Today's Topics:
A visit from the mothership.
The goals of the elders speak wisdom society
the sex life of the Brain Worm
Twinkies (2 msgs)
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Message-Id: <9110081726.AA03973@decuac.DEC.COM>
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 91 13:26:18 EDT
From: "Fun,fun,fun, till the Speaker takes my checkbook away 08-Oct-1991 1327" <berg@tle.enet.dec.com>
To: dobbs@tle.enet.dec.com
Subject: A visit from the mothership.
Last weekend I passed through the town of Stratham, NH. This was the site of
an unusual weather phenomenon the day before hurricane Bob hit the area.
What I saw were trees sheared off about 10 to 15 feet up in an area about
a mile across. The local picnic area was the focus of the event and
the normally wooded area was devastated. Army Engineers were clearing
the evidence out. I was told by my companions that the local papers reported
it as a sudden localized downward draft.
The phenomenon seems to be related to the the explanation for the formation
of the crop circles. The differences are that this area was wooded and
hilly. The focal point of the damage was on or near a hill, not on a plane.
The impact area was much larger. I have not heard any claims of hoaxers, yet.
Stratham is located 5 miles from Exiter, where Betty and Barney had a
date with the Xists.
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Message-Id: <9110081503.AA04281@enet-gw.pa.dec.com>
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 91 08:03:22 PDT
From: "Alan H. Martin 08-Oct-1991 1104" <amartin@tle.enet.dec.com>
To: subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Cc: amartin@tle.enet.dec.com
Subject: The goals of the elders speak wisdom society
>Video: ROur Elders SpeakS - Towards the World Wide Year Of The Elder
>
> This video project will document meetings and the consultations
>with Elders. The video will also be a companion piece to the book and
>will reflect on the ten year history of the Elders project with
>interviews from Elders both in the book and others. The video will
>show the needs for and the grassroots steps for organizing the _World
>Wide Year Of The Elder_.
"The video will include a moving scene featuring a lecture by an Elder from a
small fishing village above the Arctic Circle. The Elder transmits the wisdom
of how Elders in retirement condos in Orlando can get their VCRs to stop
blinking 12:00 by setting the clock".
/AHM
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Message-Id: <9110090116.AA23876@cambridge.apple.com>
Date: Tue, 08 Oct 91 21:20:30 EST
From: Steve Strassmann <straz@cambridge.apple.com>
To: subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: the sex life of the Brain Worm
Sure, you may think you know all about the sex life of the Martian Peen Worm,
but do you know about the brain worm? This is excerpted from Chet Raymo's quite
serious science column in the Boston Globe, Oct 7, p. 26.
Consider the life cycle of the brain worm, Dicrocoelium dendriticum.
Adult brain worms are skinny and flat like noodles. They live in the livers of
sheep. Oodles and oodles of their eggs travel down the sheep's intestines and
are excreted onto the grass. There they lie, quiescent, until a dung-eating
snail happens to pass. Gobbled, the eggs awaken, in the snail's gut, and turn
themselves into roundish things that drill their way through the gut to lodge
themselves in the snail's digestive gland. Thus ensconced, they change again,
into a stringy sort of thing called a mother sporocyte. The MS (as I'll call
her), clones herself into a zillion copies, or daughter sporocytes, filling the
snail's digestive gland to overcrowding. The jam-packed DS's (as I'll call 'em)
change again, into spermlike creatures, called cercaria, that migrate to the
snail's respiratory chamber. Snuffling and sniffling, the clogged-up snail coats
the cercaria with mucus and sneezes the slime ball onto the grass. The slime
keeps the cercaria moist and alive, but - wonder of wonders - the slime ball
looks exactly like a snail's egg. Along comes a wood ant with a taste for
snail's eggs that lugs the slime ball back to the nest for dinner. Devoured, the
cercaria change into metacercaria, most of which take up housekeeping in the
ant's abdomen. A few metacercaria travel to the ant's brain, where they twiddle
the controls and cause the ant to go a particular kind of crazy. The ant crawls
up to the top of a grass stem and sits there in a catatonic state until - yep,
you saw it coming - a sheep nibbles on the grass. The sheep's pancreatic juices
cause the metacercaria to hatch into young brain worms that make their way to
the sheep's liver and ...
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Date: Tue, 8 Oct 91 09:01:13 EDT
Message-Id: <9110081301.AA15768@aldebaran.think.com>
To: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
From: aldo@think.com
Subject: Twinkies
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 91 10:41:10 -0700
From: Rex Black <rex@devnet.la.locus.com>
Message-Id: <9110071741.AA414309@devnet.la.locus.com>
To: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Cc: quirin@infiniti.ece.cmu.edu
Subject:
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> I'm looking for two references, one is a reference to the trial where
> the defendant supposedly used an overdose of Twinkies (TM) snack
> cakes as a defense for murder.
Ah, yes, the Twinkie Defense. In the early 80s, Dan White shot George
Moscone, the Mayor of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk, a San Francisco
Supervisor who happened to be gay.
Almost right, but a few corrections:
Moscone was well known for his
tolerance of gays and his permissive policies, but this really was
beside the point. Milk just had the bad luck to be in Moscone's office
at the time.
No. White and Moscone were alone in Moscone's office when Moscone was
shot. After shooting Moscone, White (presumably figuring that he had
nothing to lose, and being a homophobe anyway) walked down the hall to
Milk's office, found him there, and shot him.
Dan White was an ex-cop and ex-city official of some sort
(I forget), and he was distraught because he had lost his job. He went
to see Moscone to force him to give it back,
White was a city supervisor, as was Milk. White resigned his position
in a fit of pique. A few days later he had second thoughts, and asked
Moscone to ignore his resignation letter and reinstate him. Moscone's
refusal to do so led to White's violent response.
[...]
When Dan got out of prison, he was moved anonymously to Orange County.
Some residents put out a reward to anyone who would find and identify
the ex-convict. Before he could be tracked down and presumably tarred and
feathered, Dan hung himself in the shower of his bathroom with a sheet.
Actually, he sat in his car in a closed garage, with a pipe from the
exhaust to the interior of the car. But, these are details...
At some point, a sculptor unveiled a tribute to George and Harvey that
featured Twinkies. It was reviled as being in bad taste.
Ain't life grand...
This whole story was horrible. I don't think that anybody who lived in
the Bay Area at the time can recall it without at least a twinge of
emotion. There was a candlelight vigil on the night of the
assassination that seemed to stretch from one end of the city to the
other.
Check out the documentary "The Life and Times of Harvey Milk" (has
appeared on PBS) for a good chronology, including interviews with
principals.
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From: Joseph Zachary Provo <crimson@wpi.wpi.edu>
Date: Tue, 8 Oct 91 12:47:50 EST
Message-Id: <9110081647.AA13541@rugsucker>
To: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: twinkies.
ok, so i fucked up.
smite me twice, light my pipe, pick a bale of 'frop.
Rev Dkr Nick LaRG0, ASC, who was not in San Francisco at the time.
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End of Subgenius Digest
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