Newsgroups: bit.listserv.fnord-l
Date:         Thu, 27 Aug 1992 23:38:10 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      Would you buy a used car from my sister

In the Old Way of Thinking it quite self-evidently takes just as much time to
not-be-in-Little-Rock as to be in Little Rock. During such time as one is not-
in-Little-Rock moreover it may transpire by the Old Way of Thinking common to
us all that *by sheer coincidence* someone who has *never* hacked into this
account, there are many possible motives for *never* having hacked into this
account, and of those who have hacked into this account some have left muddier
footprints than others, some have left notes explicitly stating that they have
refrained from reading my old e-mail files (but then failed to log off), some
may have not, decided to invite some perfectly innocent third party to
Budapest. Neither of them knowing of a recent letter from one totally
extraneous third party of utterly exiguous relevance to the Current Situation,
nobodyinparticular.heh.heh@A1.QUAKER.UPENN.EDU, who has never in her life seen
mbm@PASCL.UARC.UPENN.EDU but *did* mention a year-and-a-half-ago impulsive
trip to Budapest for a romanitc date at the Opera with T., still there and
probably quite willing to deny the whole thing should M and H actually go.

   Those who have fnorded long enough to deserve the accolade "veteran"
instantly recognize the above as equivalent to, "jxjohnson@ualr.edu, seven
pounds is a good start, darling, but hardly represents even a down payment
in the Grand Scheme of things; but since worrying yerself sick over
Persecution by yr new Dept where you aint hardly did nothing yet got you to
lose seven precious pounds, here's incentive to worrying yerself sick over
what I'm up to behind your vast back unless you hurry up, now, I am NOT
saying I am not coming till you-all is anorexic but,...

   And another thing, Janie. You are supposed to be the Little Rock Research
Bureau for Paranoid Central. That is what you are paid for. Do you think you
are making $3400 per semester as adjunct faculty *on your own merits*? Hell,
no, they are taking bribes from *us* to give you Cover, understand, elsewise
the History Department, now the Psychology Department, would fire you for
Insanity as you yourself report that
>and that I "scare people--from secretaries all the way UP" and that

   But what are you *doing* along the lines of Paranoid Research? You say
you have to LICK YOUR WEIGHT IN WILDCATS to keep your weight down, you say.
That's too many wildcats, Janie. Especially after, somewhere in the pile of
vanquished wildcats, you find one or more wildcats severely or critically
wounded hence as you would not harm any living creature you must nurse the
poor thing back to health.

   While your JOB, meanwhile, was to find out

>who owns the infiniti dealership in little rock and where is it i
>mean street address

   And *what* was the very limit of your Paranoid imagination in our hour
of need when the chance to jump the smoking gun was in our lap?

>don't find an 'infiniti' dealership in LR, at least not under
>'infiniti' in the yellow pages which lists by car dealership and by

   As luck would have it, by sheer coincidence. Of course. Not a fat chance,
buster. It was two days ago. Paranoid ideation crackled around the neural
network:

>>>Yet-unsubstantiated rumour to effect that Henry Miller is in Little Rock AR
>>>to plug his new book, Lexus.

>>Henry Miller is *dead*, schmuck.

>We'll let that "schmuck" pass, this thing has many layers of meaning. What's
>the competition of the Lexus? You see, idiot, plane as the beam in your
>nostril. There is an Inifiniti dealership in Little Rock, Arkansas, and my
>slut sister is selling cars. Opened in the last three weeks. Betchabazoo
>she's even named it LIPMAN MOTORS, which is why that computer account,
>mxlipman@gamma.ualr.edu, is off the air. Any other State Capital, Albany,
>Harrisburg, Carson City, you'd expect to see Assemblymen, State Senators,
>Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners, driving around new Infinitis while,
>following a night with Miriam, exhibiting the aftereffects of being turned
>into cabbages and cauliflowers. BUT THIS IS ARKANSAS, WHO COULD TELL THE
>DIFFERENCE, you imbecile, of course!
>
>   Work to do!

   Only the nature of the work, saving your adored Governor's political or
even life in every sense, finally roused you, Janie Johnson, to your patriotic
Paranoid sense of duty.

>we want you to take that [deleted] wildcat and throw the [deleted] thing with
>a hard copy of the following tied to its dead stinking tail, and pronto, you
>understand, through the window of clinton headquarters before...it's too late
>do you undertand by the following we mean message to follow momentarily stay
>tuned

>we have reason to believe that my sister is in little rock to sell
>the governor an infiniti, "it's not a car, it's an aphrodisiac," and that this
>is funded by a joint conspiracy involving the japanese ministry of
>international trade and industry and the republican national committee via a
>slush fund controlled by the ministry of the imperial court with the personal
>knowledge if not enthusiastic participation of the emperor of japan, akihito.

>motive is the two hundred billion dollars clinton wants to spend on a cheap
>us imitation of the japanese ministry of international trade and industry.
>
>what the inifiniti is an aphrodisiac for well we remind you that miriam kills
>by setting the male sexual orgasm to kill rather than stun and after all would
>were merely turned into a vegetable.
>
>and sorry about this the money was laundered by your good buddy stephens as
>first national bankshares subsidiary of bank of commerce and credit
>international that stephens in the cayman islands

   Well, if "The New Covenant says: You do your part," we did OUR part, Billy
Boy. Frankly, stopping assassinations before they happen, as opposed to
obsessing after, aint our bag, you know. And you did yours, we are grateful,
you are not going to persecute us till after the election, just inundate us
with computergenerated junkmail CLINTON-GORE ON NATIONAL SECURITY (500 records)
etc, with the COMMANDs for getting the software to generate more character
string permutations of the same cliches....

   *************

   SUCH females and males, software and hardware, of FNORD-L subscribership,
was the apparent future of FNORDing in post-Paranoid postMiddenist post
poasties HAD IT BEEN LEFT ALONE. But it was not. We have burrowed in the
stacks. We have burrowed in the queues and doubly linked lists. We have
asked the LARGER question, "How would we recognize a New Way of Thinking if
we saw one" - as it happened we thought we did - "or even for that matter if
one came right out and hit us on the nose."

   In effect, is there, can there be, a Turing test for a New Way of Thinking?
We, who all think the Old way, make no mistake of that, would be in Duck Soup
without something deep, logical, and mathematical like that. And we have never
discovered our Leftern Hemispheres. So we asked women, we asked software, we
asked hardware all sorts of screwball things, we looked high and low and in
places not even we thought existed for the key to the, ah, gee, Igotnoidee.

Daniel A. Foss
Who thinks this time he's succeeded in making Janie Johnson a star of
daytime television, like the legendary H on the other channel
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