got socked in the stomach, or would you rather eat a hearty lunch and then get socked in the stomach? > [...] It couldn't have been any less athletically enlightening > than that thing we did one day during a touch-football lesson, where > we were supposed to run toward the gym teacher and then he'd give us a > little nudge to the side and we would make a quick turn and run off in > the direction he pushed us in, but it didn't work for me, as I just > fell over immediately when he gave me the little nudge. Again, you'll never be in the NHL, even if, as I said last week, you might be a diver and not a john. Punching someone in the face, that gets a little penalty. Shoving someone, that's fine. But falling down easily when someone gently nudges you, that makes the NHL very upset. -- K. LEAGUE ORDERS MURDER OFEASY DIVING MANFRE ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: The maze that will solve ALL world problems! Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 22:55:26 -0400 Andrew Pearson (apearson@pt.lu) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > I wasn't really in either group -- I fantasized about the two groups > > of kids beating each other to death so that I could be the class's > > sole survivor and inherit 30 times 128 crayons to become the > > Crayola King Of Schenectady. Assuming they didn't all have the _same_ > > 128 colors. > > I say, Kibo old chap? Wouldn't that be pointless given that no living > person would survive to appreciate your greatness? Or where you planning > to arrange the corpses of your erstwhile classmates around the edge of > the room? Perhaps you could have coloured them in with magic markers > first, then arranged them into a rainbow. > > I ask only out of fear. What are you, yellow with fear? No, you can't be, I took your yellow. I bet that makes you green with envy! Except I already have your green. You can be blue about that. Or rather, you could if I didn't already own your blue. I think you still have fuschia. > Is your new secret project to troll all of usenet into killing each > other in an almighty fistfight so that you can inherit all the detritus > and sit as undisputed king atop a great heap of rickety old computers, > StarTrek action figures with suckable candy protusions, Pez dispensers > and long sentences lightly scattered with commas? A "Star Trek" action figure you could lick? Hmm. I hate to think what the top of Picard's head would taste like after a long day yelling at Wesley for saving the ship without his permission. -- K. BALDIE PICARD TOSSES WESLEY OUTTHE WINDOW ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: The maze that will solve ALL world problems! Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 00:52:25 -0400 Xaonon (xaonon@hotpop.com) wrote: > > I liked dodgeball, but I was too good at dodging and not good enough at > throwing. Half of the games would end with me on one side and about ten of > the other team on the other side, and I would regret not having telekinetic > powers with which to throw all the balls at them at once, because there's no > way to hit someone who's *expecting* to be hit. At most you can aim at one > guy and throw it at another, but faking them out only works the first time. I think that was the first draft of the screenplay for Chevy Chase's "Modern Problems" -- he was going to just use his telekinetic powers to win The World Dodgeball Championship so that the dodgeball team could save the orphanage run by The Nuns Who Like Dodgeball, but then they changed it to just have him using his telekinetic powers to make a ballet dancer's testicles explode for no reason, because that's the sort of guy Chevy Chase is in that movie. Also they didn't want the movie to be crushed by that other movie coming out the same weekend about the big dodgeball championship, but they also changed their plot and made Stallone a boxer instead of a dodgeball player. This means that there are no movies about dodgeball championships or telekinetic dodgeball cheating, although there's still a chance they could make a sequel to "Flubber" where Robin Williams sprays Wil Wheaton with magic dodgeball-playing juice that makes the game take a turn for the spaztacular. ("Flubber" is one of those movies where, while watching it, I simply decided I waswatching a completely different movie. In my brain, the movie became "Flubberella", with a young Jane Fonda flying through outer space in a translucent green rubber catsuit. But the mood was spoiled because she kept yelling "Shazbot!") Anyway, Xaonon (whose name is strikingly similar to a "Doctor Who" character except spelled funny), my own personal offensive strategy for playing dodgeball was similar to yours except without the over-thinking. I would look directly at the person I was trying to throw the ball at and then just throw the ball at someone else because it's hard to aim when the bigger kids are about to throw rock-hard overinflated rubber balls at your face from two feet away. I think once I accidentally hit one of The Nuns Who Like Dodgeball. That may be a lie. In my entire life, I may have never been near a _real_ nun. -- K. SPAZZO DOOFUS THROWS RUBBER SPHERE BRUISE ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fan.beable Subject: Re: Humor, includes WebTV Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 01:32:29 -0400 Stacia (stacia@world.std.com) wrote: > > Beable van Polasm (beable+unsenet@beable.com.invalid) wrote: > > > > [...] > > I think it's just a coincidence that Ms. Classical Beauty of America's > > name is Ashlee Bullock. Maybe her name should be Ashlee Heifer? > > Jesus. That's as bad as David Carson on alt.obits; he claims to be a > great Christian but most of the time expounds upon how ugly a lot of women > at Wal-Mart are. I sometimes forget how charming you can be. Yeah, Beable Dot Com Dot Invalid, if that _is_ your real name, open your eyes and you'll see that _everyone_ at Wal-Mart is repulsive! I think Wal-Mart is full of the same people who used to use the restrooms at the Wendy's on 7th Avenue before they closed it. And if you want to see real Walter-Reed-museum-quality deformities? Trader Joe's in the frozen food aisle. I don't mean the shoppers, I mean the things in the rice bowls. Some of those lumps are shapes so weird that not even topologists can bear to look at them. Of course, Trader Joe himself never saw anything wrong with these amorphous yet stringy blobs of indestructible meat, because his head was shaped like the middle stage of that diagram of how to turn a sphere inside-out through the fourth dimension, with a wad of bubble gum stuck to one of the blebs. -- K. P.S. We seem to have wandered away from the original topic, which was, does WebTV make people fat, or is it the other way around? ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fan.beable Subject: Re: Humor, includes WebTV Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 23:06:12 -0400 Beable van Polasm (beable+unsenet@beable.com.invalid) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > And if you want to see real Walter-Reed-museum-quality deformities? > > Trader Joe's in the frozen food aisle. I don't mean the shoppers, > > I mean the things in the rice bowls. Some of those lumps are shapes > > so weird that not even topologists can bear to look at them. > > WELL! I found a statue of The Virgin Mary that looks like a POTATO! > What do you think THAT means? It depends on whether slicing it up would yield communion wafers or potato chips. Or something halfway between the two, like those "vegetable chips" Trader Joe's makes from some weird vegetables that have less flavor than potatoes. -- K. VIRGIN POTATO GRANTS WISHES ONLYTO LOSERS ^ slice here (for nutrition purposes, this article counts as 2 servings) ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: More soda sensations Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 01:42:40 -0400 Jacob W. Haller (spog@jwgh.org) wrote: > > Today's selection is 'non-alcoholic sangria SENORIAL Natural and > Artifical Flavor Sangria Flavored Carbonated Beverage'. I've had that. It's not bad. It actually has somewhat of a cheap-red- wine-sediment flavor, not Kool-Aidy at all. I managed to get a slight buzz off it, so I think it may contain a small quantity of actual wine, possibly on the order of 2 proof. (That's legally considered "non-alcoholic", even if it has more active ingredients than the average dose of cootie spray.) I don't drink, and I'm really skinny, so it doesn't take much to make my brain get all buzzy. > Before even opening it, there were several things I liked about this one: > > * It's made from both natural AND artificial Sangria! > > * The bottle is sort of shaped like a little wine bottle, instead of the > soda bottle-shaped soda bottles you usually see! Quite sophisticated. > The use of lower-case letters emphasizes that this is not one of your > STUPID BABYISH SODA-POPS FOR KIDS. > > * It doesn't have a twist-off cap, so you know that the beverage maker > was focused so much on making it a great soda that they couldn't be > bothered with fripperies like making it easy to open! I've only seen it here in plastic soda bottles with twist caps. They sell it at the local drugstore, right next to that revolting tamarind-flavored brown drink and the even more revolting V-8 carrot-and-pineapple-juice-like-substitute-blended-from-concentrate- pink-slime-in-a-bottle. (But when it comes to awful V-8 products, Canada is king, because they have a new one called "V-Go", which is something like regular V-8 with green peppers and a bunch of corn syrup in it.) > The first thing I noticed upon opening the bottle is that the stuff is > really fizzy. It's even fizzier than Dr Pepper, which is so fizzy that > they have to put a warning label on it explaining that the bottle could > explode at any moment, killing you and everyone you care about, so be > careful for gosh sakes! However, I have a mop at hand for just such > soda-related disasters, so I was able to clean up with a minimum of fuss > and effort. If you enjoy that effect, you should try the one-liter plastic Polar sodas. I don't know how they manage to do it, but whenever you open one of those, you get a super-dee-duper geyser squirting out from under the cap in all directions, and possibly also into the fourth dimension, because the jets are so powerful that they can go through anything, even stuff that hasn't yet been discovered. I think they pressurize all the bottles with a bicycle pump or something. > Next, on to the smell. It smells quite grapey. Now, to decant into a > handy pint glass ... hm, that's a nice dark red color, enough to make me > wonder if it actually smells like cherries. Another whiff confirms that > I was right the first time and it is in fact more grapelike. Must be > the FD&C red #40. > > Now for the taste. Quite nice! The grape soda taste is there, but it > has a slight tang of something alcoholic that makes it more interesting > and tasty (even though I don't as a rule like alcoholic beverages). The > aftertaste reminds me of eating those little grape-flavored hard candies > that come in small round tins. My guess is that it's grape-flavored soda with some wine-barrel-bottom sediment stirred in. Now, if you want something scary, I can go over to Chinatown and get you one of the jars of fire-engine-red lumpy "Fermented Sediment". It's apparently rice that's been subjected to the same process used to make other kinds of rancid slime, plus nuclear-strength red dye to keep you from finding out what color it _really_ is. For added fun, you could get a copy of The Sausage Maker catalog and order a big sack of Fermento, and sprinkle Fermento on everything you eat from now on. Also get some natural casings and stuff everything you eat into one before you eat it. It's kind of hard to get a whole soft pretzel into a hog middle, but it's the only way you can incorporate pretzels into an all-sausage diet. Fermento! Ask for it by name! And hog middles! Ask for them by odor! -- K. I see from my records that it was August 18, 2001, when I got lightly buzzed off the non-alcoholic sangria, and this is what I learned: "Never attempt to drink a bottle of sangria and typeset Chinese at the same time." ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: More soda sensations Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 23:51:19 -0400 Tamara (tamaraharris@sprint.ca) wrote: > > "Beable van Polasm" (beable+unsenet@beable.com.invalid) wrote: > > > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com): > > > > > > I don't drink, and I'm really skinny, so it doesn't take much to > > > make my brain get all buzzy. > > > > EAT, Kibo! Why won't you EAT SOMETHING?! Why are you trying to KILL > > Tamara's mother? EAT! You so SKINNY! > > I am a bad person. My mom made some (non-perishable) treats for Kibo the > other month and I have not yet sent them off to him. She, too, thought he > was too skinny. Handsome, but skinny. > > Would everybody PLEASE just eat *something* to get her off of our backs?? Today I ate three breaded "veal" patties (you know, those oval fried ones that used to be 10% veal and 90% beef hearts, but now they don't even contain beef hearts, nowadays they're beige inside) and two tubes of stupid Hershey's Portable Pudding and oh yeah a bottle of iced tea and half a tube of Spree (they're the same as SweeTarts except without the missing letter, and slightly chewy.) But the night's still young. Lately I've been living off a combination of tacos and chicken nuggets with sour-cream-based ranch-style sauce for dipping. And where the hell is that stewed peacock you people promised me? -- K. I need to lose more weight, I'm going to play the lead role in the Broadway hit "The Terror Of Tommy Tune." It'll just be me and a bunch of wacky midgets. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: important shatner news! Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 01:50:44 -0400 Poot Rootbeer (poot@dork.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > I still don't believe that news story about Microsoft introducing > > an "iLoo" public toilet in England. I mean, who would want to use > > a keyboard that someone had been typing on while pooping? And > > worse, who would want to use a toilet a nerd had been sitting on? > > I think they took a page from 7up's experimental cousin "dnL" and > created a product whose logo is intentionally upside-down. > > The toilet is really "007!" When you get in and sit down, Pierce > Brosnan reminds you to buckle your safety belt! Or whatever it is they > call them over there. They don't call them anything. They call them something which rhymes with what they would call them if they actually called them something. So, for instance, if the Brits wanted to call safety restraints "shouldergirdles", they'd never call them that, they'd say "older turtles". But it wouldn't be confusing because turtles would be called something else, and all the other nouns would play musical chairs, and only the least popular word would fall out of the dictionary, and it would probably just be something with one of those "ae" ligatures they still use in Aengland. The Romans would call a shoulder belt a "scapulare" and the barbarians would say "baldric". Me, I just think of the car plus shoulder belt as "a purse you sit inside". I suspect the iLoo doesn't really have a seat belt, unless people tend to fall off the toilet when they stumble across a particularly salacious Web page. Also, KITT had a "laser restraint system" that could hold you in your seat with not just a laser, but a magic laser. But KITT didn't have a computer you could actually use, so I don't know why he needed a laser restraint system. -- K. LINKED TOILET CAUSES STINKY SPAMMY EMAILS ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: serving food to kids and other captives Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 03:12:00 -0400 talysman (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > I wanted to find some more pleasing pictures of school lunches > for kibo, so I've been snooping around a bit, but apparently > school cafeterias don't put up web pages that use the keywords > "bad spoiled rotten yuck". I did find this interesting page: > > http://www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/preschoolnutr/348-653/348-653.html > > this is some sort of directions on how to teach preschool kids > about bad food, apparently so they will be easier to handle > in gradeschool cafeterias. [...] > > -> Germs are both good and bad. Some good germs live > -> in the gastrointestinal tract of the body to help > -> make vitamins. > > some germs are, apparently, tiny shoe-making elves, except that > they make vitamins instead of shoes. with tiny hammers. also, > some good germs that make vitamins accidentally make a bubbling > potion instead, then they drink it and turn into mister hyde. > > I think "gastrointestinal tract" is not quite the kind of word > that 2-6 year olds are going to understand. Yeah. They should have just said "the big funny Slip'N'Slide water flume ride that goes from your mouth to your pooper!" > -> Good germs are also used to make some foods, such > -> as pickles. > > mmmm. pickled paramecium! Wait, wait. Which are they calling a germ, the cucumber or the vinegar? > -> Bad germs that make you sick are carried by > -> dirt. Some bad germs eat sugar and decay > -> teeth. > > would these be *pickled* decay teeth, or just the ordinary brand > of decay teeth? why do germs eat decay teeth if they have no teeth > to chew the teeth with? Also, why should anyone eat wheat germ? > -> Most germs need food, moisture, and warm > -> temperatures to grow. Animal protein foods (milk, > -> meat, fish, poultry, eggs) provide food and > -> moisture for harmful bacteria to grow at warm > -> temperatures in the danger zone from 40ˇ-160ˇF > -> (4ˇ-71ˇC). > > oh, yeah, kid... you aren't allowed to graduate from preschool > until you memorize the fnarrenheit AND centipede degree range > of the danger zone. I think the kids are still hung up on the word "protein", unless the teacher stopped to explain that "protein" is the stuff that's not in the school's tater tots. > [...] > > I also like the breakdown of activities for each age group. the > three-year-olds get to look at dirt, which can be fun, and also > get to hear "Betty Bacterium Bugs The Baby" during storytime. if > you're four, you get to "make a germ squirm". and *this* list > is great! > > -> * How do salad bar sneeze guards protect food > -> from grownups? from children? The secret reason children never infect salad bars is that kids hate salad, even in bar form. > -> * How do waiters/wiatresses in restaurants keep > -> hands clean? By peeing on them in the restroom. > -> * Who should wear plastic gloves? Acrobats who do handstands in the gym's shower. > -> * When are plastic gloves no longer safe? After they've touched your hands. > -> * When is licking fingers safe? Not when you've been handling bacon and there's a cat nearby. I think cats' tongues are made out of emery. KITTYS JAGGED TONGUE CAUSES FINGER OUCHIE > -> * What do workers wear at fast food restaurants > -> to keep hair out of food? (hats/hairnets) Although the word "wiatresses" is very nice, I prefer this lesson: -> Never taste a food that looks (moldy, bruised, wilted, dirty), -> smells (putrid, sickening), or feels (slimy, dry) funny. Blue cheese meets all three qualifications. It says right here in print that blue cheese is bad because it looks moldy, smells sickening, and feels slimy! Hooray! At last I have proved that it is all you people who like cheese who are wrong! -- K -- POTATO TOTLET RANCID TATERS CRISPY JACKET DONATE DIZEEZ FROZEN CENTER TOKIDS LIVERS ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: fpcg version 2.0 Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 03:23:49 -0400 Conmidhe (ark.15.conmidhe@spamgourmet.com) wrote: > > Today I went and bought the chili plants for this years front porch > chili garden. 6 of them in all. 1 habanero, 2 red chili (that's > southernese for cayenne), and 3 cowhorn chili (jumbo cayenne). What? No anaheim? No poblano? Only one habanero? C'mon, you gotta at least have a whole bunch of habaneros if you want to make something strong enough to beat the watery hot sauce they sell at the supermarket. If you don't plant an adequate amount of habaneros you may wind up with only enough spice to make the sort of "hot sauce" that comes in packets with Wendy's chili (the packets contain 50% borscht, 50% maple syrup, and the remainder is spice.) > the fpcg v2.0 is now in place and should do well if all these tornados > will go around my porch....and hopefully the rest of the house as > well. I doubt your six chili plants are strong enough to keep it away. You need the kind that come in a tin can with a screw top and a picture of a bomb falling on Vietnam on the side. -- K. PEPPER GARDEN CAUSES STORMS LITTLE BOTHER ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: fpcg version 2.0 Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 14:15:35 -0400 Glenn Knickerbocker (NotR@bestweb.net) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > What? No anaheim? No poblano? Only one habanero? > > I made the mistake of making a quart of salsa with only one big poblano > and one medium jalape–o because they smelled so nice and fresh they > fooled me into thinking they'd be plenty. It was still hot enough that > people only ate a tiny bit of it, leaving it all for me afterward, Yay! Your plan worked! The thing about spicy food is that some people like their food to contain less than one-millionth the capsaicin concentration that other people like. It's a pretty amazing differential. I like my food to be pretty hot (but not so hot as to keep me from eating large quantities) but bear in mind that I have more taste buds than you and thus the amount I consider to be pleasantly painful might not be as bad for you. Unless I've already killed off all my extra taste buds in the name of equality. > but then I never got around to buying any serranos to season it properly > before I finished eating it. The funny thing was, even though I went to > the grocery store where all the Mexicans in Newburgh go to buy all their > wacky root vegetables, the cashier had no idea what tomatillos were, and > one woman had even come up to me while I was picking them out to ask me > how you eat them. Whenever you go to an ethnic grocery store and buy something that freaks out the cashier -- like the time I bought the pair of giant frozen frogs in Chinatown -- that means either you've broadened your horizons a whole lot, or else they're trying to warn you that nobody, and I mean nobody, would want a frog that's been in the freezer than long. > I saw the most incredible white-trash hair creations at that store, but > even the most intricate combovers were eclipsed by this one woman's hair > all pulled up, sprayed, and mashed into an enormous flat bun that looked > like a giant wind-up key sticking out of the top of her head. That wasn't a store! You discovered the secret portal to the bridge of the "Next Generation" Enterprise! Get out of there quick before the French guy with the British accent starts quoting Shakespeare at you to disguise the fact that no new literature was generated between the 17th and 24th centuries after they accidentally ruined Earth history during one of their time-travel misadventures! > Hmmm, now I think I have to go buy some serranos and tomatillos to add > to the boring canned salsa that's been sitting in the refrigerator for > the past three weeks. And what brand of refrigerator is it? Let me guess... -- K. BORING CANNED CHILIS REPOSE INSIDE MAYTAG ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: fpcg version 2.0 Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 20:56:02 -0400 [on secret salsa recipes of the ancients] Joseph Michael Bay (jmbay@Stanford.EDU) wrote: > > SALSA SECUNDUS > On a harsh prison planet (or some kind of choppy food thing), combine: > 3 large whole tomatoes, but not whole because you've > cut them into quarters now, haven't you? That's okay then. Most prison planets don't have whole tomatoes. Only ketchup. The kind in clear bottles that have been sitting on the top shelf of the supermarket exposed to the fluorescent lights until the ketchup has turned the color of hoisin sauce and contracted into a hollow bottle-shaped leathery mass. There oughta be a law in the Constitution about the quality of ketchup on prison planets! > Hot peppers of whatever sort equivalent in volume to about > half a tomato, or more, or less, depending on how hot you like it. Now here's where I start getting confused. You see, tomatoes are solid all the way through (well, semi-solid) but peppers are hollow inside. So are you saying to get one of those big round peppers the size of a tomato but only a twentieth the mass, or are you saying I should stuff lots of little peppers inside the big pepper to equal the guts of the tomato? > Also if you don't like it hot (some do), don't put the seeds in. Actually, I thought the spiciest part was supposed to be the placenta. Yes, a pepper has a placenta. (Now your love of salsa is RUINED!) The placenta is the stringy white stuff on the inside, it's where the oil lives. > Also if you don't like running around crying and yelling OW OW OW > MY EYES OH THE PAIN, THE PAIN OF IT ALL you shouldn't touch your > eyes after chopping hot peppers. You can wipe off the painful hot > stuff by rubbing your fingertips on some tomato guts, if no prisses > are watching. I don't like this remake of "American Pie". It's not even as good as the original, and the original was a terrible movie in all respects. I mean, an entire school of cool teens who wear nothing but plaid shirts with no logos? And a magical beer glass that changes into a blue plastic cup and back several times before the obvious payoff? > An onion. Yes, "an onion". If you really like strong oniony flavor > use a gigantic white onion (or a yellow onion, on account of the war), > or a mid-size red onion (I like those), or if you don't like them so > much go for a smallish Vidalia onion. Cut it up a bit. I like dried onion flakes better. They have a different sort of crunch and a little bit more of a garlicky flavor. > a tablespoon of lime juice, or the juice of one lime (better) > a little salt, like a quarter of a teaspoon, or less, because you > can always add more later BUT YOU CAN'T TAKE IT AWAY! IT'S NOT > POSSIBEL, EVAR!!!1! Sure you can. You can just run it through that big machine Howard Hughes built that filtered out all the salt in the entire ocean, leaving him with ten pounds of gold. Also, between the lime and the salt, your recipe is in danger of turning into a margarita. If you dump in a can of fluorescent pink strawberry slime don't expect me to dip my Dorito in it. > Also, if you have access to jicama, peel some of that and slice > it up, byatch! Eh, a jicama is just a sort of off-brand turnip. > Oregano's not bad. Half a teaspoon. Fresh oregano is awesome. I think we're coming to the scene where Tommy Chong tries to get you to snort the bag of laundry detergent. > If you don't hate cilantro, and you have some, toss in a smallish > handful or so. WAAH! MY HANDS ARE TOO BIG TO MAKE SALSA! But it's okay for me to have Man Hands because I hate cilantro. Even if you call it "Chinese parsley" and put it all over a "Chinese sandwich" at that insipid restaurant that used to be next door to my mail drop. > As many crushed garlic cloves as you are interested in (maybe none, > maybe several. A garlic *bulb* has dozens of *cloves*, and you > should peel the cloves before crushing). "Here, Cheech, try this. It's a clove cigarette. It's full of cloves." > Chop it all up kind of coarsely, give it a stir, and let it sit > around in the fridge (or room temperature -- it's acidic and hot) > for a few hours, if you want. Or just start eating it. How can you eat salsa without first making some chicken nuggets to dip into it? Please post a recipe for making chicken nuggets. The ones shaped like five-pointed stars, not the ones shaped like blobs. I'm ambivalent about the ones shaped like one of those drumsticks that Fred Flintstone eats all day without ever making more than one bite mark appear in it. > Tomatillos are a bit more work, really, since you have to peel > them, kinda braise, boil or steam them, and *then* chop 'em up. > But they are good too. You can make your own tomatillos by cross-breeding tomatoes and armadillos. It takes a pretty good mad scientist to do that. > On fruit in salsa: > > What the hell, right? Tomatoes are fruit. So far I've had > mango and pineapple in salsa, and they were both good. I think you may have had lime juice in your salsa, too. If you can't remember which ingredients you've added so far, maybe you shouldn't be working with hot pepper. Either you'll keep adding pepper over and over, or else you'll be so absent- minded that you'll add dirt to it, or worse, flubber. -- K. JOEBAY FORGOT SALSAS SECRET RECIPE NODIRT ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fan.beable Subject: Re: RABBIT CRIMINALS! Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 14:28:50 -0400 Beable van Polasm (beable+unsenet@beable.com.invalid) wrote: > > An estimated 40,000 Queenslanders own rabbits, contrary to State Law > which declares the rabbit to be vermin, and illegal to keep except > under very stringent conditions for research purposes. These stringent > conditions state that rabbits must be kept in a concrete room with > walls at least one metre thick, and require a licence to be obtained > for the keeping of rabbits. They're taking "Monty Python And The Holy Grail" a little too seriously. Just because "Monty Python" depicted a deadly vorpal bunny, that's no reason to assume it could happen in real life. Real life only mimics more realistic British comedies, like "The Benny Hill Show". > It is difficult to understand why some Queenslanders would break the > law in this manner, when it is common knowledge that rabbits are > noxious vermin. If they love rabbits so much, why not move to one > of the other States of the Federation which allow the keeping of > rabbits? Or why not keep guinea pigs, and glue large floppy ears > onto them and pretend they are rabbits? Because they smell worse than rabbits. Guinea pigs pee and rabbits don't. That's why rabbits are always so high-strung. On the Spectrum Of Animal Stinkiness (with ferrets being at the top and turtles being at the bottom), guinea pigs are in the middle with cats, but rabbits are down by the volvox. (An ice cream truck drives past, its music box playing the classic song: "Down by the volvox, early in the morning...") Volvox are the bounciest microbes, even in song form. -- K. MIDGET SOCCER GOALIE BLOCKS VOLVOX GLOBES ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fan.beable Subject: Re: RABBIT CRIMINALS! Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 22:53:15 -0400 Beable van Polasm (beable+unsenet@beable.com.invalid) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > On the Spectrum Of Animal Stinkiness (with ferrets being at the top > > and turtles being at the bottom), guinea pigs are in the middle with > > cats, but rabbits are down by the volvox. > > IT'S TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN IN THE UNIVERSE OF ANIMAL STINKINESS!!1 That's a rather quaint view of our Universe. Modern science has determined that, although the world is on the back of a big fat turtle, which is on a smaller turtle, which is on a teensy turtle, all the way down, the original concept must be revised to include some girl turtles and some black turtles and some gay turtles to make the theory more correct in a politically correct sense, like all other science. And although turtles are the world's cleanest animal (because every turtle dunks its tiny houses in water every day) near the bottom it probably does start to smell after a long weekend. This is how we know the world is at least three days old. STINKY BOTTOM TURTLE BURIED UNDERA STENCH > What about turtal guts? Is that stinky? I think someone should print a coffee-table book of things kids write in those museum visitor books. Then they should print a coffee-table book of reviews of the other book that people wrote on Amazon.com. And then the two books could be switched and nobody would know the difference. -- K. run, it's an earthquake! one of the turtles moved and the San Andreas zipper opened! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: RABBIT CRIMINALS! Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 21:00:31 -0400 Gregory King (greg@flyingpawn.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > I think someone should print a coffee-table book of things kids write in > > those museum visitor books. > > Can you include things like field trip thank you letters in that coffee > table book? A while ago at a grocery store I saw: > > "Thank you for showing us the vegetables and cake. We liked touching the > lobster. We liked your pretty yummy apples! We liked the ice in the > freezer." Well, at least "our apples are pretty yummy, and you might enjoy touching our lobsters" would be a better slogan for the market than "our most important special is you!" Before that market went out of business, I wanted them to do at least one TV commercial so I could see which sub-Ben-Stiller-level celebrity to bellow "Our most important special is... YOUUUUUUUU!!!!" I'm guessing a local baseball player from the wrong locality. Like a Toledo Mud Hen. But what sort of class gets lousy lame field trips to the supermarket? I assume the teacher had just run out of nicotine gum. Unless this was in some quaint part of the country where the supermarkets are too primitive to sell nicotine gum, in which case the teacher just needed a new bar of Lifebuoy to wash out someone's mouth for using a dirty word like "rumpus" or "nicotine". > I would buy a book like that, and then I would use it as a tourist guide > so that I could visit the places with the stinkiest turtal guts and the > lobsters that are the most fun to touch. Hey, I've been to the museum that says "DO NOT CLIMB ON THE LOBSTER" and the museum where the guest book said "I GET TO SEE THE GUTS OF A TURTAL" in the same day. And that made them both better. So your new book should group these things in ways that makes it easy to visit places of equal wackiness so that you can enjoy multiple forms of wackiness back-to-back to conserve your valuable wackiness time. Of course, it would be even better to enjoy two wackies simulatenously... "Wow! I visited Philadelphia's Pretzel Museum and the Alberta Telephone Museum at the same time! By splitting myself into two people I was able to produce concentrated wackiness! All the laws of physics are wrong! But wait, I just remembered the Pretzel Museum closed a few years ago... oh no, that means that the museum I visited was... A GHOST!" -- K. TWISTY SNACKS MUSEUM CLOSED PHILLY BORING ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: RABBIT CRIMINALS! Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 22:42:36 -0400 Jacob W. Haller (spog@jwgh.org) wrote: > > Stacia (stacia@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > > > MIDGET SOCCER > > > GOALIE BLOCKS > > > VOLVOX GLOBES > > > > Hi. What's with the new stinger at the end of your posts? We'd turn it > > into a meme but the rest of us aren't smart enough to do it consistently > > or correctly. > > I think Kibo has gotten a job writing copy for some new, hyper-large > candy valentine hearts. (Yes, the all-powerful Necco lobby has finally > gotten to him!) I don't like Necco hearts. See? REVILE NECCOS CHALKY HEARTS FLAVOR OFBONE So there. -- K. Which would win in a fight between "stingers" and "zingers"? ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: ATTN: FELLOW ALCOHOLICS Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 14:42:56 -0400 Joseph Michael Bay (jmbay@Stanford.EDU) wrote: > > Jeremy Impson (jdimpson@acm.org) wrote: > > > > Chris McGonnell (smeagol@NOkey-net.net) wrote: > > > > > > Calvados is great, but it isn't sweet. It's made from APPLES! APPLES! > > > > Sweet bad. Apples aren't quite understood by this unit. > > Unit? What's to understand? Calvados is a kind of applejack, > and applejack is a kind of brandy. Daron (a brand of calvados) > is one that I've tasted and enjoyed, and it's not too expensive. > The only other brandy I've liked that was at all affordable was > Courvoisier, which is what The Ladies' Man drinks. From now on I'm going to imagine that you look like Sheldon Leonard so I can call you "Big Max Calvados". Now if you'll excuse me I've got to go park my motorcycle next to a billboard that says "DRINK CALVADOS", then I'll trip over the ottoman. Just beware of any liqueur made entirely from walnuts! Also, I may not know my liqueurs, or even how to stop spelling "liqueueur", but I know Apple Jacks taste _bad_ because real apples aren't fluorescent pink. -- K. ESCHEW CEREAL APPLES ARENOT BRIGHT SALMON ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: ATTN: FELLOW ALCOHOLICS Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 23:00:55 -0400 Joseph Michael Bay (jmbay@Stanford.EDU) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Also, I may not know my liqueurs, or even how to stop spelling > > "liqueueur", but I know Apple Jacks taste _bad_ because real apples > > aren't fluorescent pink. > > Applejack is not a liqueur! It's a brandy! GRR! I think you misspelled "Applejack! Brandy! Twenty-three! Pip! Pip! Applejack!", Dexter. Now tell the chimp to hurry up and put "The Mod Squad" and "Mission: Impossible" on the air. And it's not a brandy, it's a breakfast cereal! You should agree with me there because it means you're allowed to have it for breakfast. -- K. BRANDY CEREAL ITSALL ONEBIG MESSOF TOXINS ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Theme song from a parallel universe Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 23:13:50 -0400 [regarding the lame old sitcom "It's About Time"] Matt McIrvin (mmcirvin@world.std.com) wrote: > > My father has an old picture of himself dressed as a caveman > (Flintstonian ragged clothing, papier-mache club) from some college > theme event inspired by that sitcom. I never did hear the whole > story about that. You think there _is_ a whole story about that? I suspect if you put every episode of "It's About Time" together you still wouldn't even get one whole story, let alone one that would explain your father dressing up as Barney Rubble yet still managing to produce offspring. In fact, I doubt "It's About Time" contained enough material to inspire anyone to dress up in their everyday clothes, let alone a home-made Bedrock uniform. Let's put it this way -- there's a reason Irwin Allen's "The Time Tunnel" is considered the funniest show about time travel. -- K. TICTOC TUNNEL CAUSES SPARKS ANDBAD LAUGHS P.S. You said "papier-mache", using a poncy French spelling instead of the proper English spelling of "paper-mache"! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Theme song from a parallel universe Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 21:04:11 -0400 Jeremy Impson (jdimpson@acm.org) wrote: > > Matt McIrvin (mmcirvin@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > My father has an old picture of himself dressed as a caveman > > (Flintstonian ragged clothing, papier-mache club) from some college > > theme event inspired by that sitcom. I never did hear the whole > > story about that. > > Possibly you *are* the whole story about that. Well, this means that the next time he twirls his spaghetti in the wrong direction using a salad fork instead of a pasta fork at one of my elegant dinner parties, I'm gonna yell "Hey Matt, were you born in a Flintstones house?" Then I'll have him blacklisted by the papier-mache club and he'll have to go to Plaster Fun Time like the rest of us peons. -- K. HISHAT MELTED STORMS DAMPEN PAPIER MACHAY ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: A Really Big Show. Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 01:10:22 -0400 John F. Winston (johnfwin@mlode.com) wrote: > > Subject: A Really Big Show. May 9, 2003. > > Here is something that was put on the Internet by a person who > likes to make fun of me. It obviously is a hoax. > > ..................................................................... > ..................................................................... > > From: T > Subject: John F. Winston: "unplugged" > The 1st Annual John F. Winston Reunion, Retreat, and Convention > will be held at the Marriot Hotel and Convention Center in San > Francisco, CA July 25, 26, and 27 > Card-carrying members and affiliates of the following > organizations (in no particular order) are invited and encouraged > to attend: > Extra-Terrestrials > Disciples of Nostradamus > Citizens of Atlantis > International Brotherhood of Mediums, Channelers, and Soothsayers > Men (and women) In Black > Trekkies of Earth > Sub-terranian Dwellers > Trekkies of Earth > Sub-terranian Dwellers > Black Helicopter Pilots Association > Civilian Employees of the Air Force at Groom Lake(Area 51 Division) John, if you hadn't said it was a hoax, you'd be receiving a big envelope of money in the mail right now. But sadly, you tipped me off before I could mail it. Now I don't know where to go for my summer vacation! Also, I'm not sure which kind of sub-terranian dweller I may or may not be. Please explain the difference between the two types of Trekkies, the two types of sub-terranians, and how to tell all four of them apart in a dark dilithium mine. > Scheduled events include: > > Friday July 25 9AM---1PM Orientation and Brainwashing > for Dependants and Press > Friday July 25 2PM---6PM Channeling Seminar Speaker: > Lady Kadjina > Friday July 25 6PM---8PM Dinner Main Ballroom > Friday July 25 9PM--11PM Making Spooky Faces-An > Instructional Lecture Speaker: Jesse Ventura > Friday July 25 11PM-11:30 PM Saving Money by Channeling Down > the Center Speaker: Carrottop > Saturday July 26 8AM--9AM Continental Breakfast in the > Alpha-Centauri Lounge > Saturday July 26 9AM-12 N SubTerranean and Atlantean > Artifact Exhibition > Saturday July 26 12 N---2PM Men In Black Chili Cook-off > Sponsored by Ray Ban Night Vision Sunglasses > Saturday July 26 2PM---3PM Windsor Pilates in a Low-G > Environment > Instructor: Seven Of Nine > Saturday July 26 3PM---5PM Advancing Science Through Cattle > Mutilations Video and Discussion Group > Saturday July 26 5PM---7PM Dinner Main Ballroom > Saturday July 26 8PM---9PM Lecture: "Close Encounters > of the Fourth Kind" Windsor Pilates! That's where they nail someone to a cross that has big rounded feet while Jean Stapleton sings, right? Or am I confusing my obscurities again? If I did, please let me know whether or not I did on purpose, because I'm all confused now, probably because I missed the orientation. > Relaxation > Techniques for A-al Probe Volunteers Speaker: Jim Fox Mulder > Kirk > Saturday July 26 9PM--11PM "Hiding in Plain Sight" Flight > and Avoidance Techniques Speaker: The Predator > Saturday July 26 11PM--12 M The Effects of Earth > Atmosphere on Space Vehicles Speaker: Leader of the Greys > Sunday July 27 8AM---9AM Continental Breakfast in the > Orion Belt Pavillion > Sunday July 27 9AM---12 N Predicting the Future For > Fun and Profit Speaker: Lady K > Sunday July 27 12 N----2PM Crop Circles For the > Hobbyist - New and Exciting Designs for Home Decorating > Sunday July 27 2PM----4PM Designer Foil Beanie Show - > See The Latest Fashions in High Frequency Protection > Sunday July 27 4PM----6PM Air Show by the Romulan > Flight Demonstration Team > Sunday July 27 6PM----8PM Dinner Main Ballroom > Sunday July 27 9PM---10PM John F. Winston Award > Ceremony and Debriefing But it doesn't say which room the Romulan air show will be in! Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter, given that you can't see their spaceships until right before the Enterprise blows them up. And the Enterprise won't be there because it's over at that other hotel in Las Vegas. > Special Guest > Presenters Include: The Ghostbusters, Sigourney Weaver, and Bill > Shatner > LifetimeAchievment Award will be presented to Ray Walston by Alf Just Bill Shatner? Not any of the more important "Star Trek" cast members, like that handsome devil who played transporter chief Lt. Kyle? > Group discount accomodations are available through Gene Rodenberry > Tours Inc. and Hotels.com > Please, no open containers or coolers permitted > > John Winston. johnfwin@mlode.com In space, nobody needs a cooler. -- K. SAAVIK GAVEME ELEVEN FINGER VULCAN SALUTE ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Kibo's Top-Secret Project Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 21:03:10 -0400 Glenn Knickerbocker (NotR@bestweb.net) wrote: > > Pugg (pugg71@hotmail.com) wrote: > > > > So, Kibo, do we ever get to hear what the top-secret project is? > > Judging from his new signature formula, it obviously has something to do > with the I Ching, but I can't figure out which letters are supposed to be > solid and which are supposed to be broken because in Comic Sans MS > they're all exactly the same thickness. Hey! Are you accusing me of using the I Ching to generate surrealist fiction because I'm secret Philip K. Dick and have the delusion that we're still living in ancient Rome? If so, I'll have you know the guy who was raving about that in front of the Boston Public Library was nearly ten feet away from me while I was following him! So, there is no conspiracy to cover up the fact that some crazy guy's delusions may or may not be true! I'm just playing along with his hallucinations in order to make the conspiracy think that I think the guy is only hallucinating seeing ancient Rome! The little sixlets are not a signature, they're merely filler and a small part of a wholly unrelated plan to conquer the world. Also, your computer has an ugly font installed. My computer has hundreds of fonts, but I only use the one that's not ugly. -- K. GROSSO SANSES THANKS TOYOUR EMMESS EYEEEE ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: YAY FOR AIRBAGS Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 22:26:43 -0400 Glenn Knickerbocker (NotR@bestweb.net) wrote: > > I'm alive. > > I'm fine now but the doctor says to expect to hurt all over tomorrow and > take lots of Tylenol 3. > > Details redacted for personal safety. Available on request. Glad to hear you're alive and that nobody secretly replaced your airbag with a whoopee cushion. Then later, Glenn Knickerbocker (NotR@bestweb.net) wrote: > > Utilizing two different varieties of LONG NOSE PLIERS just now, > I was even able to straighten out my glasses. Why did you say "LONG NOSE PLIERS" in big fat letters? Oh, I know, does this have something to do with your SECRET PROJECT? You're knitting a pile of rebar into either your own hockey goalie mask or a fireproof hose for Red Adair, right? Incidenally, I keep wondering why there is "Tylenol 3" but no "Tylenol 2". And if it's so good, why is the original Tylenol still on the market? I don't take any of them because they don't work on me. I just think of them as Necco conversation hearts without the stimulating reading. -- K. LITTLE CHALKY TABLET WITHNO HEARTY SAYING ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: A can of dog food Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 19:47:22 -0400 Dean Lenort (dean.lenort@att.net) wrote: > > Beable van Polasm (beable+unsenet@beable.com.invalid) wrote: > > > > A can of dog food costs about a dollar. But if you think about it, > > that's SEVEN DOG DOLLARS!! I don't spend seven dollars a meal on > > myself! And I weigh about ten times as much as my dog, which means > > that a can of dog food is actually worth SEVENTY HUMAN DOLLARS!! > > That's why I don't eat dog food - it's too expensive. > > That reminds me of one of the "chili booths" at last weekends cookoff. > > This one group of people simply set up a card table, made up a monstrous > batch of margaritas, and then offered a margarita to anyone who was willing > to have their Polaroid taken while eating a tablespoon or so of Alpo. I > believe the total was around 60 or so before they ran out of film for the > camera. That didn't stop people from participating in this gastronomical > delight, but it did take some of the fun out of it. > > No word on how their "chili" fell in the final rankings. Do you really think that Alpo is any different from the brown stuff inside the three-for-a-dollar individually-wrapped supermarket burritos? The ones where the wrapper has to be a different color for each flavor because nobody who likes those could be smart enough to read? The ones that consist of ninety percent folded cardboard and ten percent brown meat gel applied with a butter knife before being lovingly sealed up by a robot cramming the whole burrito through a little tube into the wrapper sideways? The ones where, after microwaving, the top half of the burrito comes out dry and brittle but the saggy bottom that leaks is floating in a puddle of bright orange oil? I think the Alpo by itself might be preferable to the Alpo inside the crumpled cardboard wad, but it's a close call. Alpo is probably better because it costs a whole dollar a can. And don't get me started on the unholy hybrid of the two: canned tamales. (Those are one of those strange foods that I enjoy even though I know it's really vile. I think there must be a secret additive.) But I prefer the deluxe-quality two-dollar burritos from the gas station. They're Exxontastic! -- K. FOLDED BOARDS AROUND CANNED DOGGIE DINNER ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: american money Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 02:36:48 -0400 talysman (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > ok, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the U.S. treasure > department's new money. I'm talking, of course, about the > 18 cent piece dienniad that will replace all dimes currently > in circulation by 2005, followed by the 29 cent hexatridekad > that will replace all quarters in 2007. I mean, first of all, > although efficient, they aren't really as useful as kibo's > negative pennies; second, the names just suck. I think they > should revive the name of the old "bits" and call them ekabits > and hyperbits, myself. I have a photo of a ten million adopengo (2 x 10^25 pengo) Hungarian bank note. I snapped it while I was in the Bank Of Canada's Museum Of Currency. But it was a very cold day in Ottawa and as I was walking back to the hotel a penguin tried to crush me by sliding a big block of ice onto me while playing annoying music over and over. Fortunately I escaped and my photo was recovered, once I transferred the files onto a new computer due to snow damage my laptop suffered at the hands of the evil penguin. Anyway, "ado-" is a great prefix, because it's not just 10^19, it's 2 x 10^19, which is double gigantic. So we should immediately convert all our money into ekabits and negative pennies. (Negative pennies look just like scissle, except that when they touch regular currency there is a little explosion, vaporizing both items.) In addition to my old idea of negative pennies, I also think we might need negative Disney Dollars. (You'd only be able to redeem them at places that aren't Disneyland.) > also, despite the greater efficiency of a coin system that uses > only pennies, nickels, dienniads, and hexatridekads, I think > we're only opening ourselves up to an international currency > race. canadia will almost certainly adopt an 83-cents canadian > coin (the octotroon) as a retributive move to strengthen their > own coin system, although we will still laugh because it will > be worth less than the next US coin, the vigintunium (51 cents.) That one's made from the newly-discovered element vigintunium, which has a half-life of a millionth of a second, to keep the economy moving. > [...] we might even see other countries introduce even weirder coins > into circulation, such as intravenous coins! Sorry. > small coins from bosnia that will have pictures of imaginary > islands with french names that sound dirty. russia's new coins > will all look like parameciums and amoebas. saudi arabia will > probably introduce a spiked ball currency that will punish the > greedy by firing poison into their palms. SPIKED RIYALS PUNISH GREEDY FIRING POISON That was TOO EASY. Please try to use only words that I will have a harder time jamming into such an annoying format. And hurry up -- I can only do this in every article for the next six to eight months before people start to get sick of it. -- K. But the Museum Of Currency would still rather display the deadly currency that would kill all visitors instead of getting a current U.S. dollar coin. (Maybe they can't afford to spend $1.50 on a real dollar.) ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: american money Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 04:35:31 -0400 Rich Holmes (rsholmes+usenet@mailbox.syr.edu) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Please try to use only words that I will have a harder time jamming > > into such an annoying format. And hurry up -- I can only do this in > > every article for the next six to eight months before people start to > > get sick of it. > > Has it been five months, 29 days, 18 hours and 32 minutes already? > How time flies. Oh, if only I had a nickel for every time I wasted sarcasm on the Internet. So, here's the deal. I can't stop doing it until everyone else starts doing it so that I have to stop and switch to making fun of what losers everyone else is for doing something so dorky. Also you all have to be really enjoying writing things in that cryptic format so that I can explain the really boring story behind it to ruin all your fun. It's mean of you not to play along when I want to be mean to you! -- K. SECRET PLOTBY KIBOTO BOTHER PEOPLE BOXILY (I couldn't have thought of the word "boxily" in a million years if "Battlestar Galactica" weren't on my TV right now.) ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: american money Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 00:59:13 -0400 Tim Chmielelewski (chuma@dcsi.net.au) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > So, here's the deal. I can't stop doing it until everyone else starts > > doing it so that I have to stop and switch to making fun of what > > losers everyone else is for doing something so dorky. Also you all > > have to be really enjoying writing things in that cryptic format so > > that I can explain the really boring story behind it to ruin all your > > fun. It's mean of you not to play along when I want to be mean to you! > > Yes and have a Happy Dot Com! > > Thanks. Hey, that's a really annoying catchphrase. I think I'll start saying it, just to annoy people. Thanks! I'm glad you invented it! -- K. "Have" a "happy" dot "com"! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: american money Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 04:06:27 -0400 Bryce Utting (butting@ihug.co.nz) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > if only I had a nickel for every time I wasted sarcasm on the Internet. > ^^^^^^ > [ decoy ] You see, in the olden days, duck decoys were a form of legal tender. "I'm going to the store, loan me a string of ducks," you'd say. Real ducks were worth more than decoys because you could eat them but real ducks were also worth less than decoys because they could poop, so it all evened out. This is where the expression "getting all your ducks in a row" comes from. You'd need to line up a hundred of them beak-to-tail on the same string to pay for a common household implement such as a dunking stool or trebuchet. > > So, here's the deal. I can't stop doing it until everyone else starts > > doing it so that I have to stop and switch to making fun of what losers > > everyone else is for doing something so dorky. Also you all have to be > > really enjoying writing things in that cryptic format so that I can > > explain the really boring story behind it to ruin all your fun. It's > > mean of you not to play along when I want to be mean to you! > > play along? we're SAVING! we took your idea of ternary currency to > heart, and we're hoarding all these posts as positive pennies. posts > with no tators are zero-value in the new economy, and non-Kibo posts > with no tators aren't currency at all. we're gambling on the future > value of these cryptograms, ready to trade them off against negatives > when they arrive! > > 'course, none of us know what a negative penny will look like. > probably some bozo will just post something so massively broken the > whole thing will collapse. > > > SECRET PLOTBY > > KIBOTO BOTHER > > PEOPLE BOXILY > > > > (I couldn't have thought of the word "boxily" in a million years if > > "Battlestar Galactica" weren't on my TV right now.) > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > [ another one ] > > see, we all wouldn't fall victim to his FIENDISH plots if just once in > a while we'd pay attention to the hidden meanings. "boxily" and > "Battlestar Galatica"? in a CYLON'S PINK TUTU! he's been watching > Tron again, and it's worth MONEY to us this time! > > BOXLEITNER QUADRANTES > ADDSWEALTH FORBETTORS > IMMERSEDIN POPCULTURE > ABERRATION WHOOOOOOPS > IDESTROYED THEECONOMY Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Ten-letter words aren't legal, especially because Bruce Boxleitner doesn't even speak Latin, you bozo! LEVATE DALOCV LVDERE NESCIS IDIOTA RECEDE And now you owe me a zillion denarii, a barrel of lupins, and a roast peacock in jellyfish sauce. You can pick up the latter at my favorite restaurant. It's of the ones that is in compliance with the anti-gambling laws because there's not a single gameboard around whenever the local centurions drops in, and the menu is conveniently carved in giant letters on the tabletops: ABEMVS INCENA PVLLVM PISCEM PERNAM PAONEM Of course it's a little hard to read because they sniffed away the start of "habemus" and swallowed the middle of the tripthong in "pavonem". But still, I win again! Somehow, I always manage to get to the end of what I'm typing before you people even begin reading it. A clear victory for me. You should just give up and hand over all your money to me now, because trying to hang onto it will warp your brain. SPERNE LVCRVM VERSAT MENTES INSANA CVPIDO And now you know the rest of the story, thanks to a volcano conveniently preserving some useful insults and two-thousand- year-old dinner menus that can be sung to the tune of a backgammon board. I'll translate those tomorrow, if you leave the fish guts off my peacock. -- K. TIMEOF CHRIST ZINGER STINGS MODERN NIMNUL ...and we're done! That was too easy. Let's move on to hneftafl. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Julius Kibo (was: Re: american money) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 18:30:25 -0400 And now, by popular demand, or rather, because one person here failed to express a total lack of interest... Bryce Utting (butting@ihug.co.nz) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Bryce Utting (butting@ihug.co.nz) wrote: > > > BOXLEITNER QUADRANTES > > > ADDSWEALTH FORBETTORS > > > IMMERSEDIN POPCULTURE > > > ABERRATION WHOOOOOOPS > > > IDESTROYED THEECONOMY > > > > Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Ten-letter words aren't legal, especially > > because Bruce Boxleitner doesn't even speak Latin, you bozo! > > > > LEVATE DALOCV > > LVDERE NESCIS > > IDIOTA RECEDE > > > > And now you owe me a zillion denarii, a barrel of lupins, and a > > roast peacock in jellyfish sauce. > > oh no! the nominative singular (wait, dative? accusative? genitive? > [hurh, hurh] argh, I'm only making things WORSE for myself!) in there > means he's talking to *ME*, and not all you other lamers as well, and > everything I already owe is now in double-hock, and Kibo'll have me > thrown into the Marshalsea! That one said, in the sophisticated language of two millennia ago: RISEUP GOHOME NEWBIE PLAYER GOAWAY RETARD That's a loose translation, except for "retard". > there's only one thing I can pay this back with: > > bozocity. > > better get me thinkin' cap on. ETHUL! whut brand a' bozocity do we > have in supply today? THINK, Ethul, THINK! But Vivian Vance is dead. She died of woe because she had a name that couldn't be spelled in Scrabble without using a blank for the third "V". Of course, if she had lived in ancient Rome, you would keep spelling her name in Scrabble just to use up all those "V"s that shouldn't be there. I'm not sure what shape a Roman Scrabble board was, but I bet it would make a slightly more sophisticated kind of poem, if you don't mind that every sentence has to end with someone yelling "TRIPLE WORD SCORE!" Another popular Roman game was "Hungry Hungry Hippos", which they played with Christians. > > You can pick up the [peacock] at my favorite restaurant. It's one > > of the ones that is in compliance with the anti-gambling laws > > because there's not a single gameboard around whenever the local > > centurions drops in, and the menu is conveniently carved in giant > > letters on the tabletops: > > > > ABEMVS INCENA > > PVLLVM PISCEM > > PERNAM PAONEM > > fish? picenium bozonium? nah, 'cos the fish barrel's already full of > lupins. Ethul, you're supposed to be HELPING. They left out an "h" and a "v" for space reasons. So I feel entitled to do the same sort of cheating in this translation: WEHAVE DINNER CHIKEN FISHES PIGLET PEACOK So you see, when they came by to check on whether or not people were gambling in the restaurant, all the gamblers would have to do is drop the dice (three of them) into a wine cup, swallow all the tokens, and just pretend the gameboard was a menu. However, I wouldn't eat at that restaurant very often because I like beef better than misspelled backgammon. > > Of course it's a little hard to read because they sniffed away > > the start of "habemus" and swallowed the middle of the tripthong > > in "pavonem". But still, I win again! Somehow, I always manage > > to get to the end of what I'm typing before you people even begin > > reading it. A clear victory for me. You should just give up and > > hand over all your money to me now, because trying to hang onto > > it will warp your brain. > > ETHUL!!! the vast gravitational attraction of Kibo's gold hoard is > pulling me brainstem apart! HURRRY! I got all this gold by inventing a magnet that attracts all the gold in the world. I did this at an abandoned amusement park built by Vikings in the year 1000 this weekend. While I was visiting the Norumbega Tower, I found all sorts of excitingly authentic Viking relics: For instance, a flask of mead inscribed "MILLER", and a small box of "MARLBORO 100S", a strand of ribbon with a series of deflated pink latex balloons attached (perhaps to celebrate the birth of a really sissy Viking warrior), and most curiously, the lower half of a totem figurine of some god wearing white spandex with blue superhero boots. As near as I can tell, some guy in 1893 was impressed with how much money the Columbian Exposition had made (1892, for the 400th anniversary of that dude with the girly hair blundering into the important part of the world) so he decided to start his own cheap knockoff, namely an amusement park devoted to the imaginary Viking conquest of Massachusetts in the year 1000, so that the payoff (the 900th anniversary) could be a few years after he got the bogus history entrenched in people's minds via a large bronze plaque explaining all of it. (Apparently Leif Erikson himself chose the site of where an amusement park would be built 893 years later. But then the Vikings conveniently chose to move from the United States to Iceland in the 1300s, because they thought it was someone else's turn to have the country with the good weather.) Thanks to Matt & Samantha driving me to the Norumbega Tower, I was able to use a slide projector filled with holograms, some glow-in-the-dark paint, and a tank of helium to scare away all the teenagers from the abandoned amusement park so that I could take advantage of a convenient local legend to build my magnet to attract all the gold in the world so that I could use the money to destroy the space program because there are plenty of problems right here on Earth, and also, I kidnapped the Monkees right before the big sing-off. > > SPERNE LVCRVM > > VERSAT MENTES > > INSANA CVPIDO > > ETHUL!!! now that *cupid* you've always been moaning about's been > crushed by the insane mentes of his filthy lucre! HURRY!!! NOW!!!!! This one's too easy! Every word has an English cognate! "Spurn", "lucre", "invert"/"convert"/"divert"/"revert"/"pervert", "mentality", "insane", and the common everyday word "cupidity". Put 'em all together, shake really hard, and you get: ESCHEW WEALTH INSANE DESIRE TWISTS BRAINS Those three all came from gameboards or tabletops in Rome and Pompeii. It seems that when playing this particular variant of backgammon (the kind which had a third row so that they could use three dice so that they could say "Wow! This is New Improved Super Backgammon!") if you went over to some Roman dude's house and asked to wager some quatloos over a friendly game of Super Backgammon, he'd say, "Sure! But we're going to use MY gameboard!" and he'd orient it so that the insults were facing you. Except in the case of the one that just talked about sauteed peacocks, which wasn't intended to make people lost, just to make them hungry. Now stop asking me to translate Latin because you're making me feel like the new Joe Friday instead of the good one. You know, the one who was cool because he didn't act or ever make a sentence. The new one travels around giving Latin lessons to people (he's done so in two episode so far, and they've only aired about ten) which proves that TV can always find new ways to make Joe Friday even squarer. Used to be Joe Friday gave you a stern talking-to about drugs. Now he just talks about the declension of "Praetorum". And yet he still can't tell a Pericles helmet from a Roman one. > > -- K. > > > > TIMEOF CHRIST > > ZINGER STINGS > > MODERN NIMNUL > > NIMNUL... NIMNUL, NIMNA, NIMNI, NIMWI, NIMWIT. Ethul, I'm BLOCKING. > THINK!!! Oh no! Bruce Utting's brain's filesystem is blocking! And his mind's locked in a race condition! A RACE CONDITION! BRUCE, THAT MEANS YOU'RE A RACIST! You're just jealous of those of us who have a heritage that's 30% Roman, 20% Viking, and 50% Orkan. I do NOT tip my tripla to you, sir! > okay. Kibo's on a Latin rush and wants fealty. all I have to work > with are the crumbs dug from the chiselled inscription in his > table-top, some sort of Roman font, a little swirly in the S though > the particularly discrete serifs are a nice touch. ETHUL, SHARRUP > ABOUT ROMANS AND FEALTY! ROMANES EUNT----- hey, waitaminute. > > *whisperwhisperwhisperwhisperwhisperwhisper* > > ahem. > > Ladies and Kibologists, oh, and, uhr, Ladies who -are- Kibologists, > yet who somehow still remain Ladies, it gives me great pleasure to > frantically throw something together at short notice and hopefully > clear the venue before those calling "Author!" manage to lay hands on > anything that could leave a bruise. REAL weapons don't leave bruises, or any other chunks of solid matter large enough to see without a microscope. REAL weapons go "BOOM!", not "BRUISE!" > The dramatic arts present us with many treasures of our culture, many > glories indeed that have delighted and aroused and stirred over the > centuries, and it is from this rich ancestry that I hope to entertain > you in this brief passage of the cess, sorry, *news*-spool before > fleeing once more into the night. > > And so I give you, a mere 549 days after it could possibly have made > any sense: > > > > JULIUS KIBO > > > > > DRAMATIS PERSONAE > > KIBO. > > [...] > > Kibo I see a note writ darker than any demi-bold. Speak, and be > told why you should seek a job far from pen or screen. Mining > mud could possibly your worth redeem. Bravo! Although your play was too long for me to quote or read any of it other than the speech above, I thoroughly enjoyed it, except that it should have been "Titus Andronicus" so that at the end I could declare "WHITE CASTLES FOR EVERYONE!" Now, WHITE CASTLES FOR EVERYONE! Chow down and later I'll explain where Bob Hope went. Also, you should mention that Cymbeline invented the hovercraft just to make Matt McIrvin happy. -- K. Except nobody would believe Shakespeare wrote a play called "Cymbeline". You'd better think of a more plausible name for a fake Shakespeare play... ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Julius Kibo (was: Re: american money) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 21:24:43 -0400 Joseph Michael Bay (jmbay@Stanford.EDU) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Now, WHITE CASTLES FOR EVERYONE! Chow down and later I'll explain > > where Bob Hope went. > > That's a rather -- tender -- subject. A true White Castle aficionado would never insult a White Castle burger by calling it merely "tender". They're in a realm which is so far beyond "tender" that even the term "semi-liquid" doesn't apply. White Castles have a texture like wet cotton candy, only even better. Remember the old Wendy's commercials where they told you that their burgers were good because they would squirt beef blood all over nuns' habits? Well, White Castles are more moist than that. They actually become more solid when you put ketchup on them. > Also, a movie theater in Palo Alto is doing a massive Bop Hope > Centenary thing. Several days of nothing that doesn't have Bob > Hope in it! So they're shutting down the concession stand? -- K. What, you thought the salty yellow grease on the popcorn was something harmless, like a petroleum chemical blend? ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Julius Kibo (was: Re: american money) Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 01:12:31 -0400 Joseph Michael Bay (jmbay@Stanford.EDU) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Remember the old Wendy's commercials where they told you that their > > burgers were good because they would squirt beef blood all over > > nuns' habits? > > WhaaaaaaAAaAaa? You spelled "no" all wacky. > I'd love to see it. It was circa 1983 or 1984, during the Dark Ages of hamburger commercials, shortly before Wendy's re-invigorated the genre by showing senile dwarves yelling "WHERE'S THE BEEF?" and also shortly before Burger King killed the genre again with "Where's Herb?" The premise was that, while wacky music played, various people would bite into Wendy's burgers, which would squirt beef juice on their clothes, to show how "juicy" they were. The commercial ended with a nun getting hamburger spooge all over her upper frontals (probably the result of God punishing her for eating at Wendy's, although I don't know if Wendy's is a venial sin or a mortal sin. Probably venial, because the hamburgers aren't that good.) They had the mistaken impression that equating their hamburgers with sponges dripping with cow oil would make them appetizing. But then, a year or two later, wacky hamburger commercials were forgotten as people turned to the Noid, Max Headroom, Godzilla, and the California Raisins to advertise cheap pizza, New Coke, Dr Pepper, and themselves. I have the distinct impression that sometime within the last twenty years many, but not all, members of the advertising profession have figured out how to make commercials that aren't as memorably dopey. Now they're mostly just boring, even the ones that still have nuns and monks acting like regular bozos. > > > [Joe Bay wrote:] > > > Also, a movie theater in Palo Alto is doing a massive Bop Hope > > > Centenary thing. Several days of nothing that doesn't have Bob > > > Hope in it! > > > > So they're shutting down the concession stand? > > Nope. > > There's some kind of nasty root-beer-and-gray-meat concoction, though. How do you make a Bob Hope float? something something something NATALIE WOOD!!! -- K. And why does Dr Pepper come in a vending machine? ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: the secret of the iLoo Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 04:29:27 -0400 talysman (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > some of you may remember Kibo and I discussing the iLoo not too > many threads ago; Kibo expressed doubts that the story was true, > while I dug up a story on MSNBC about the iLoo. my reasoning at > that point was this: if MSNBC (co-owned by Microsoft) reports > that the Microsoft Network has built their own internet-enabled > portapotty, it seems likely that the story is true. > > but I was wrong. > > and then I was right again. [...] > > and now they are changing their story. You know, if it had been a really slick, clever company, like those geniuses that make that beer that makes you sexy, I would be cynical and assume that Microsoft's deliberately adopting this strategy of "Our UK division is lying, it's a hoax!" "No, our US branch is lying, it's not a hoax!" in order to glom up media coverage for free with this wacky, wacky Microsoft-vs-Microsoft war of stupid words. But this is Microsoft we're talking about, and I think they honestly don't know whether or not they are manufacturing a computer system FOR ME TO POOP ON. > http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134731106_iloo14.html > > -> Microsoft admitted yesterday that it may have > -> misled the public about its quirky plan to install > -> an Internet kiosk and surround-sound speakers in a > -> British portable toilet. > > a cover-up! > > -> The "iLoo" project became the butt of jokes around > -> the world after it was disclosed two weeks ago. > > haw haw he said "BUTT!" and then he disclosed it! > > -> On Monday the company said it was just a > -> joke. Then yesterday it changed the story and said > -> iLoo was a real project, but executives killed it > -> after reading the news coverage. > > I think this was the same policy they used when announcing > security problems. first, they announce they are going to > fix the security holes with a month-long concentration on > security. then, they announce it was all a joke. and then, > they announce it *wasn't* a joke, but MS executives decided > that security wasn't a good investment. My take on this is that the "iLoo" announcement is worded in such a way that it could only be a joke. It's full of "Match Game" level double-entendres, and they couldn't possibly name it "iLoo" and publicly advertise that name without (a) trademarking it (which they haven't) and (b) getting sued by Apple (which they didn't) -- after all, everyone knows Apple's been working on a toilet-shaped computer for years. Oh, sure, it won't technically be a _working_ toilet, but Apple's new computer will be shaped even more like a toilet than most toilets are. Plus the advertising campaign will say something about "the two-ply paperless office of the future." I think that someone at MSN UK was trying to post a wacky (although their precise motives will never be known) and they actually managed to troll some of the management of MSN UK and Microsoft USA into fighting over one of the stupidest subjects possible. Mainly, this business shows that Microsoft management is so incredibly dorky that they can't spot even juvenile humor. If the sentence "MSN is also in talks with toilet paper manufacturers to produce special web paper for those in need of URL inspiration" didn't clue them in that this wasn't a serious press release, then I suspect that I could walk into the headquarters wearing a rainbow clown wig and no pants and they'd look to see if I had an appointment. > -> [ ... ] > -> Microsoft acknowledged yesterday that it goofed up. > > -> "We apologize for our mistake and are working on > -> making sure it doesn't happen again," said Lisa > -> Gurry, MSN group product manager in Redmond. > > that's a confusing statement. how do you work to make sure > that you don't lie again? can't you just say "we won't lie > again"? or maybe Lisa means that Microsoft is working to > make sure that no one accidentally builds an internet toilet > again. I think she said that they are making sure that they will never, ever apologize again. > further down in the article... > > -> Other companies provide digital advertising > -> displays in urinals so the concept wasn't too > -> far-fetched, but it still drew potty jokes such as > -> the one about Microsoft's new Pee-C. > > I still think my linking the iLoo to the Urine Control system > was much funnier than ... OH WAIT! I GEDDIT! PEE! SEA! The press release from the UK used the term "WWW.C", but then Jack Paar quoted it and got kicked off the Internet. > -> After a few weeks of wisecracks, Microsoft's > -> spokesmen on Monday said the iLoo was a joke. > > I think they just couldn't think of a snappy comeback, so they > pretended they had made the first joke. "SEE! haw haw! those > comedians were laughing WITH us, not AGAINST us!" > > -> "I can confirm it was an April Fools' joke," Noury > -> Bernard-Hasan, a director in the public-relations > -> division, told the CNET news Web site. > > that's one hell of an april fool's joke! played in mid april! > I bet they used Microsoft Outhouse^WOutlook to keep track of > April 1st! tight planning, fellahs! "Mid"-April? The press release was dated April 30, and posted May 2. Them's kalends, not ides. Unless Microsoft has renamed all the calendar months and changed their lengths to jam in four extra ones with the word "extreme" in their names, but I don't think they're scheduled to announce the Microsoft Calendar until after they've gotten the legislation passed forcing us to use it, sometime shortly after the second noon of the first day of Intercalarius Daffodil 39/X. > -> Yesterday the company revised its story. Gurry > -> explained to reporters that it was real, and the > -> U.K. group has leeway to do its own projects, but > -> that executives in Redmond decided the iLoo was > -> inappropriate. > > "it's been real, folks, but we're taking our potty and calling > it quits. smell you later!" I suddenly had a vision of Microsoft executives marching down the hallway in V-formation without swinging their arms or bending their knees, while chanting "THE iLOO IS INAPPROPRIATE! THE iLOO IS INAPPROPRIATE! INAPPROPRIATE! INAPPROPRIATE!" and then smoke would come out of their ears and they would go on a rampage and chase Richard Benjamin into a room with a convenient rack of clearly-labeled beakers of Throwing Acid. By the way, has anyone ever noticed that the guy who wrote "Jurassic Park" totally ripped off the guy who wrote "Westworld"? > -> "It didn't really map to our global branding > -> objectives," Gurry said. > > I hope they mean branding their *product*, otherwise I don't > want to know about their branding objectives. [...] I don't plan to buy a Microsoft spanking machine, let alone anything that would chase me around the apartment with a branding iron, a hot poker, David Spade's Tazer, or a bag of 1,000 spring clothespins. SPANKY DEVICE ONSALE EIGHTY LASHES REBATE > [...] > this story feels incomplete. to really make it complete, Apple > needs to slap a "look and feel" lawsuit on Microsoft, for using > the letter "i". Hey, I already said that a whole page above this. Go back and read it! -- K. "Microsoft Windows: Sit on it!" ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Reporting garbage truck drivers Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 04:10:46 -0400 Kevin S. Wilson (rescyou@spro.net) wrote: > > revjack (revjack@revjack.net) wrote: > > > > I'm about to report the Ice Cream Man, or rather, his truck. > > It plays a ghastly Casio style version of "Turkey in the > > Straw" at what I'm guessing is 110 decibels. And it is > > driven very slowly throughout the neighborgood and into the > > next town, so I can hear it for about an hour and a half. It > > is so loud that you cannot have a conversation with a person > > when it drives by; you have to stop and wait. I can > > literally hear it in the next town. > > The ice cream truck that comes through our neighborhood is apparently > driven by a guy who Just Doesn't Get It. It's one of those little > golf-cart type trucks, but he cruises through here at about 30 miles > per hour. I think someone needs to have a chat with him about his > target market and the profit motive. I'm not going to say how happy I am that last year's ice cream truck is gone from my neighborhood, because I don't want to jinx it. > On the other hand, maybe he's just using the ice cream truck as a > cover, as in "Reservoir Dogs." And as in that Cheech & Chong movie. And as in "The Ice Cream Man" with Clint Howard. Don't mess with your guy, because he might be Clint Howard and then his tag-a-long brother (the bald one _with_ the hat) will want to be in any movie you put Clint in. I've always found it amusing that the voice they dubbed in for Baby Baalok on "Star Trek" (Vic Perrin attempting to talk like an alien space baby) sounded exactly like the way Clint Howard grew up to talk. Clint's a cool guy, even if he was on "Space Rangers" (with Linda Hunt, Gottfried John, Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa, and special guest star Claudia Christian.) Were the casting directors unable to hire any actors who looked like normal people? The shape of Clint Howard's head fascinates me. He has a head designed by Bil Keane but with eyes by Margaret Keane. I look like him reflected in a fun-house mirror, but he looks like me reflected in a crazy-house mirror. In any case, the best movie about an ice cream truck is "The Ice Cream Man" just because Clint Howard kills people with ice cream cones, just like Schwarzenegger in "Last Action Hero". And the best comedy sketch about a TV show about an ice cream truck is the sketch in "Tunnelvision" about the guy pitching a show titled "The Million Dollar Ice Cream Truck" that gets rejected because someone on TV ate an ice cream cone last week. -- K. I still want to do a show called "The Twilight Cone" where Baby Rod Serling would wail, "Waah! My ice cream cone fell on the ground -- OR DID IT?" ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Happy Fun Paranoia Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 04:14:28 -0400 Kevin S. Wilson (rescyou@spro.net) wrote: > > I have a court date of July 2 for my lawsuit against a Charleston > company that wouldn't stop spamming me. Would you like to be next? Huh? See, if they _stopped_, it wouldn't be spamming. Saying a spammer won't stop is like saying "This water's too wet!" It's what makes a spammer a spammer. His defense will be: "Your honor, I'm a spammer, and according to the dictionary, I'm _required_ to send too much mail forever and ever!" ...and you'd better hope he's not smart enough to yell "CASE CLOSED! Q.E.D.! I WIN, NO GIVEBACKS!" after that or you'll be in trouble. Especially if his lawsuit was printed out in the Venice font in purple and green 24-point letters. And hopefully he won't be smart enough to say "I don't _not_ move that the plaintiff's name be legally changed to 'Please Spam Me Harder Sir!'" because if you don't realize you need to object to the double negative, the spammer will be legally entitled to request that the entire courtroom rise to point at you and yell "HAW HAW!" So be careful. These spammers think they're clever folks. And that makes them much more dangerous than if they actually were. -- K. If you need an expert witness to testify that he was detained by the Canadian government for using SpamAssassin to tidy up his mailbox, sorry, but I want to stay home and watch your trial on TV. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Why aren't Vikings more popular on ARK? Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 00:50:38 -0400 Tim Chmielelewski (chuma@dcsi.net.au) wrote: > > The word 'viking' comes from an old English word meaning pirate. OH YEAH, WELL, THEN WHY ARE THERE STILL PIRATES??? Also, I'd just like to point out that I can go all the way to Norumbega for free, because I have a bus pass. Norumbega was a mythical Viking settlement in North America. You can see it on some 400-year-old maps showing bogus coastlines of the New England area. (This was in the days when cartographers could get away with just guessing what was between Maine and Virginia.) Norumbega's location varied depending on whom you asked, but it's often considered to have been on the Charles River just west of Boston (i.e. in Newton.) Today Newton has a Norumbega Park, which is near but not quite in the same place as the amusement park which was also known as Norumbega Park: [from defunctparks.com] -> -> Norumbega Park opened in June of 1897 in the Auburndale section of -> Newton, Massachusetts. The amusement park was built by the directors -> of the Commonwealth Avenue Street Railway in an attempt to increase -> patronage and revenues on the trolley line running between Boston -> and Auburndale. The park's name was taken from Norumbega Tower, a -> huge stone structure located across the river in Weston, built to -> honor the Viking explorers who had sailed up the Charles River -> around 1000 AD. Incidentally, the Green Line "A" trolley was removed because they didn't want Vikings riding into downtown Boston on the trolley. So today we just have buses going to and from Newton. Because Vikings hate having to ring for stops. And it's great fun to give tourists directions involving "follow along where the 'A' trolley tracks used to be before they took them out, then turn at the imaginary Viking settlement..." Newton is one of 28 suburbs of Boston named Newton, because the Puritans thought nobody would ever need to go outside Boston, so when the city overflowed and people went out and started a whole bunch of suburbs, because Boston had been the only city until then each the new towns were just named "New-Towne", which is now spelled "Newton". The most prominent one of those was renamed "Cambridge" because it wanted to pretend it was part of England to make it seem like Harvard was just as good as Oxford. That also solved the problem of Cambridge getting confused with the other Newton, which is, well, adjacent. Boston is the sort of city where not only do streets intersect themselves, but neighboring towns have identical names. So I commend the people of Cambridge for stealing a name all the way from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Allegedly John Smith was the first one to decide to call this entire region "New England" instead of "Norumbega" -- if you look at maps from the 1590s, they often have made-up stuff between New France (Quebec) and Virginia, and it's all labelled "Norumbega" with a city on a river in the middle. The big city was said to be chock-full of gold, like all nonexistent cities. Why the city of Norumbega is supposed to be Newton, I don't know -- there's nothing on these maps that looks anything like Massachusetts (i.e. no Cape Cod) so the fantasy city clearly can't be any real place. But apparently Newton had one of those old colonial-era stone towers that later people decided would be a better tourist attraction if they said it was a Viking tower (like that one in Newport, which was actually built by Benedict Arnold -- not the famous one, but one of his ancestors.) The Abenaki (a Vermont Indian tribe) were the people who had been using the name "Norumbega" for this corner of the country, and they supposedly got the name from the Vikings long before, according to those people who work hard to convince themselves that the Vikings got here before the Native Americans did. Maine also claims to have been the site of the city of Norumbega, and worrying about whether it was in Massachusetts or Maine is like asking who would win in a fight between Luke Skywalker and Wesley Crusher. And of course the Space Vikings from Space Norumbega would kill them both. -- K. And that's all I know about Norumbega, and most of it's probably wrong even though it would still be all untrue