Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Get A Grip!  (Uh...)
From: dnicol@cstp.umkc.edu
Date: 18 Dec 92 17:34:26 -0600
Organization: UM - Kansas City, Computer Science
NNTP-Posting-Host: vax2.cstp.umkc.edu

Here it is, the sad and sorry exchange.  It's incredible to what lengths
an adult with too much time on his hands will go for no reason.


Subj:	RE: Gibsons "electronic book", 8th december = password?, URGENT
                                                                    
I have Gibson's _COMPLETE_ agrippa. Please let me know if you want a 
copy? Please do not let anyone else know, okay?
 
--Fred--
aka Gibson
            

_________________________________________________________________________
|+         +  .                   :    o  .    |                        |
|   o           *   .   O      . +          .  |ftwinkie@drive.BMWs.comp|
| +     O                   @        o   .     |Fredrik twinkie         |
|____________Abaracadbr_Software_______________|________________________|
                                                           
Dear Fred,
     How could I possibly refuse?
     Mum's the word.                                                



Hi.  The reader is expected to have acquired their own copy of Agrippa by now.
Otherwise I'd post Mr Twinkie's superior version....  but like I said, I'm
being a meany and keeping it.....  Is there one available via FTP yet?  Most 
likely.    Please post flames to Alt.insensitive.rude.rude.rude.......

Ok, ok, I'll send it along too.  Since Mr. Twinkie isn't Mr. Gibson with a
nom de (how do you say KEYBOARD in french, anyway), I guess I can share.


From:	VAX2::DNICOL       17-DEC-1992 10:58:32.99
To:	IN%"ftwinkie@drive.BMWs.comp"
CC:	DNICOL
Subj:	Thank you very much.... trust ... licensing?



Well this is certainly a nice piece of poetry.  Reading through the first
time I am struck by the apparent misuse of the preposition "of" -- a round
of rock ----- there are round rocks in streams, rounds of ammunition.  Aside
from that, I have to look up WRACK in Webster's when I get home after my
last exam, which is in a few hours.

I'd charge people half a grand each to tell them how I got my gun, too.


I'm glad that the erasing software seems not to have transferred through e-mail.

Keeping your address a secret is a new fun -- How dangerous is this poem?
Without the other fragile toys in the boxed set, is the care of this secret
you have entrusted to me--- is it up to me how secret to keep it?  Am I the
only one?

I'm glad you are diversifying your writings.  All the sex in __Difference Engine__ put me off finishing it.

Re: stamped tin...  oh, before that

Re:  the art boxes in N'Mancer -- I have a piece of true art history relating
to Calder bottles on display in the Philly MMA I think... previously part
of my grandfather's collection  (send money, drugs, whatever) :-)

Re: sex in Difference Engine ... maybe it was that my marriage was falling apartand I was put off by sex for that reason... it bounced around the living room
of the commune -- I think Sean took it with him when he and his fiancee, not
the mother of his child, moved to Colorado to work at a ski resort


Re: the Re three previous to this one

(oh... my friend, the big fan, who thinks you're Fredrikrik twinkie playing me
for a chump, says hi.) (she's a big fan of William Gibson.  She's not some
oscillating, rotating, air circulation device. ;-))
 
     My 1950's Smith-Corona CORONA typewriter, on whose stamped tin I rested
my forehead many many  many times, got stolen earlier this year, along
with a variety of other things, including my tape collection (irreplacable,
sentimental) and my copy of S. Rushdie's ___The Satanic Verses__, which oddly,
I had just finished reading that morning.  Leading me to conclude that either
a:  A conspiracy exists which was waiting for me to finish reading the book
b:  I needed a radical shift and deliberately left my door unlocked
c:  "when it rains it pours" isn't just what's written on cartons of Morton Salt.



Mr. Twinkie,  that's quite a poem you've written there, but I'm afraid you
misused a preposition.  Gibson, being a professional writer, would not have
done such a thing.  I am therefore purging my directories of all traces of 
your insolent attempt.

:-)

     word.

From:	IN%"ftwinkie@drive.BMWs.comp" 17-DEC-1992 21:37:07.87
To:	IN%"DNICOL@VAX2.CSTP.UMKC.EDU"
CC:	
Subj:	RE: Thank you very much.... trust ... licensing?

        What the hell are you talking about!? Okay, I was joking when I 
was pretending to be Gibson, but this is the REAL true Agrippa poem. I do 
not have a clue how the encryption was stripped off. But you ask me for 
the poem and then just send me a hate letter back saying what a chump I 
am. And you actually claimed I WROTE THE DAMN thing! Well I have news for 
you buddy. When you find out it "IS" the real version don't be coming 
back to me for the real thing again. I ain't doing no more favors for 
you!
            

_________________________________________________________________________
|+         +  .                   :    o  .    |                        |
|   o           *   .   O      . +          .  |ftwinkie@drive.BMWs.comp|
| +     O                   @        o   .     |Fredrik twinkie         |
|____________Abaracadbr_Software_______________|________________________|

      
From:	VAX2::DNICOL       18-DEC-1992 14:42:33.22
To:	IN%"ftwinkie@drive.BMWs.comp"
CC:	DNICOL
Subj:	RE: Thank you very much.... trust ... licensing?

Hello.
Hello hello hello.


     Sorry you took me at face value.  I wrote that letter to you under the
impression that you were what you said you were, Gibson operating under a
pseudonym, having decided to trust ME (based on a posting to net-news?  Surely
there must be more!) with , well, a valuable document.  Judging from the minutae
of the poem I got from you, and TWO OTHER SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT VERSIONS i got
from other places ---  I do believe that the version you sent me is authentic,
and I am keeping it a secret, like you asked me to do, in what I am keeping
as the contract under which you offered it to me and I accepted by reading it.
I don't know if that's what you intended,  I'm sorry I called you a chump,
don't shoot me, please, and when asked I'm giving away the less-authentic
seeming versions.

     About your claiming to be Gibson...  you certainly had me going there for
a while!  I got so excited I even kissed someone.



     BTW, I saw HOFFA, DeVito's production, last night at the Kansas City 
critic's premeire.  It's an excellent movie.  Thoughts this morning about
leaders and martyrs.  One of the courses I took last semester was Chinese 
Philosophy and Culture, we studied Confucius, and various dynasties.  I
realized this morning that in China, where they don't have a concept of
individual worth and achievement, but only continuation of the Tao,  martyrdom
would be a very tricky concept to explain...  all the wars between the various
warring states...  at one point the buried a hundred thousand Buddhists alive...
I'm not kidding.  But after thinking about how difficult it must havebeen to
try to explain Christianity to Chinese, and how the effort could only have
brought about more maturity in Christian thought, as inspired (my thoughts,
not Jesuit or any other kind of missionaries') by condsidering Jack Nicholson's
portrayal of James T. Hoffa, from a script written by the same genius who
wrote HOUSE OF GAMES, as a MARTYR (sorry, gave away the ending) ; After thinking
about these things, I no longer agree with Mark Twain that all those American
missionaries in China should have come home to southern Missouri to face down
lynch mobs.

     And that is a mjor shift in ideology for me.

     I'm sorry if you are taking my honestly sharing my deep thoughts as
anything other than a friendly gesture, perhaps I should leave this paragraph
out.

     Merry Christmas

     Merry Christmas


Got a lot of snow in Idlewilde?




---David                 

Assuming that NEWS takes this file, I'll follow it with the two files that
Fred Twinkie (not his real name) sent me.  Good night and god bless.