From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Jonathan Brandis, 1976-2003, Star of Seaquest Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 04:48:52 -0500 The Avocado Avenger (stacia@io.com) wrote: > > Frankly, I think we need to re-calibrate the Death Ray. This just isn't > the swift, vengeful coincidence I expect from such a high-tech piece of > equipment. Let's hit it with a mallet. Yeah. I think we were only trying to kill the following people from NBC's "seaQuest DSV": * Roy Scheider * Roy Scheider's makeup man * The psychic dolphin * The psychic dolphin's makeup man * All the writers and producers except Lee Goldberg (HI LEE!) * The network executives who put the show on the air * Bob Ballard, for failing to explain the show's science to me * Steven Spielberg, for putting his name on the show even though it sucked worse than the stuff he actually directs * Almost everyone else involved with the show, except Joanthan Brandis, Michael Ironside, and Ted Raimi, who radiate a combination of talent and watchability no matter what sort of futuristic space turd they're starring in. Oh, and let's also exempt Royce D. Applegate, because he's already dead, also having died prematurely under mysterious circumstances. So now "SeaQuest DSV"'s curse has killed twice. Who will be next? Will Peter DeLuise die of a rare plaid form of skin suffocation? Will Roy Scheider break his hip when he falls off his shoes? Will special guest star Dom DeLuise, living in a space-age plastic bubble, drink too much bubble tea and drown in his bubble teepee? Man, I'm mean-spirited tonight. I'll apologize to Jonathan Brandis for making light of his TV show once he comes back from the dead to explain to me these puzzling contradictions that prove the "seaQuest DSV" curse is really THE ONLY THING SCARIER THAN A CURSE -- A CONSPIRACY: [From the Associated Press, today] -> -> Television and Film Actor Jonathan Brandis Dead at Age 27 -> The Associated Press -> Published: Nov 21, 2003 -> -> LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Jonathan Brandis, who from an early age appeared -> in a string of roles on television, commercials and film, including -> the starring role in 1991's "The Neverending Story 2: The Next Chapter" -> and two seasons on Steven Spielberg's "SeaQuest DSV," has died. He was 27. -> -> The county coroner's office is investigating the Nov. 12 death, which -> was reported by the Los Angeles Police Department as a possible suicide, -> Lt. Ed Winter of the coroner's Investigations Bureau said Thursday. Problem #1: Why did the Associated Press choose to COVER UP his death for nine days? That's three whole news cycles! Problem #2: It wasn't Steven Spielberg's "seaQuest DSV", it BELONGED TO THE WORLD. A shining vision of how we can all solve our problems by living in a submarine with a dolphin also living in the submarine so that we can get advice from talking dolphins without ever having to go outside. Problem #3: Are they saying that it wasn't him but his EVIL TWIN who appeared in one of the THREE seasons of "seaQuest DSV"? His character was definitely in all three seasons, because otherwise the submarine would have exploded, because he was the show's Wesley Crusher and only he could save the submarine from the disastrous results of his science experiments. Also in the third season apparently he gained the ability to teleport due to sloppy editing when the third-season opener was chopped down from two hours to one with a pair of garden shears (he somehow managed to go from a maximum-security prison to interrupting a global summit meeting between scenes.) ARE THEY NOW TRYING TO PRETEND THERE WAS NO THIRD SEASON OF "SEAqUEST"? The character he played was poorly-written, but well-acted. And now THEY rubbed him out! I suspect the French or Australians did it, because anyone else who watched every episode of "seaQuest DSV" knows that France and Australia are evil countries who keep trying to take over the ocean, with the only thing stopping them being one submarine which can rule all the oceans at once because it's really long and has its own dolphin. That's why Jonathan Brandis's character had to teleport from jail to the summit meeting so that he could inform the world that the dictator of Australia was trying to flood the world with his subduction ray but fortunately they could save the world now that the submarine was back from the alien planet. NOT MAKING UP!!! Fun fact: One of Jonathan Brandis's earliest TV appearances was on a special with creepy magician Lance Burton (every photo in his press kit is the same photo, with different feathered hair pasted on -- yes, I have a Lance Burton press kit) hosted by Marc Summers, who went on to do that show that had kids going down slides into vats of pudding, and is now on a show about how pudding is made, and as I've observed before, Marc Summers is still grossed out. Oh, John Astin was in that special, too. So, in descending order of coolness, that special contained John Astin, Jonathan Brandis, Marc Summers, and Lance Burton and his hair. That's the sort of random combination of cast members that could only have been selected by a network executive twirling a giant spinner while going down a slide into a vat of chocolate-covered chimps aboard a submarine in outer space. -- K. My fondest Jonathan Brandis memory is that I actually watched all of "Sidekicks" just to see him convince Chuck Norris to beat up Joe Piscopo. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: there were two guys performing nut rolls, and one was a salted. Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 05:29:23 -0500 [concerning British people sitting in runny canned beans] Joseph Michael Bay (jmbay@Stanford.EDU) wrote: > > KIBO DIDN'T MENTION ANN-MARGRET! > > WHAT IS WRONG WITH KIBO? Nothing. It's just that I've only watched that scene five or six times this year so it wasn't as fresh in my memory as, say, the scene in "Atomic War Bride" where the guy shows his wife how his radiation suit's helmet has a Geiger counter sticking out of it. My wives never take an interest in anything I attach to my radiation suit! Also, parts of my brain stopped being able to think about her because of that stupid "Flintstones" stupid live-action stupid sequel with a British guy playing Fred Flinstone and Alan Cumming (star of the "Spice Girls" movie and the "Josie And The Pussycats" movie) in _two_ roles, one of which was Mick Jagger, er, I mean, Mick Jaggerock or whatever clever name they gave him, which destroyed the continuity of my brain because I _know_ he wasn't one of The Who. But don't worry. Even if you folks also watch live-action flops based on barely-animated cartoons, you'll never lose as many brain cells as I have because unlike me, you folks are lucky enough to get to listen to me as I tell you things that will re-activate old brain cells you forgot you had. For instance, remember "Meego"? With the guy who used to be the fake Latka, and that kid from the movie that gave Cuba Gooding Jr. a catchphrase that even he got sick of after ten minutes? Well, now you remember that you hadn't thought about "Meego" in a few years, and therefore you now have one brain cell that won't be allowed to forget. -- K. Also, remember when Al Lewis said that Butch Patrick looked like Mitch Miller? ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: there were two guys performing nut rolls, and one was a salted. Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 02:19:32 -0500 Joseph Michael Bay (jmbay@Stanford.EDU) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > [...] > > "Meego" > > [...] Well, now you remember that you hadn't thought about "Meego" > > in a few years, and therefore you now have one brain cell that won't > > be allowed to forget. > > Actually I think "Meego" took that one brain cell and put it into > some sort of canister and flew off to Pluto with it. COME BACK, TINY LITTLE BRAIN CELL! BRAIN CELL, COME BACK! HEYYY BRAAAAIN CELLLL! Joe needs you to think about TV! Of course, I can never get rid of particular cell in my brain -- curse my position as the one who must periodically remind others that "Meego" used to exist! I'd love to kill off that one cell because then maybe it's the one that keeps me from being able to recognize faces that aren't typefaces. I got me a brain lobe full of prosopagnosia because I'm all blocked up with a tiny memory of "Meego"! (I'd been wrongly calling the condition "aphasia" -- which I obviously don't have or I'd think you people were just typing nonsense all the time instead of most of the time -- because I had "aphasia" mixed up with "agnosia". I've got a touch of prosopagnosia -- difficulty recongnizing human faces -- which doesn't affect my daily life very much, since I can still watch TV. And now that I've decided to blame this mild neurological oddity I've had my entire life on some stupid toddler sitcom that got cancelled a few years ago, I feel much better about it. CURSE YOU, "MEEGO"!) -- K. And amazingly, concussing myself on Jacob Haller's car door didn't kill that one evil brain cell. As to why I still can't remember Brian Posehn's name even after we gave each other the finger, I don't know. I'm getting better at remembering his name because lately I've been spending a few hours a day practicing. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: there were two guys performing nut rolls, and one was a salted. Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 09:38:53 -0500 Matt McIrvin (mmcirvin@world.std.com) wrote: > > "Talysman the Ur-Beatle" (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > > > ok, Kibo has mentioned having prosopagnosia, [...] > > Well, I don't have any trouble with this. Gee, good for you, Matt. Is that also your reaction when someone tells you they have cancer? YAY FOR YOU, MATT! YOU HAVE AT LEAST ONE FEWER CONDITION THAN ONE OTHER PERSON! Maybe if you're lucky you're not alone -- I hope you don't turn out to be the only person on the whole Internet not to have prosopagnosia. > [...] > > I think that Kibo is clearly far short of full-blown prosopagnosia, but > I've watched enough TV with him that I think his perception of faces is > a little bit odd. He has trouble distinguishing actors who have some > very general facial characteristics in common, the classic example being > Lance Henriksen and Earl Boen; [...] > And he says he does better with faces on TV than in real life. The more I think about what you just wrote about me, the more cross I am with you right now. First, you seem not to have grasped that if I say something to you when you've invited me to watch your big-screen TV, that things said in your living room are not part of my public life intended to be broadcast to the entire Internet. Even in cases where I've mentioned something relatively inconsequential and you've blabbed about it on a.r.k, I've been somewhat upset, and in this case it's about a mild neurological oddity I have that I've never before felt like I should talk about. Outside my family, you were the first person I ever discussed it with at any length, and I thought you were understanding of it, so I was barely able to work up the courage to mention it on a.r.k the next day, and then I see you deciding to tell everyone your diagnosis of what you think is wrong with me. Second, you could at least get your facts straight. If you're going to gossip about me to practically everyone I know, you should provide more reliable gossip. Haven't I explained to you that the running joke about Lance Henriksen and Earl Boen being interchangeable is due to the (probably deliberately) confusing editing in the middle of "The Terminator"? (The two of them play rather indistinct characters -- by which I mean that neither has a personality, they serve the same function, they are dressed alike, and they are seen mainly in the background. As I recall, when Schwarzenegger shoots up the police station, there are _three_ shots of one or the other of them getting killed, further complicated by one of them entering a scene right as the other exits; I don't know why, but the director seemed to be trying to add some pointless confusion to that sequence, perhaps just so he could get away with slipping in some extra gore when one or the other of them was killed a second time.) I do have trouble with faces, but that was a joke; The joke may have been partly inspired by my face issue causing me to rewind that scene a couple times to try to figure out whether it was the director's fault or my fault that the movie was confusing, but that doesn't make it a piece of evidence for you to broadcast in support of your diagnosis. It's not as if I said Linda Hamilton was Linda Hunt or anything. Third, I don't understand why you're going out of your way to try to convince people you seem to think I'm profoundly impaired. I mentioned that I had some difficulty recognizing faces of people I meet, and now suddenly you're telling the entire Internet that I can hardly even watch TV. I hope people don't take you seriously. If people start treating me as if I'm made of glass because they think I have some sort of major neurological impairment, I'm not going to be happy. Has it occurred to you that practically all my friends read a.r.k and you've just tried to make them think I'm too incompetent _to watch television_? You are aware that one of my jobs has been to work as a _designer_, and that people I have done business with (or hope to do business with) are going to see your conclusions about what's wrong with me? Next time, if you allow _me_ to talk about a medical condition of mine, I will try to describe it, which would be preferable to you putting out distorted gossip based on things I said in your living room. For the record, for anyone who's interested: I have some degree of prosopagnosia, a condition which often makes it difficult for me to tell whether I've seen someone before when I meet them the second time (mainly affecting real-life meetings at airports, which is why I always tell people to find me because I may have trouble finding them.) It is a neurological condition (not a mental disorder, not a visual disorder, not a lack of attention) which is usually caused by a blow to the head (in my case, I think it was just naturally-occurring) and doesn't affect my ability to _remember_ faces (it has nothing to do with being unable to remember what name goes with what face, something everyone has trouble with to some degree), just my ability to _recognize_ faces. It affects only faces; I think those who know me (and have seen me talk endlessly about details of typography, paintings, cinematography, etc.) know I am highly visually perceptive. In fact, I suspect my interest in the visual arts, and good "eye" for art, is something of a reaction to the prosopagnosia -- I have always concentrated on analysis of everything I see because the part of my visual comprehension which works, the part that makes up the bulk of human perception, is the part that can analyze things rationally in terms of shape, color, texture, etc., as prosopagnosia only affects a specialized category of visual perception. The belief is that the human visual system has special wiring designed for perceiving faces in addition to all the general-purpose visual- analysis stuff, and I'm missing the magic unit that likes to take pictures of faces. For instance, for most people, if you were asked to describe someone you know, you'd summon up an image of that person's face, and then you'd mentally "look" at it and pull off details like what shape the nose is, what color eyes there are, etc., whereas I would draw a blank unless I had studied that person well enough to have deliberately _memorized_ details of what the nose is, what the eyes are, etc. I have an excellent visual memory -- if you ask me to sketch Dali's "The Persistence Of Memory" I can put the trees and watches in the right place, if you ask me about the Times Roman "R" I can draw it in every detail from memory -- but most people have some extra circuitry that basically takes snapshots of faces as single units, whereas I have to put the same effort into learning a face that I do into remembering anything else. And recognizing faces, even when I've memorized their details, is still a problem because faces show up at different angles, in different lighting, at different distances, with different hairstyles, with different expressions, whenever you see them. (Cecilia Burman's prosopagnosia site, http://www.prosopagnosia.com , has a really great demonstration of how this works by showing some photos of faces and some photos of rocks, showing that most people "just can" recognize faces under all sorts of conditions, but you have to really work to learn the specific shape of a rock in order to recognize it under even mildly different conditions, because the brain doesn't have special "rock" circuits.) This doesn't normally bother me at all, because it mainly makes little problems when I have to meet someone at an airport, etc., or when someone says "Hi!" on the street and I wonder if I've ever met them before. People I know well turn out to be quite recognizable because I work at learning how to recognize them -- most people have a distinctive style of dress (even though they don't wear the same clothes all the time, I've developed a fashion sense to be able to say "He likes desaturated solid colors, and they like stripes of tertiaries...") and a recognizable height, hair color, gait, voice, and so on. I don't understand why I do well recognizing actors and newsmakers and so on in photos and on TV (although I'm not quite as good as average, I'm not terrible at it either; I actually scored above-average on an online test at recognizing photos of famous people last night.) I think it's because photos and movies tend to try to make people easy to recognize (good lighting, etc.) and I can study the image without the face moving around. (And of course it's usually a picture of someone I've seen a zillion times!) There's no real way of illustrating what a face looks like to someone like me; Cecilia Burman has some pictures of Mickey Mouse with his face blurred, and Bill Choisser's site ( http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/ ) has a pixelated photo of him, but those are more illustrations of "This is how hard it is for some people," it's not possible to illustrate _what_ the perceptual difficulty is. I can see the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. quite clearly, I just don't get it as "this is a face", just as "here's a complicated collection of body parts that have to be studied individually, like a puzzle." It's a very difficult thing to explain, particularly as the effect is so subtle (most people aren't even aware that this condition exists because it doesn't affect people like me in any way that might be noticed, except in terms of some social awkwardness when people say hi on the street.) It's a lot like trying to explain color-blindness to someone with full color vision -- they probably always ask, "If red and green look the same to you, do they both look red, or do they both look green?" You can't describe how what you see is different from what other people see, you just know there's a little bit of extra information that other people are getting. With prosopagnosia, the most common response seems to be "I have trouble remembering what name goes with what face too. Why don't you just pay more attention?" But you wouldn't tell a color-blind person to try harder to see the difference between red and green. You'd just expect them to deal with it. Just as a color-blind person knows that the red is on the top of the traffic light and the green is on the bottom, I know that a person of height X with stride Y and hair Z is probably a specific friend, and if I hadn't gone out of my way to bring up the subject as an interesting minor difference between me and other people, you folks would never be aware I was different in this way (unless you met me at the airport and wondered why I told you to wave to me.) Just as it's a little tricky to understand how prosopagnosia works, it's also tricky to figure out where I fit in on the spectrum of people with this disorder. I think I have a relatively mild case of it -- enough to make it hard to recognize people's faces, but not the degree some people have where they are unable to read people's emotions from their facial expressions, and some people aren't able to perceive faces _at all_. (The more general form of agnosia causes some people to have generalized perceptual problems, making them unable to recognize things of any sort, as in Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat". Prosopagnosia is face-recognition-specific, agnosia is a broad category of disorders that fall into the category of "trouble recognizing something".) After the terrorist attack on New York in 2001, there was a brief fad for installing "face-recognition" cameras in buildings, stadiums, and so on, in hopes that computers would be able to identify terrorists by looking at them through a cheap little video camera and applying some digital-image-processing snake-oil. I could've told them that wouldn't work. Most humans have the wonderful gift of just automatically being able to _know_ they've seen a face before without thinking about it, but I deal with faces in the same way a computer does, by looking for clues such as shapes and colors and positions of the parts, and thus I know that no grid of pixels pointed at a three-dimensional face with a variable hairstyle and bad lighting can put those pixels together into the equivalent of the automatic "Aha! It's Mary!" moment humans usually have. The most fascinating thing about this is that it's so specific -- as someone who's done a lot of computer programming, I always tended to assume that the brain was like a computer and followed well-defined rules about what did what (even if we can't specify what each part does, it still seems like it ought to work more like a computer) but it turns out that there are things in our brains that perform tasks well beyond the sophistication of any artificial intelligence we could create any time soon. Think of how hard it is for a computer to scan a printed page and determine that the "a"s are "a"s, the "b"s are "b"s, and so on (scanned text tends to come out with a lot of garbled words) and then imagine how complicated the task is of answering the question of, "Who is that person down the hallway?" We don't understand how most people can do this without furrowing their brows and hunting for clues, but I know what it's like to try to do it in the more computery way of having to consciously match faces to a database I've been keeping of people's bits and parts. I have to use the generalized "studying stuff" algorithms for everything, while most people also have "seeing whole faces" tricks. I don't look on it as being a problem for me -- it only causes a little trouble in specific circumstances and as I mentioned earlier, I think its side effect is that it caused me to get really good at the visual analysis of visual media other than faces, such as ad layouts, clothes, movie scenes, calligraphy, and so on. It's a flaw, but I think on the whole it's helped me as much as it's hurt me. The only thing I've concluded I just will never be able to do is to become a painter of fine portraits. (I can sketch okay, except for faces! That's probably why my design work tends to revolve around logos and lettering and layout, rather then trying to emulate Rembrandt.) And that's all I'm interested in saying about this quirk of my neural net. I hope it helps everyone understand that I, like most people, am a little different from everyone else, but I hope that bringing up the subject doesn't lead to people thinking I'm having great difficulties or the new Rain Man or some sort of bizarre crazed genius. (Well, actually, the prosopagnosia isn't the reason I'm a bizarre crazed genius. But there is insufficient space on the Internet for me to list all the ways in which I'm weird. For purposes of this discussion, I just wanted to talk about one perceptual difficulty caused by a bug in my wetware.) -- K. Now, as far as being a supertaster goes, that's another tiny genetic difference that makes me better than the Muggles, even if it makes dark chocolate taste really nasty. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: there were two guys performing nut rolls, and one was a salted. Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 01:41:15 -0500 Glenn Knickerbocker (notr@bestweb.net) wrote: > > I don't have prosopagnosia either, of course, just an even worse memory > for actors' faces and names than for those of people I know. Combine > this with my forgetfulness of stories and the trancelike state the 30 Hz > flicker induces in me, and I really am incompetent to watch television. I think everyone is worse at remembering people's names than all their friends are. I have yet to meet a person who has never had trouble remembering someone's name, somewhere. And even if you do ever meet that person, you would automatically forget their name in order to keep the Universe from folding up on itself because of one of those paradoxes that isn't even a paradox! But, as I've mentioned, I have particular trouble with _one_ name: I can't remember that Brian Posehn is "Brian Posehn". I have to keep calling him "that guy who looks like a child molester with an extra side of sideburns" and that bothers me because I don't think he's actually a child molester, even though I don't know the backstory as to why he was given the electric chair live on stage. I suspect this means that either (a) all other humans were born with a Brian Posehn Cell and I'm missing it and nobody has noticed because nobody else ever thinks about him because I know that he was personally giving me the finger when I was in the back row of that giant theater, or else (b) there is no such thing as a Brian Posehn Cell because all intersections of the words "Brian" and "Brain" got blowed up at the end of the "Space: 1999" episode "Brian The Brain", after the Daleks laughed at how pathetic the robot looked until he jumped out the airlock. > > [...] > > And that's all I'm interested in saying about this quirk of my neural net. > > I have trouble remaining interested in my own attempts to explain my > mental quirks to other people, too. Why don't you just pay more > attention? Do you mean to the TV, or what? -- K. I have to turn on the TV! That guy might be on! Sideburn guy! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: there were two guys performing nut rolls, and one was a salted. Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 01:30:44 -0500 David DeLaney (dbd@gatekeeper.vic.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > [addressing Matt McIrvin] > > > > I hope you don't turn out to be the only person on the whole Internet > > not to have prosopagnosia. > > He might be. I myself can only add about one or two new names to new faces a > day. And get confused between people who bear similarities to each other even > though they don't look alike; canonical case was in high school, where I > never could remember which of Scott's two sisters, Ann or Amy, was the one > that was six inches taller than the other. (Both had long black hair. Scott > had short curly black hair. This will lead you, correctly, to conclude that > their last name was Corrigan...) You have a daily limit on how many faces you learn? Hmm, I'll have to use that excuse next time I'm at a party: "I'm sorry, I can only learn one or two new faces a day, and I already looked at that ugly couple over there..." > > [...] > > Uh-oh. Kibo's mad at Matt. I'm going to hide under the Tubby Tustard > bin now... Oh, it's okay, he's forgiven, assuming he starts wearing the name tag I'll be sending him. And -- hey, David, what are you eating under there? -- K. Also, is it true that the second "T" in "Tubby Tustard" really stands for "M" because "Teletubbies" was originally a German production with them cavorting drunkenly about the biergarten? Of course, few Germans actually stand for "M", what with him killing that little girl and then throwing her pretty ball into the bushes... ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: there were two guys performing nut rolls, and one was a salted. Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 03:40:26 -0500 "Talysman the Ur-Beatle" (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > ok, Kibo has mentioned having prosopagnosia, and I've mentioned having a > mild version of it in passing to a couple people, mainly on the moo > (don't worry, you can't catch it. YET.) so now I'm wondering: how many > other ARK peoples have trouble recognizing faces? is it like mine, where > I sometimes can't describe what people look like after they've left the > room? I don't know -- maybe you just picked boring friends, or perhaps they're all secretly the bastard love children of Mr. Potato Head and spend all their free time trading noses and ears to confuse you. I would, however, suspect there would be a relatively high incidence of at least mild forms of prosopagnosia among graphic artists, fashion designers, hair stylists, and people who wear scary bodypaint to college football games -- anyone connected to either the abstract use of color or decorating the human body. Maybe even among photographers if I'm reasonably typical (I have a lot less trouble recognizing photos and video images than I do with three-dimensional people. I don't know if this is because people on TV tend to be relatively famous and are well-lit and covered in dramatic makeup, or just because I'm really good at looking at two-dimensional contours and so on.) > my prosopagnosia -- ok, let's call it "faceblindness", it's easier -- > doesn't hurt my social life much because it seems everyone I know has a > tattoo, dyed or otherwise unusual hair, a beard, or a piercing. which is > perhaps weird, seeing as I have none of those things myself. I've been trying to get everyone I know to wear Mexican wrestler masks all the time. It would really help me out in at least three ways. Either that, or people should just wear "Star Trek" uniforms with nametags on them. The shirts could be color-coded. From now on, everyone I've never met will wear red, while gold is reserved for the people I've taught myself to recognize, and blue is for the people I should recognize but don't. Of course, people in uniforms all wind up looking alike (especially if they all have "Star Trek" hairblobs instead of real haircuts) so the nametags would have to be really big and easy to read. Better yet, the nametags should also have a photo of the wearer, because I'm good with photos. Hey, that's why "Space: 1999" was better than "Star Trek" -- because their uniforms did have little photos of themselves on the front, just like Space Ghost. -- K. And never mind the prosopagnosia. How many of you are supertasters? WHY CAN'T SOMEONE MARKET A LINE OF TV DINNERS JUST FOR US? ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: there were two guys performing nut rolls, and one was a salted. Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 02:03:06 -0500 Joe Manfre (manfre@world.std.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > For instance, remember "Meego"? With the guy who used to be the > > fake Latka, and that kid from the movie that gave Cuba Gooding Jr. > > a catchphrase that even he got sick of after ten minutes? Well, now > > you remember that you hadn't thought about "Meego" in a few years, > > and therefore you now have one brain cell that won't be allowed to > > forget. > > Ha! There's a moving company here in the D.C. area called Meego > Movers, and I used to see their trucks around a lot, and they'd always > make me think of you, Kibo. Really? You should be thinking of seizing the opportunity to hire people to move Meego! He's really tired of living in your basement and Mork and Uncle Martin and Spock wouldn't mind seeing him go. They say he's too silly. Except for Spock, who just wants some privacy for his romantic relationship with the other two. > I don't think I would hire them, though, because they're clearly not > as philosophical as the moving company "Prime Movers" that advertises > on the spine of the local Yellow Pages. "Thanks to us, the even numbers are unevenly-distributed, because we put 2 where 19 used to be. Take that, Sieve of Eratosthenes!" -- K. And take that, Pascal's Triangle! Take that, Zeno's Paradox! Take that Mork's Shazbot! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: This was being delivered next door the other day Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 05:53:32 -0500 Tim Chmielewski (chuma@dcsi.net.au) wrote: > > When I arrived at work the other day I saw a truck on the street with a > "74 Karat" printing press. > > I thought gold was too heavy and droopy to be used to build a printing > press? Well, 74 karats wouldn't be heavy if you changed the gold into diamonds, because then you'd have a printing press weighing about 15 grams, and also you wouldn't have to worry about it being 308% pure. In any case, remember that regular printing type -- the sort people use every day if they haven't heard of computers or offset presses -- is mostly lead, which isn't quite as squishy as gold but does melt if you breathe on it hard, which is why when the Allies bombed the Klingspor foundry the basement became one big block of lead. If the Germans had been sensible enough to make everything out of gold, that tragedy could have been averted, and the Nazis would still be churning out propaganda posters to this day instead of being reduced to just running for governor of one of those states that's a magnet for crazy people. Also, in that alternative history, we'd now have magnets that can attract all the gold in the world instead of states that attract all the crazy people in the world except for the ones that already settled in Waco or Cape Cod. > It would have been funnier if they couldn't fit it down the alleyway next > to the building they were going to put it in, but that didn't happen. > > At least we don't have to copy out these Bibles by hand anymore. If I were Christian, I wouldn't settle for a cheap _copy_ of the Bible. I'd either own the original or tell the church to go screw themselves for being too elitist to let me own the only real Bible. -- K. So when are the people who do the Good News Bible going to learn how to draw more than half of each person? (I like the part where the Romans nail Jesus to a big gamma after he demonstrates his powers by turning half a fish into three halves of a fish.) ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: snack food betting pool Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 02:29:00 -0500 Glenn Knickerbocker (notr@bestweb.net) wrote: > > My finger slipped as I was buying my yummy Classic White Popcorn, and > now I have an extra bag of Fritos in my desk drawer. Any bets on when I > will next have a craving for excessively salty corn chips? Well, I was at the little bitty supermarket around the corner yesterday, and I wanted some of those Perdue chicken nuggets (the ones that used to come 18 per pack in three neat rows but just got smaller and now come 22 per pack wadded up into a vacbed-bondage-style clump) and there was a discount that week but all three spots on the shelf had the ones that advertised they contained cheddar cheez, so I looked behind the frontmost ones in all three stacks and lo and behold, I found the non-cheez variety, and because I like to buy my food in pairs in case I forget I already ate dinner and want to have the same thing again, I picked up two. When I got home, one of the two packages had mutated back into the cheez kind! This happens to me a lot. I inspect the food really carefully (I check the price, I read the ingredients, I look at the expiration date) and then I reach for a second one without thinking and get the wrong flavor. So, any bets on when I throw out the cheez ones because they must be moldy, years from now? (I can't throw them out now because I would never waste food, even though there is no chance in hell I am ever going to eat these. And I can't put them in the food-for-the-poor box downstairs because they're refrigerated, and frankly, I'm poor and don't want the other poor people to know I wasted money on the wrong chicken nuggets because they might laugh at me.) > Actually, even this popcorn is a little overly salty. Good thing the > whole reason for my getting up in the first place was to get a soda. What are you, afraid of a little salt? It's just salt! It's not like it's something that tastes bad and makes people sick, like cheez! I bet the cheez in these chicken nuggets is oversalted, too, but I swear on a stack of bacon I'm not going to find out. Mmm... bacon. I wish I had bacon instead of chicken nuggets contaminated with the opposite of bacon. -- K. Words that should never again be used in the same run-on sentence: "cheez" and "vacbed". ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Erotic phone stories for food lovers Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 02:35:43 -0500 James Vandenberg (james@vandenberg.dropbear.id.au) wrote: > > Are you lonely? Bored? Or just curious? Want to hear women talk about their > culinary adventures? Hear about what they've been getting up to in their > kitchens? This is spicy. Tam will entertain all your gastronomic fantasies. > Call now. 1800 416 9754. That reminds me of something I was thinking about this morning. What are the LEAST erotic foods there are? I need to know in case I ever have to run a school kitchen. -- K. I'm thinking pureed caper berries and/or any Chef Boyardee product molded directly from Bill Murray's face. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Erotic phone stories for food lovers Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 04:04:37 -0500 Tamara (tamaraharris@rogers-removethis-.com) wrote: > > James Vandenberg (james@vandenberg.dropbear.id.au) wrote: > > > > Are you lonely? Bored? Or just curious? Want to hear women talk about > > their culinary adventures? Hear about what they've been getting up to > > in their kitchens? This is spicy. Tam will entertain all your > > gastronomic fantasies. Call now. 1800 416 9754. > > Yes, for more than an hour this morning, I tantalized > Ja-drool-pant-drool-mes on the phone with recipes for Chicken Kiev (a.k.a. > 'Chernobyl Chicken' or 'Cholesterol Bombs'), Lentil Soup, Standing Rib Roast > and more. You need a RECIPE to make SOUP? Lentils plus water plus smaller quantities of other random stuff that strikes your fancy at the moment equals lentil soup. The longer you cook it, the better. That's all. No measuring, no ingredients other than "lentils and water and stuff you like." Of course, that could lead to some people ruining it by putting Dr Pepper in it, so maybe it should be slightly longer: "lentils and water and stuff you like that isn't antithetical to the entire concept of soup." Chicken Kiev = chicken + butter + garlic. Roll it in bread crumbs, step on it several times, and deep-fry it if you want it to be like the puck version they sell to cafeterias. Standing Rib Roast: Buy a rib roast. Put it in the oven, but -- this is important -- stand it up _before_ cooking it. And I thought my recipes (which usually involve opening two or at most three cans) were trivial... I've got one involving a can of spicy coconut soup, a packet of rice noodles (udon), and a box of Japanese-style mixed vegetables that'll knock your socks off if I ever reveal which one of those three is the _secret_ ingredient and which brand of aluminum foil is involved. > He said that he will be off to hijack a plane to Canada tonight. Okay, I'm alerting the Canadian government not to let any Australians visit the CN Tower for the next twelve years. -- K. What I particularly liked about that incident was that it wasn't even a building owned by the government; they told me I couldn't visit a private tourist attraction because I might get greasy American fingerprints on it or something. That's like going to Las Vegas and having the FBI tell you that you can't go to the Liberace Museum, except I think the Liberace Museum has more stuff in it and is ten times scarier. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Erotic phone stories for food lovers Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 04:11:24 -0500 [regarding Chicken Kiev] Tamara (tamaraharris@rogers-removethis-.com) wrote: > > (IMPORTANT -- don't overcook the chicken or you'll ruin it!!) But I have always felt that meat _should_ be overcooked. In other words, it ain't over until Yogi Berra dies of old age and your smoke alarm goes off for long enough that you get used to hearing its constant squeal and freak out when the battery dies and there's a sudden silence. The proper way of cooking bacon is to get it crispy, and bacon is just another shape for ham, so why shouldn't we cook all other meats to destruction? Beef is delicious when you get it crispy, and chicken, well, if you start with skinless chicken and cook it my way, it will grow a wonderful new crunchy skin to replace the skin you forgot to buy. To paraphrase Zippy: If it's worth cooking, it's worth overcooking. I feel that way about broccoli, too. Broccoli should have a nice mushy texture. You know, just like carrots are supposed to have. -- K. I own a propane torch and a butane torch. And a spot welder. That should prove I know my meats! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: My Boyfriend Has a Pulse Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 02:46:36 -0500 Paula (mmmtoblerone@earthlink.ent) wrote: > > So, have Darla and Sam been the only people around to have anything > but horrible experiences with online romance? Dear Usenet Forum, I never thought it could happen to me, a simple Tupperware salesman, but yesterday, as I knocked on the door of the convent, I -- -- wait a minute, Paula, did you say "romance" or "imaginary lust of the sort that people pay money to read"? I'm not going to continue until you tell me or someone pays me. -- K. "Romance"? Ah, yes, one of your hu-man emotions. What is this thing you Earth people call a "Venus Butterfly"? On my planet, an "Earth Butterfly" involves a motorized wheelbarrow of radioactive nougat! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: A great new taste sensation between "kitsch" and "retch" Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 03:22:09 -0500 A Reuters article that's practically an AFP article: -> -> Turkey & Gravy Soda on the Table for Thanksgiving -> Sat November 22, 2003 12:25 AM ET -> -> SEATTLE (Reuters) - Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings: -> cranberry sauce, stuffing and turkey gravy flavored soda. Yummy? -> -> In the latest food fad to emerge in the United States, Seattle -> specialty soda maker Jones Soda Co. scored a hit this week with the -> introduction of a limited batch of Turkey & Gravy-flavored soda. -> -> The tan-colored soda sold out in just three hours after an initial -> batch was put up for sale on its Web site on Friday, a spokeswoman -> for the company said. Yeah, that's the definition of a fad -- some people bought some stuff a site had. And because the Web was involved, that made it a fad. If the Web hadn't been involved, it would have been just sad. Still, I'm glad we've discovered a hip new fad to replace dangling chad. It's so rad! -> Proceeds from the online sale, where two bottles of Turkey & Gravy -> soda sold for about $11, HOLY BIG FAT FAD BATMAN!!!! THEIR ENTIRE INVENTORY ONLY HAS TO SELL OUT TWICE MORE TO FINISH OFF THE SIX-PACK!!!! (Rule of thumb: No beverage that doesn't come in cases of at least six bottles has ever tasted good. Think about it. Ever seen Red Bull sold any way but loose cans?) -> were donated to Toys for Tots, a children's charity. YAY TOYS FOR TOTS IS SAVED! ...providing they use the eleven dollars to change their name to "Half A Toy For Half A Tot." -> Local retailers will start selling the soda from Monday. Yes, the soda is made by Badge 713 himself, Joe Monday. He always wears a hat, he never smiles, he never wastes time swinging his arms when he walks, and now he's switched from smoking Chesterfields to drinking meat soda. Tastes like turkey. Thanksgiving turkey. All the fixin's? All the fixin's. Some idea. Try some? Joe, doctor says no meat soda for me. But it's smooth. Well, maybe just one. You'll need this. The bottle opener? The bottle opener. That worked. I saw it. Joe, this tastes like dingleberries. Dingleberries? Sorry, Joe, I forgot you don't have teenagers. What are dingleberries? Some of that "hip" new "slang" that's going around. Oh. Means it tastes bad. Not our job to taste things that taste good. You're right. Now finish your dinglesoda and let's go bust that perp who looked at a dirty magazine once. DUM-DA-DUM-DUM! -> Jones Soda said it would be up to local stores to set prices for -> Turkey & Gravy soda. Other sodas from the company typically cost $1 -> to $1.50. -> -> Thanksgiving, a U.S. holiday that falls on the fourth Thursday of -> November, typically features a dinner with turkey, gravy and other -> condiments. HOLY WOW BATMAN, IN THE U.S. THEY CELEBRATE BY HAVING UNSPECIFIED CONDIMENTS! -> Turkey & Gravy soda tastes like a Thanksgiving dinner, but contains -> no meat extracts, Jones Soda said. -> -> This isn't the company's first experiment in exotic carbonation. I saw a pop-up ad for an "exotic carbonation" Web site once, but I didn't go there because didn't want to pay to see a Foley catheter being inserted. (Of course, he doesn't do that any more -- now Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCullogh, and Mark McKinney have steady jobs on that show where they go into guys' houses and give them makeovers.) -> Fish tacos and ham flavors have also been offered as promotional -> soda flavors. Jones Soda said it will continue to introduce other -> unusual soda flavors. -> -> Other flavors offered by Jones Soda include green apple, bubblegum and blue. I've seen the fluorescent green (apple) and fluorescent magenta (bubble gum) right next to the fluorescent blue (Windex) flavor of Jones soda at 7-Eleven, my local retailer of sodas too lame to be sold in real markets. -> crushed melon. PERVERTS!!! -- K. I'm still waiting for someone to sue the company that makes the Harry Potter candy for false advertising. The booger- flavored Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans aren't labelled that they contain only synthetic boogers, just like Twinkies! ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: A great new taste sensation between "kitsch" and "retch" Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 01:47:11 -0500 Whosetitanelbow (crgre02+usenet@newsguy.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Yeah, that's the definition of a fad -- some people bought some stuff > > a site had. And because the Web was involved, that made it a fad. > > If they'd had a "flash mob" for their bottled vomit, it would have been so > five minutes ago that it would have been 2003-retro and thereby avante- > passe or whatever. Flash mobs are passe? Oops. I thought we were having the world's slowest flash mob right here from 1991 until now! I guess now we'll have to come up with a new term to justify alt.religion.kibology's existence to the authority that runs the Internet, "Wired" magazine. -- K. Also, I object to the term "Flash mob". It's properly named a "Flash swf". I don't know what would use a "mob" file. Probably some Hewlett-Packard screen- saver that kills Moby Dick if you don't print out solid white paper all day. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Kibologists Kiss (Minty) Asse. Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 03:51:12 -0500 Matt McIrvin (mmcirvin@world.std.com) wrote: > > The agent had trained for a year, in secret, to operate without huds, > scriminators or 0wz0rable adjuncts of any sort, and thus prepared hung > around in alleys trying to look drunk and nondescript. When Spamabog's > gangsters-turned-cultists finally stuffed him in the trunk of a car and > packed him on a private jet to the inner sanctum, no doubt somewhere > just outside Chelyabinsk, it was almost a relief. Now _this_ is an excellent article, even if you mentioned Chelyabinsk without explaining about the elevator dentist who steals felt boots from children... WITH HIS MIND! > The animations started to jump off the screens and dance around the > room, talk balloons hovering above their cartoon heads. GUTTER BALL. > WHOA DUDE. Everything smelled like rubber. This is the best gas mask fetish story I've read. -- K. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Wrong question...wrong answer Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 04:38:07 -0500 "Tamara" (tamaraharris@rogers-removethis-.com) wrote: > > Me: "So if we broke up or something, how long do you thing it would > take for you to get over me?" > > Him: "Um...five months." > > > > Me: "FIVE MONTHS?!?!" > > Him: "We can talk about this 80 years from now." > > Me: "Great. When I am 119 years old?!? Thanks." > > ~T (sleeping in the guest bedroom tonight) Well, Tam, if you broke up with him when you were 119 years old, how long would it take for you to get over him? And now, for further insight into how Men Are From Mars, But Women Are Hot, here is a highly enlightened comedy sketch: HER: Honey, I have something to tell you. HIM: (instantly enraged with jealousy) What -- are you having an AFFAIR? HER: No, honey. I've been having fantasies. HIM: (more enraged with jealousy) You're FANTASIZING about someone ELSE? HER: No, honey, I'm fantasizing about you. HIM: Oh... I guess that's okay. HER: Yes, I've been fantasizing that you'll never find out that I'm secretly married to your mom! (HE LOOKS SHOCKED. COMEDIC MUSIC STING HAPPENS HERE, THEN HE CHASES HER AROUND THE ROOM IN FAST MOTION, THEN SHE CHASES HIM INTO THE OCEAN, AND THEN THE CAMERA PULLS BACK TO SHOW TWO HIDEOUS ALIENS WATCHING THIS ON THEIR 3-D TELEVIEWER) FIRST HIDEOUS ALIEN: Foolish humans and their affairs! SECOND HIDEOUS ALIEN: Honey, I have something to tell you. (FIRST ALIEN LOOKS SHOCKED. COMEDIC MUSIC STING. CAMERA PULLS BACK TO REVEAL THAT THIS IS ALL TAKING PLACE IN THE BOWL OF A TOILET. A WOMAN'S HAND REACHES INTO THE FRAME AND FLUSHES IT.) WOMAN: Honey, I have something to tell you... We have to break up because I'm a woman, and you're just a toilet. TOILET: No problem! I'm already having an affair with new lavender-scented double-action Vanish Drop-Ins! WOMAN: Why, they're the only product that cleans AND deodorizes! TOILET: Yes, everyone should use Vanish Drop-Ins! WOMAN: Everyone should use Vanish Drop-Ins! BOTH: Hurrah for Vanish Drop-Ins! (CAMERA PULLS BACK TO REVEAL THAT THIS IS NOT A TV COMMERCIAL AT ALL, BUT JUST A FRAGMENT OF A SCRIPT ON A COMPUTER SCREEN. PAC-MAN ENTERS AND EATS THE SCRIPT.) PAC-MAN: Burp! MS. PAC-MAN: You have no penis. (PAC-MAN SHRIVELS UP AND DIES. THE END.) -- K. By reading this article, you are now qualified as a "Men Are From Mars, John Gray Isn't Even As Original As Eric Berne" counselor who can charge people money to hear that People Are Funny and/or Kids Say The D*rndest Things. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Want more apartment woes? Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 01:57:12 -0500 Tamara (tamaraharris@rogers-removethis-.com) wrote: > > We're heading on 4 months of living here and I still have contractors in my > house. Right now, I can see the butt-crack of the plumber as he is snaking > some wacky machiney-like thing down the bathroom drain and pulling up wads > and wads of hair. Either the previous tenants did some really weird stuff > while using the loo or my cats are shedding into the toilet at will. Or you've been eating too many of those pork rinds that have the hairs embedded inside them. What brand is that again? Oh, yeah, any brand! > Regardless, it is O GROSS! The plumber pulled more hair out of my drain > than I have on my head. EWWWW! So when you assembled it, what sort of wig did you make? > The 'new apartment' disaster tally so far -- > > - Leaf mice > - Oven leaf mice > - House rain > - Falling ceilings > - Sonia's pots and pans > - Hookers [1] > - Scary, icky drain hair > > [1] Dan told me that I would make a killing around here, considering how > disgustingly ugly the competition is. I need to invest in some new > thigh-high fishnets and a sleazy pair of stilettos. Since you're in Canada, you'd probably do even better if you could combine "hooker" with "hockey" somehow to become the world's first hocker. You could charge for things with names like "the full butterfly" and, of course, "spearing" and "roughing". A hocker outfit would be something like a sweater made from rainbow- colored Saran Wrap, with a bright blue leaf on the front of it, captioned "TORONTO HOT SEXS". Oh, and the fight strap would go ALL OVER the place. -- K. Mike Myers would sleep with you instantly. Okay, maybe this was a bad idea. But still not as bad as letting him crap all over our treasured childhood memories of Dr. Seuss. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Kibo and following me, Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 02:04:56 -0500 Lots42 The Library Avenger (lots42@aol.comaol.com) wrote: > > I used to say that Kibo was stalking me, based on trash I found on the walk > near my house. Like "I saw a Rolling Rock beer bottle. Kibo must have been > drinking it while watching me." Is that the one where if you peel off the label, you automatically get laid? If so, then how would you have known it was a Rolling Rock bottle, given that I would have peeled the label off and ignored the beer? > Then this afternoon I saw an unopened maxi. > > Kibo? I'm sorry, I don't use feminine hygiene products. In fact, I can't even spell "feminine hygiene". I know it's got some "i"s and some "e"s and wings that flex for comfort, but other than that, I had nothing to do with your surprise maxi pad. Maybe it was a gift from the gods to combat your not-so-fresh feeling. The only time I had to choose feminine hygiene products was when I had to "CIRCLE THE ONE YOU TRULY WANT" from a page of vaginal deodorants before being forced to watch a family drama starring Tom Wopat loaded with commercials for one of the vaginal deodorants which wasn't the one I circled before the show, and neither was the one I circled after the show, and then test-marketing was ruined forever and it was all Tom Wopat's fault for not making me want the right "intimate perfume". -- K. I wonder which brand he used back when he was on "Dukes of Hazzard". ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Free Supermarket Ham Inquiry Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 02:14:23 -0500 The Avocado Avenger (stacia@io.com) wrote: > > The local supermarket, Food 4 Less ("Home of Ray The Crazed > Employee"), has a contest where every time you buy something, they give > you a card covered in silver flaky stuff. Most cards have prized of 20 > cents off a 400 count barrel of pickles, or something else equally > useful. > > However, I managed to actually win something big - a 9 pound ham. > Free, no charge, gratis, cheap at twice the price ham. > > I don't like ham. > > So what am I supposed to do with 10 pounds of it? Cut it into little cubes and you can make about a hundred gallons of pea soup. No? Whatsamatta? Don't like a hundred gallons of pea soup, or you just don't like a hundred gallons of stuff in general? Do you like bacon? Ham is just bacon that they forgot to cut into really expensive little slices. Slice it thin and cook it until it turns into crispy ham chips, and then change its name to bacon and life will be perfect. If all else fails, you could dye it green and make yet another creepy live-action perversion of a classic Dr. Seuss book, provided you hire someone obnoxious and spastic to be Sam-I-Am. (I applied for the roles of the Grinch and the Cat In The Hat, but they said I wasn't spastic.) -- K. I tried to be spastic, but they could tell I was only acting. ----------------------------------------------------- From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: An answer to the question, "I am wear?" Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2003 01:25:42 -0500 You may recall lately I've been complaining about the Stop & Shop supermarket they opened around the corner from me. It's small (especially compared to the gigantic Prudential Shaw's), they price the White Castles as if they're made of solid saffron, they never empty the Coinstar machine (as if it matters, since I can always just shove coins into the automated checkout stations) and they put the wrong types of mystery meat into their pot pies. Well, lately I've been poking around that building trying to figure out a reasonably efficient route to go the two hundred feet or so from my apartment to the supermarket, because the market's plaza is so incredibly badly laid-out (and situated, essentially, on the side of a cliff) that I always wind up having to walk around about 3/4 of the building's circumference to get in. The market's entrance is on the south side. I live on the east side. So I should have to walk around one corner, right? Well, no. The parking lot on the south is bounded by rock walls because they blasted it out of the hill and it only has an opening on the _west_ side, because they put the loading-dock entrance on the _east_ side and wanted to make sure nobody but me would ever see it. I can't get in through the loading dock, so my only options are to walk east->north->west->south->in or else to go through the plaza's interior. The plaza is an ugly, irregular arch-shaped building. Apparently the architect who designed it though it would be really great if the whole building served as a sort of picture frame for the neoclassical hospital across the street. You can stand in the market's parking lot and say, "Wow! That building way down there looks really nice, especially in comparison to this ugly new arch-shaped thing between me and it!" To cut through the building to get to the market entrance and parking lot, there are doors on the north side, and steps leading up through the arch (the purpose of the arch is to keep the Stop & Shop and Walgreen's from touching so that you have to go outside and get wet if you want to shop at both stores, there are indoor steps only on the Stop & Shop's side.) So that shortens my walking route to east->north->south->in. But it introduces a new problem... ...the interior of this arch is even uglier than the outside. It consists mainly of a lobby and two long escalators. The lights are a cluster of floodlights hanging from the ceiling at random heights (like the constellation over Conan O'Brien's desk) except that they made the mistake of hanging some of them low enough that you can reach up and grab them while you're riding the escalator. The only reason Bad Teens haven't pulled all these down by swinging on them is that even they can't stand to go in this building. (Or they're afraid the arch will collapse if they pull on one of the spotlights.) By themselves, those lights aren't particularly awful, but they're just a small part of what's wrong with this building. The lights on the outside are floodlights pointed upwards against the exterior walls. They have glass across the tops of them to keep the rain on top of them. The glass is flat and rain pools up on them, causing pond ripples to be projected up onto the building so that in bad weather, the building looks like it's underwater. The lobby that leads to the two escalators is partly carpeted. And partly tiled. I don't think it's a mistake. Some insane architect clearly said, "This will be FUN for FEET because it's TWO DIFFERENT TEXTURES!" They din't want to just have a two-color floor, they wanted a floor with some gray carpet, some gray tiles, and some white tiles. The carpeted part is an irregular chunk of the floor leading from the doors to the escalators providing you're careful to step around the semicircular bite the tiles have taken out of the carpet. I have complained that the giant Prudential Shaw's is a strange shape, but at least it's a strange two-dimensional shape. This Stop & Shop is in a building that's practically a Berrocal sculpture, although Berrocal would have put something in the giant hole in the middle. Because they didn't blast away enough of the hill when they put it in, different parts of this building are at different elevations, which is why the building's interior consists mostly of escalators. It's a lumpen arch with stores growing out of different parts of it at different heights, and most of the store entrances are on the side of the arch that faces away from the street. Yesterday I was studying a blueprint of the building to see whether I could find an easier route into the market (perhaps through the loading dock, or up some hidden stairway or something) and although I have been so far unsuccessful in finding an efficient route, I did notice something... You see, when cheapos throw a building together, the building's blueprint is _also_ used as the firemen's map next to the fire alarm panel _and_ the "you are here" map, despite that it's inappropriate for those uses (once it's been shrunk down, it becomes this complicated little mess covered with symbols for toilets and electrical outlets and other stuff I can't make out because it's all so teeny.) To prepare this blueprint for its new life as a map for the public, they reduced it to about one- quarter size, and added one line of small print across the middle: "YOU ARE HEAR". I expect that that's not the stupidest detail I'll discover in that building, but it will take me another few years to find all the stupid parts, especially the well-hidden ones which protrude into the fourth dimension. -- K. Oh, and over at the Shaw's, the push-handles on the shopping carts have the secret third version of their wordmark where the "a" in "Shaw's" is a one-story version with two spurs, as opposed to the one-story "a" with one spur or the new two-story "a". Of course, if they'd put the Shaw's in the lumpy building, they would have had to draw a new three-and-five-sevenths-story "a" with a giant hole in it.