All my life I have never quite understood
why money screeches to a halt when it sees
me on the horizon! But it will come within
grabbing distance one day.

..........£££.........

dammit, missed again!

The British Pound
Is now quite sound
But the Dollar
Is quite a holler
Below the Pound
Where it is found
Kissing the Bhat
And what's with that?

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

The inventor of the Pringles can died recently and per his request, was cremated and his remains were buried in ... wait for it... a Pringles can!
http://gizmodo.com/394445/pringles-c...itpringles-can

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

My Time with Billy

I spend my days
With Billy Mays
My clothes I preen
With Oxy-Clean
The veggies nice
I slice aand dice
My counters flow
With Orange Glo
The House I'll pawn
For Lint-be-Gone
Mama Mia!
Clean it via
Turbo Tiger
Vacuum Cliner
Dirt meets its doom
Hit with Kaboom!
Think I'm Nutty?
Mighty Putty!
One push it took
Hercules Hook
I have no fears
of extra tears
Bloomin' breaker
Onion Maker
So many more
In Billy's store
I buy all night
In sheer delight
But now it's dawn
and money's gone

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

BE ALERT!
The world needs more lerts.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Ode on a Grecian Urn

I read an ode on a Grecian urn;
Man, all I did was turn, turn, turn.
The ode was good, I'll grant you that,
But better read on something flat.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Disneyworld

I got to Disneyworld at six
The better all my rides to picks.
The lines there were already long;
To pass the time I sang a song.
A soft and dreamy little air
Of how to murder Tony Blair.
I sang of eating bugs and ants
And accidents inside my pants.
And though the ride looks safe, no doubt
How easy is it to fall out?
And if the cars should jump the tracks
Would we first die of heart attacks
Along that big fell swoop profound-
Or merely squish into the ground?
A little child in front of me
Said suddenly he had to pee.
His mother and his dad agreed
And moving quickly all three fleed.
In just ten minutes I felt fine,
The first and only man in line.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

I don't believe that we have ever properly addressed the tiltle of this thread.
Dear Mr. Thread Title
No, not like that, I mean discussed the issue that is mentioned in the thread title.
Oh
I am generally ok with allowing nervous people to play tennis, but it depends on how nervous. I mean some jitters or a little elevated blood pressure or sweating is no big deal. But if they are so nervous they can't hold the racket, or they throw up on the court (particularly clay - the court, not their stomach contents) that would be a problem. Actually, if they are throwing up clay, that would be bad too, but for them, not the game of tennis.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Are you sure the proper address to a thread title is 'Dear Mr'?

But I am glad that someone has finally shown the courage to attack this issue! I began a reply way back around # 77, but then I lost my nerve.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

In the electronic goodies shop I note a 7Mp
optical zoom camera in the glossy catalogue
for £50. Could I have one of these please.
She taps into the counter keyboard. Sorry! it
is end of range, only a display one at another
shop.

I want a place to scream a little.

Stop going so fast!

Philosophy

Forgive my little rant and rave.
I’m sitting chained inside this cave.
Outside it’s Summer, Spring or Fall;
In here just shadows on the wall.
Out there are colors rich and bright.
But all I see is black and white.

While Plato tells of Socrates
I scratch my beard and crack some fleas.
Zeno comes near with certain pride
But somehow never gets inside.
“Water’s it,” doth Thales speak
Then slips and falls into the creek.
Descartes thinks and he am, of course,
Which puts Descartes before de horse.
And for a moment I feel fine
Pretending there’s no Wittgenstein.

What is the meaning of it all?
I asked while dragging chain and ball
With many bumps across the floor
And pausing at the cavern’s door.
It was the light I strove to see
While working to set myself free.
What would I find outside the cave?
What wonders there my soul to save?

As I was working on my chain
In order to my freedom gain
A small ant walked inside and said:
When the log rolls over, we’ll be dead.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

THEY FINALLY LET THE NUTS OUT

Sitting in the airport lounge
A newspaper I found to scrounge
And having a few hours to kill
Began a column by George Will.
A fellow with a mild frown
Paused next to me and then sat down.
I said hello (I’m quite polite)
And he replied no, paint it white.
I paused, then asked what I should paint.
He said that he’s no bleepin’ saint.
I asked if he was always rude
And heard him say it’s your call, Dude.
By that time I had had enough.
I stood and gathered up my stuff,
Prepared to give one last reply
To such a strange and boorish guy.
He pulled a Borg-Thing from his ear
Glanced up at me and then leaned near.
He smiled and said you look quite beat;
Put down your stuff and have a seat.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

They never landed on the moon

Say what you like, resort to Jay for help if you wish, but you are not going to convince me...

Fact: No horse has EVER walked on the moon!!!!!

I know what you are thinking: "What about all that video footage that clearly shows them?"

Well let me explain. It's really very simple. It was FAKED!!!!!

Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin took a pantomime horse costume with them when they went. They donned* it before emerging from the LM. There was some argument over who would get to be the front part of the horse, and Armstrong won. He stepped out onto the lunar regolith and said, "That's one small step for mare**, one giant leap for a stallion."

The horse we saw dancing on the moon was clearly not a real horse because it wasn't wearing a spacesuit.

When Buzz*** Aldrin was challenged by Bart Sibrel to "swear on the bible that [he] took an actual horse up there and not just a pantomime horse costume" Buzz responded by hoofing Sibrel on the jaw.

*A word which here means "put it on".
**As in "female horse", not "sea of".
***Now his official first name.

What I can't understand is why everyone seems to "buy in" to this Internet thing.

A century ago we saw the Great Telephone Hoax, and now it's just repeating itself with apostrophe"s. Even at the time some clear-thinking people (called 'styptics', who attempted to stanch the bleeding) noted that it's impossible to yell into a piece of wire and expect a voice to come out the other end. (In a famous public demonstration in Oxford, well-known styptic Lord Randall Myson 'attempted' to talk through a strand of uncooked spaghetti, calling, "Chef Boiardi, comma here, Imma needa you!") to no effect.))


(),[],{}

Just testing.

{} < Is this a vase or two sharp-nosed people not talking?


Despite the patent (US# 3,546,837) absurdity of the telephone millions of people just HAD to get one. The craze was started in the US when President Taft became stuck in his bathtub [He was the only US President traded on the bulk commodities market] and had a telephone installed to conduct business from the bathroom for the next two and a half years. Taft would pick up the mouthpiece and blow in it and a staff member would ruffle his hair at the other end, making Taft laugh and ask for a cookie.

After many decades the public became turquoised (jaded in China) with the telephone, finally realizing the whole thing was a huge {and successful} experiment in Pavlovian conditioning (At present it is estimated that worldwide over 320,000 people die each year tripping over the dog/cat/vacuum cleaner* trying to pick up a ringing phone. Another 2,354,701 are estimated to die from heart attacks caused by the post-11PM Random Ring feature, also known as the Dead Aunt Dingle]. Marketers, invoking S'more's Law (i.e., People will eat ANYTHING if you put enough chocolate in it) suggested producing a television with many additional buttons to push so that people would sit for hours on end staring at a screen and plunking on a keyboard at the same time. Despite initial disbelief among rational people backing was obtained from the Government through DARPA (De Asinine Research Projects Asociation), with the first prototype named Asininet in its honor.

From those Humble** beginnings the internet has grown to a place where people from all over the world can argue for weeks about Moon Horses, Braille Bucks, Starship Bloopers, and similar stuff while the alien overlords sneak up behind each of us and plunge the microscopic Needle of Obedience into our respective medullas (medullae in Latin). As Benjamin Franklin wisely said, "If the ladies start charging, I'm outta here," advice well worth listening to today. Just not over the phone.


*Another triumph of the power by Marketing over common sense. Have you ever encountered a dirty vacuum?

**See Esso.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Well actually - yes. Back in my vacuum furnace days, we needed to get our vacuums down to the 10^-6 torr range. Sometimes we had problems doing this, and do you know why? Becuase there were too many of those dirty, horrible oxygen and nitrogen and water molecules in there, just ruining the fun. God, how I hate them.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Tell me about it. You build a mass spectrometer with turbomolecular pumps, backing pumps... and then leave a hole in the side so compounds can leak in. Insanity.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Mass spectroscopy would be so beautiful if those dang chemists would just stop squirting all that horrible organic glop into them. Dirty, stinky hobbits, I mean chemists.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

OK ITS SAFE TO COME OUT OF THE BOMB SHELTER NOW!
Mike and I will stop making chemistry jokes.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Stop insulting my dissertation!

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Sometimes reading specialised groups making
their "in jokes" can be interesting for the
outsiders. Perhaps a series of Stickies for
Mathematicians, Physicists, Programmers etc
might be an idea. Oh and Astronomers too...
..no wait...

And Paul, that Pantomime Horse. It was long
ago established that European viewers watching
the first Moonwalk at 3 am summer time after
some wine and trying to stay awake may have
put some hallucinations into the memory!