SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #181 New Moon of September 18, 2009 Contents copyright 2009 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. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* Another sign of the turning wheel of the year: A week or so ago I saw a family putting up fake tombstones and other such Halloween stuff in their yard. I thought September 12 was kind of early to be decorating for Halloween, but evidently they didn't. So far nobody else in the neighborhood seems to have followed their example, although some stores have had Halloween stuff on their shelves since August. The vacant lot on a busy street about a half mile away is in the process of being turned into a Pumpkin Patch, and a Halloween shop is setting up in an empty storefront a mile or so down the road. So I guess this means summer is over. The weather forecast for the Bay Area is for a heat wave, with highs near 100 F around the middle of the coming week, but that may not really count. For the sake of the economy we need to get people into a holiday-shopping mood ASAP, so summer had better be over. ********************* The tenant at the other end of this floor of the building has moved out. It's probably not coincidence that around that time I found some stuff in the dumpster that looked too good to throw away. I retrieved some of it and managed to find takers for it at a weekly social thing I go to. I felt kind of good about that. I suppose one could argue that it would have been better for the economy to let the stuff go to the dump and have people buy new stuff instead of salvaging the old, but one could also argue that it would have been worse for the planet. And I suspect that there's a connection: What's good for the planet may not necessarily be good for the economy. I'm reminded of a short science fiction story I read many years ago. Some kind of military robot went crazy and started rampaging through the town, blowing up houses and such. The economy was in a deep recession at the time, so when they noticed that people whose houses had been blown up were spending money to rebuild, they started deliberately destroying stuff belonging to random civilians. That brought the economy out of recession. ********************* Speaking of fall, I just looked up the schedule for the upcoming World Series. According to Wikipedia, it's set for late October and into November, with the third game to be played on October 31. Is that likely to affect anyone's Halloween plans? I can see some potential for conflict between family members who want to do their usual Halloween stuff while others want to watch the game. On the other hand, it could also inspire more baseball-related costumes. ********************* "It seemed like a good thing at the time, but it turned out to have problems. My friend had gotten involved with some kind of genie or something, and ended up with a never-ending flagon of ale. Well, actually it was more like a glass of beer, although I like the words "flagon of ale" better. But be that as it may, no matter how much you drank from it, it never stayed empty. You could empty it, but as soon as everybody's attention was somewhere else for a few moments it would refill itself. He kept it in his basement rec room. Every weekend his friends would get together and they would pass it around for a few hours of merriment. That went OK for several months, until his mother came to visit. She had a compulsion for neatness and a disdain for alcohol. Also, she didn't believe in magic and he hadn't told her about the magic glass. She probably wouldn't have believed him if he'd tried. So one morning after he had left for work she decided to clean up the basement rec room. When she saw what looked like an ordinary glass of beer, she just thought one of her son's friends had left it there. She brought the glass upstairs to wash it. The dishwasher was in the middle of a cycle, so she dumped the beer into the sink, and left the glass lying on its side on top of a stack of dirty dishes on the countertop. She was in a hurry to go out shopping, so once she set the glass down she hurried out of the kitchen, and didn't notice when the glass started trying to refill and beer started spilling out across the counter and onto the floor. That never-ending beer glass couldn't fill much faster than a typical draft beer tap at a bar, but that was enough to amount to several hundred gallons of spilled beer by the time she got back to the house. It had gone all over the kitchen floor and pretty much saturated the carpet in the dining room, and enough had spilled down the stairs to flood the basement to a depth of at least a couple of inches. She had no idea where it was coming from or how to stop it, so she just called her son to come home quick. He stopped the flow by setting the glass upright on the counter, but the damage had been done. She never really believed his explanation of what had happened. But after that she wasn't so quick to mess with other people's stuff without asking." ********************* Something got me to thinking about how to Tell zombies and sleepwalkers apart. Say you're in a cheesy semi-comedic horror movie, walking through some scary territory late at night. Suddenly you see a figure walking slowly toward you, arms sticking straight out in front. Is it a potentially deadly zombie, bent on tearing you apart with superhuman strength and eating your brains, or just a harmless sleepwalker? Here are some possible ways to tell the difference, at least in some universes. First, look at the position of the hands. A sleepwalker's hands will be more or less horizontal with the palms facing down and the fingers nearly straight. It's almost as if the hands were resting on an invisible tabletop at about shoulder height. Some sleepwalkers tend to be more limp-wristed, with the fingers hanging down, but either position is quite distinct from the way zombies position their hands. A zombie will have his or her hands more nearly vertical, with the palms facing each other and the thumbs uppermost. The fingers will be slightly curled, the better to grab your neck with. Their gait is also different. Zombies don't have much spare brainpower, and thus don't like to use their knee joints unless they have to. They tend to keep both legs stiff and straight, tilting their whole body from side to side and swinging their legs out to the side slightly with each step. Some sources say they inherited this from ancient Egyptian mummies, whose legs were often rather stiff from having been wrapped in bandages for thousands of years. Others dispute that theory. But no matter how it originated, it's quite distinctive. Sleepwalkers, on the other hand, walk more like normal people. Sleepwalkers and zombies also smell different, but if they're in a mixed group it can be difficult to tell who is which by smell alone. Most zombies aren't smart enough to tell the difference between a sleepwalker and another zombie. Thus a sleepwalker in a crowd of zombies is safe until he or she wakes up. You can sometimes use this to advantage. If, for example, you see one of your friends sleepwalking in a crowd of zombies, here's how you can rescue them. You adopt a zombie-like pose so the real zombies won't notice you, at least for a few minutes. Then walk slowly toward your sleepwalking friend, and gently guide them away from the zombies and back to bed. If, on the other hand, you find yourself surrounded by a mixed crowd of zombies and sleepwalkers and you don't care who (other than you) lives or dies, you may be able to escape by adopting the zombie-like pose long enough to approach and awaken one of the sleepwalkers. Once awakened the sleepwalker will most likely panic at the sight of all those zombies. This will cause the zombies to attack that person, and the resulting screaming and general commotion will wake up more of the sleepwalkers, who in turn will also be attacked, and so on. This will distract everybody long enough for you to escape. LEGAL DISCLAIMER: The author makes no warranty, express or implied, about the accuracy of this information or its applicability to your particular situation. Your fantasy universe may vary. If in doubt, get expert advice from a qualified professional. This is not an offer to sell, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security or financial instrument. Processed on equipment that may have been used to write about peanuts, tree nuts, dairy products, diary products, or shellfish. Void where zombies do not exist. ********************* I recently noticed a news headline that read "Minn. tackles stadium rowdies with breath tests". "Aha!", thought I, "more zombie-related news." After all, if someone isn't breathing but is otherwise walking around and acting like they're alive, they're likely to be a zombie. And zombies devouring people's brains in the stands during a ball game can be rather disruptive. Most sports fans would probably prefer a zombie-free experience, and breath tests would help give them that. That's assuming, of course, that you have to be breathing to pass the breath test. It also assumes that zombies don't breathe, at least not when they're not saying things like "BRAINNNZZZZ!" And if they are saying things like "BRAINNNZZZZ!" the stadium security people will probably notice them. But then I read the rest of the article. It was something dull and humdrum, about how people ejected from a game for being drunk will have to pass a sobriety test at the next game to be admitted. That may be all well and good, but not as interesting as it would have been had it been about zombies. ********************* As I mentioned earlier, they're predicting a heat wave. That reminded me of the Santa Ana winds in Southern California. Santa Ana Warm winds make the night itself seem restless. The trees toss and turn as they cannot get to sleep: They wish they had the freedom to go running through the night Like the leaves they often lose To a wanderlust That they Can only dream of. Warm winds make the night itself seem restless. A whispered invitation not to try to sleep: To let the wind caress me running naked through the night Like the gentle touch of lovers, Lovers past Or yet-to-be I often dream of. Thomas G. Digby written 0340 hr 5/29/78 typed 0505 hr 9/16/79 entered 1245 hr 4/09/92 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. 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