SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us http://www.well.com/user/bubbles/ Issue #50 New Moon of February 15, 1999 Contents copyright 1999 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. If you don't want to read about the mechanics of this, skip down to the row of asterisks (****). 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I do that one manually. ********************* The Presidential impeachment trial is now over, and I notice a number of newspaper letter-writers and other commentators grumping about how the outcome sends a message that it's OK for a President to lie and cheat. But I see a sort of opposite message in it. There is evidence that several prior Presidents had illicit sexual affairs while in office. It seems to be commonly accepted, for example, that JFK indulged and the media of the day just didn't consider it news fit to print. If that's the case then Presidents have long been getting away with sexual hanky-panky. Clinton is, in a sense, the first one who didn't totally get away with it. And it feels sort of right to let him off with only the ordeal of the trial as punishment because he was a victim of a change in the unwritten rules. Any future President who tries the same thing has no guarantee of getting off as lightly. ********************* This reminder from the Association of Dyslexic Sweet Streepers: "Please remember to clean up after your god." ********************* Now YOU can become a zillionaire in a couple of days by owning your own branch on our Porno Power Money Tree!! What's a hot commodity nowadays? Deregulated electric power. What's hot on the Internet? Sex. And what's the hot new Internet way to sell stuff? Multi-Level Marketing via email. Porno Power combines them all to REALLY rake in the dough. Porno Power will be selling deregulated electric power from our own generating plant staffed entirely by LIVE NUDE GIRLS. There'll be digital cameras all over the facility so that people why buy their electric power from Porno Power can surf into the Porno Power site on the Web and watch their electricity being generated. 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Then from the comfort of your home our easy-to-use software lets you effortlessly send out a million emails a day (two million if you're really ambitious). And for every person who responds to those emails and signs up as a seller you get MONEY. Since Porno Power is a start-up and this is being written in Silicon Valley, everybody who joins the Money Tree will get pre-IPO stock options, effective as soon as we find a country in which it is legal to set up that kind of deal. Legal Disclaimers: If you're under 18 (or higher legal age if applicable in your locality) you should not view sex sites such as ours and should not stick paper clips into electric outlets. Minors may invest, but will need their parents' consent and will not be able to view the Investors- Only sections of the Web site until they reach legal age. Void where prohibited. Past performance is not a guarantee of future earnings. Your mileage may vary. It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide. The Gostak distims the Doshes. It is not known whether or not Yngvi really is a louse. Glorb g'dorpt-borpt? Plergb. ********************* As I first-drafted this paragraph I thought I heard a cat sneeze, but there's no cat or anything else around I know about that's capable of sneezing except me, and I didn't do it. Maybe it was a mouse, or something else small I don't know about? Or maybe it was something falling, or a hand or something brushing against fabric, or some other unrelated noise that wasn't a sneeze at all? Or maybe it's a ghost that shows up someplace long enough to sneeze once, and then goes somewhere else, leaving people to Wonder. Did they really hear it? And what was it? It's gone now, so if you try to call in ghost-hunters it will be to no avail. It won't be back. Best to just dismiss it as imagination or misinterpretation of some other noise or something like that. Meanwhile the One-Sneeze Ghost is off somewhere else, not laughing at you because laughter is the job of some other ghost. But it would laugh if it was a laughing ghost, which it isn't. All this ghost does is sneeze once, somewhere just within earshot but out of sight, and then go away. Harmless, except perhaps to your imagination and peace of mind. ********************* There's someone at work who runs super-marathons, sometimes 50 or even 100 miles. I've joked with him about using him to advertise real estate in San Jose as "walking distance to San Francisco, walking distance to Santa Cruz". I suspect the Truth in Advertising people might have other ideas, but it's still fun to think about. ********************* I was just noticing that the spelling checker isn't especially happy with this issue, what with words like "Gostak" and "Doshes" and "Yngvi" and "Plergb". But Silicon Soapware isn't written to please spelling checkers, so there. ********************* Sort of free-associating: There's still time. If there were no time, nobody would ever be late for anything. But they wouldn't be on time either. Nor early. They would just be. Maybe. That kind of thing is hard to speculate on because there's no way to tell if you're on the right track or not, and even if you are on the right track, might there be a train coming at you? The only thing you'd know is that any train would not be on time because there'd be no such thing as time. And is this any way to run a railroad? With no time, passengers would already be everywhere they would ever be, so there would be no need for trains. Trains would all be rusting in the junkyard, except that they wouldn't have been built yet. Or maybe the train factory would just go ahead and make rusty trains and send them straight to the junkyard. Eliminate the middleman. Except that everything would be already there, so there would be no need for factories. No need for anything, because everything would already be and already have been over with. So that's why it may be good that there is such a thing as time. ********************* The fuss over the selection of Salt Lake City for the upcoming Winter Olympics reminds me to wonder if athletic competitions will eventually have separate "Drugs" and "No Drugs" categories, maybe eventually diverging to "Natural" and "Bionic"? It would parallel the distinction between auto races and horse races or foot races. ********************* Thing Inspired by a Remark about "Drugs" by an Entertainer at the A La Carte Cafe on the Evening of July 16, 1976 "There's a lot of drugs in Hollywood." - "You mean like when you're awakened in the night by a drug storm and you lie there listening to the thunder and wind and hail, And think about how in the morning you'll have to get up a half-hour early to shovel the Quaaludes and other assorted pills out of your driveway, And how the traffic will be terrible even if the drugplows do manage to clear the streets and freeways in time and worse if they don't, And that there'll be enough Amyl crushed by the tires of passing cars to give you a rush on the way to work whether you want it or not, And ..." - "There's not THAT much drugs in Hollywood!" - "Oh" Thomas G. Digby written 0215 hr 7/17/76 entered 1645 hr 4/11/92 -- END --