Errors-To: ecto-owner@ns1.rutgers.edu Reply-To: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu Sender: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu From: ecto@ns1.rutgers.edu To: ecto-request@ns1.rutgers.edu Bcc: ecto-digest-outbound@ns1.rutgers.edu Subject: ecto #897 ecto, Number 897 Wednesday, 8 December 1993 Today's Topics: *-----------------* Re: uh, idunno wedding etc. Re: wedding Re: Big Fires Suck Partrigde in a Pear Tree Re: Whatever it is, have a good one Chance and Cherry Hill Kate in NYC A smopping-up operation slight height, great weight, Festival of Lights Re: A smopping-up operation santa: the scientific evidence ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1993 17:03:06 -0500 (EST) From: HOLLY@umbc2.umbc.edu Subject: Re: uh, idunno > What surprises me is that a lot of woman are more critical about appearances > than men. I think it's because women in our culture are conditioned to compete against one another for the attention and admiration of men. Anyone who thinks overweightness is a Bad Thing has obviously never cuddled with someone who is large and soft and snuggly. Holly, who has a "soft and sensuous pillow-like belly" and if you don't like the "soft and sensuous pillow-like belly" then you won't ever have the pleasure of resting your head on it ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 08 Dec 93 16:12:20 CST From: Courtney Subject: wedding etc. Since alot of people are expressing interest in our wedding plans, I need to say that Kiri nd I are both in grad school in different states. We graduate around the same time, late summer, so will probably have our ceremony then. Ummm..dont know what form it will take..might even be an elopement. About Alan's questi? about our parents, well, they dont "officially" know, although i knowmy mom has more than an inkling. I formatted my announcement the way I did as my way of consolking myself to the fact that my parents might NOT be there, as I would want them to be. Anyway, there ceremony is still up in the air, and yes, we will BOTH be "brides" as is usual. As for the qwhite dress, well, anyone who knows me knows i have not worn color in 7 years...black is my theme. Soooooo...dont look for white from me! Ummm..we have already bought the rings and all.. anyone familiar with Evanston, Ill. might know of the former Calf and Dragon. That is where we designed the simple broad silver bands. Umm..to further answer Alan's question, more than likely WE will end up paying for it, as well as relying on donations/weding gifts from our friends to help us remain solvent. I expect the ceremony to be anywhere from Aug to Nov or so... Ummm..Erik? That was a really really touching thing you said to us, thank you, and NO *grin* you are NOT released from getting us a present!*wink* Just kidding, truly. As far as the legality question, well, who is going to arrest us for having a ceremony?? We can not apply for a liscense per say, but we sure as hell can write each other into our wills etc. As for the EctoHostel, as soon as we are established in whatever part of the country that Kiri's studies lead us, we will of course open our home to Ecto guests, as long as they can handle being around four cats! What would our home together be like without LOADS of cats? Anyway, I am doing all the responding to the posts because Kiri is currently REALLY wrapped up in research etc. We both thank you all!*hugs* Court and Kiri ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 8 Dec 93 18:33:51 EST From: WretchAwry Subject: Re: wedding Courtney meows some *very happy news*: > Mr. and Mrs. D.A. Dallas would like to announce the engagement of their > daughter.. > > Courtney M. Dallas > > to > > Kirstin A. Hargie > > daughter of.. > > Mr. and Mrs. J. Hargie YAY!!!! ****CONGRATULATIONS!!!**** ***HUG***HUG***HUG*** May your lives be happy and discrimination-free. You two are truly wonderful people that I'm proud to know and love. Blessings to you! Vickie ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1993 23:00:00 +0100 From: uli@zoodle.robin.de (Ulrich Grepel) Subject: Re: Big Fires Suck > On Friday a large blaze gutted a half dozen suites in my apartment > building and wrecked a good half of the building. Fortunately my > apartment, although one of the closest ones to the flames, was on the > good side of an intervening firewall, and it emerged unscathed. I > suffered no damage at all! Phew! :) *HUG* > Luckily, no people got hurt at all. Only two casualties - the building > manager's poor cat ( :( ) and someone else's caged bird. And nobody > without insurance got their places trashed, which is incredibly lucky. Poor cat, indeed! But at least the building manager didn't copy the actions of that film director in California. Bye, Uli -- There are many Gods, but there is only one Steven Jobs - Doug Waldron There are many Goddesses, but there is only one Kate Bush - ? - Bernd Driegert ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1993 22:20:00 +0100 From: uli@zoodle.robin.de (Ulrich Grepel) Subject: Partrigde in a Pear Tree I've got hold of a second program that produces the Partridge song's lyrics. But first a few comments on the old one: - I really really don't understand why any compiler on an ASCII based machine doesn't produce the Partridge lyrics. Gimme another text with similar structure and I can give you both: an ASCII and an EBCDIC version of it. - Yes, we've converted the program to an EBCDIC version. It does work. - I consider any compiler not able to produce a working program (after adaption to the charset) as BUGGY. - The program implements a Huffman-decoding algorithm. - Anyone needing the old program or more hints about it should ask me. Now the new one. I think on the first glance it's even more wierd, but the actual coding is much much simpler, even though the actual program flow is more complicated. Not analysed completely yet, but it might even work without any modifications on EBCDIC based machines. Bye, Uli /* LEAST LIKELY TO COMPILE SUCCESSFULLY: Ian Phillipps, Cambridge Consultants Ltd., Cambridge, England An appropriate program for December 25th, this consists primarily of calls to main() combined by a lot of the ternary conditional (?:) operators. Have you ever seen a more forceful return? The judges note that this program looked like what you would get by pounding on the keys of a type writer at random. Note -- I have made a minor correction (for spelling) to line 48, where I added a missing comma at column 59. I also added the #include */ #include main(t,_,a) char * a; { return! 0 I just remembered that in 3rd-grade German, we were taught that December 6 > is a significant benchmark in the holiday season in German-speaking countries. Yes, that is a special Holiday. As Ilka said: > Mitch correctly remembered that there was *something* special in Germany > on December 6th. Well, it's Nickolausi!!!! = ) Actually the proper name ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > is Nickolaus Tag. Nickolaus is somebody like Santa Claus, I guess, he ^^^^^^^^^^^ Not only like him, Nikolaus' complete name is "(heiliger) Sankt Nikolaus" which is nothing more than "(holy) Saint niCoLAUS". On Christmas we have the "Christkind" or "Christ Child", as well as the "Weihnachtsmann" or "Christmas Man". > comes around at night and leaves little presents (mainly chocolate). The ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ and nuts. > kids put their shoes outside so that Nickolaus can fill them. Of course > you only get something if you were a nice kid over the year!!! else you just get the cane! > I hope this sheds some light... = ) > > Ilka = ) > > P.S.: Yes, I must have been a good girl: I got a present, too!!! (just in > case you wondered...) = ) Yes, I must have been a good boy, I also found something... [munch!] Just to clarify the "Nikolausi" name of the day: each December 6th all German radio stations have a fight between their shows (usually settled by drawing matches or something like that) which show on any given station is 'allowed' to broadcast the 'Nickolausi' sketch, done by Gerhard Polt, where Polt tries to convince his 'son' that it is Easter and that he should be content with the choco bunnies etc, but the son always only says "NICKOLAUSI" in a kind of voice that could do both: soften rock-solid stone and drive you NUTS. Excellent! Bye, Uli P.S.: niKoLAUS -- There are many Gods, but there is only one Steven Jobs - Doug Waldron There are many Goddesses, but there is only one Kate Bush - ? - Bernd Driegert ======================================================================== Subject: Chance and Cherry Hill Date: Wed, 8 Dec 93 17:24:07 CST From: Joe Zitt imy@wcl-rs.bham.ac.uk (Ian Young) writes: > Ken Nardine A Cage Went in Search of a Bird > Earle Brown 3 Solos for Trumpet > Takehisha Kosugi 75 Leters for Improvisation > James Tenney[?] Ergodos for J. Cage > John Cale In Memoriam John Cage -- Call Waiting > John Cage Tribute (2 CD Set) Koch 3-72382 > [Appropriately, this selection was made at random by the CD player] This is a splendid album. The full title is "A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute". Highlights include Meredith Monk's performance of Cage's "Aria", a voice poetry piece by Jackson MacLow and Anne Tardos, and a long tape collage by Yoko Ono. Most pointless piece: Patrick Moraz sequenced one of Cage's prepared piano pieces using samples of a prepared piano. bgupta@hannibal.atl.ge.com (Bob R Gupta) writes: > Anyone in Zoo Jersey - I live in Cherry Hill which is just east of > Philadelphia - who can suggest an ecto-station to listen to? I think WDRE 103.9 > comes close. I'm from Cherry Hill -- lived on Darby Lane and at the Chapel Manor and Wallworth Park Apartments. I understand the mythical Susanne is also from Cherry Hill. ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1993 18:54:46 -0400 (EDT) From: Suspended In Duct Tape Subject: Kate in NYC Hi! In case there are some ectophiles around here who are planning to go to meet Kate tomorrow but haven't been wading through the morass that is .gaffa lately, I'll be there around noon. I'll be wearing a light blue denim jacket and red plaid sneakers. (I thought of wearing my Love-Hounds hat, but then figured it would be too weird to explain to Kate just what "Katemas" is... :}) See you tomorrow! Meredith meth@delphi.com ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 08 Dec 93 17:28:30 CST From: Happily married to my work since 19?? Subject: A smopping-up operation Having had to postpone my cleaning for the third time thanks to slow public transportation, then take yesterday off to go to a meeting, has left me with a backlog of email that I've had to dig out of, leaving me a bit on the punchy side. But seriously, folks: best wishes to Kiri and Court on the partnership arrangement. All this makes it especially timely that I'll soon be submitting my Ecto Product File to the archives, facilitiating your shopping for wedding gifts as well as last-minute stocking stuffers for the solstice season :-). (But whatever you do, take care of your HGP contribution before you start on any EctoGift buying sprees :-). ) Court writes: >*smile*. As for our "sisterly" affiliation, *grin*, well, arent all women >sisters? It may just be my accumulated mental fatigue talking, but for some reason it seems to me that by the law of averages, someone, somewhere may stand a chance of being amused by the following saga of my tendency to be skeptical of categ- orical statements. Nearly twenty years ago, I was TAing introductory sociology, and gave an ass- ignment to my students to consider the function of toys in socialization. One of them wrote that in her experience, nun dolls were a popular item, because, she went on to assert, every girl dreamed of becoming a nun (a/k/a sister, thereby establishing the rational nexus to the present situation). Thinking this too much of a generality, I wrote on her paper, "When I was a kid, Jewish girls wanted to marry doctors." :-) To take this on still another tangent: I have not seen Whoopi Goldberg in either _Sister Act_ I or II, but my intuitive sense is that in the long run, neither may be as well-remembered a piece of cinematic craft as Edward G. Robinson in _Brother Orchid_, in which he coincidentally hides out from The Outfit in a monastery. Court goes on to say: >Seriously though, we have been such best friends for such a long >time, that long before we decided to make things permanent, or even realized >our interest, we called ourselves sisters to explain why/how we were such >good friends!! [...] The explanation sure had me convinced/fooled, as the case may be. I was always a little uncertain how a Hargie and a Dallas, both single, could be sisters in the pure genealogical sense, but assumed they were stepsisters, half-sisters, or the heiresses to some other kind of blended-family arrangement. It is a testament either to their success at managing the flow of potentially sensitive information, or to my devotion to Freud's notion that sometimes a cigar really is a cigar :-). WRT the other major life event recently reported in these pages, it was good to learn that Neil was unhurt in the fire. In a strange way, it brought to mind the recent discussion of the _Equipoise_ cover art as an expression of counterbalancing phenomena. On the one hand, we have "Feed the Fire," but on the other hand we have "Beat It Out." :-) WRT our thread on somatypes: Perhaps Ian should collect data on the relative frequency of endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs on the list, and ultimately share the histogram with us :-). I also have begun to wonder what the radical radio right's favorite endomorph, Rush Limbaugh, would conclude about the rela- tive social significance of somatype for the two sexes. Were the cover photos on the new Heart album retouched? Neither of the Wilsons looks especially endomorphic to me in those pix. WRT something completely different (ah there, John Cleese :-) ), I don't imm- ediately grasp the comparison of _Man Facing Southeast_ to _The Man in the White Suit_. Is there an easy explanation, or even a hard one? I must get some sort of rest before my mental fatigue gets any worse :-). Mitch -------------------------- "How do I know/My youth is all spent/My get up and go/has got up and went/ But in spite of it all/I'm able to grin/And think of the places/My get up has been." --The Weavers ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 8 Dec 93 16:28:01 PST From: Neal Copperman Subject: slight height, great weight, mjm's people altering talk show sounds really interesting. Sadly, it kind of reminded me of the Saturday Night Live sketch where Eddie Murphy masceraded as a white guy. As soon as the last black person got off the bus, they had a big party and champagne and h'ors devours (?) were brought out. This pretty much happened everywhere he went. It would be very enlightening if we all had the opportunity to experience, even for a brief period of time, how life treats other people (maybe the incredibly rich and famous as well as physically, racially or whateverly different). I was getting mail from a real estate agent which showed him standing tall and proud next to a yardstick with the caption "Measure of Success". He was well over 6 feet tall, and that was his big selling point for being a hotshot real estate agent. I was really turned off, since I've had a few tall people lord it over those of us who are height impaired. In fact, for the longest time I was madly in love with a woman taller than I was, and she wouldn't even admit that SHE would only consider a taller man. She wouldn't go out with me because eventually I would become insecure because of her great height. A thought that had never crossed my mind before, but having it told to me often enough did have some impact. I came to resent her height prejudice, though not her height (and not tall people in general, so no need for tall ectofiles to worry). Neal ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1993 19:49:29 -0500 (EST) From: HOLLY@umbc2.umbc.edu Subject: Festival of Lights Chappy Chanukah! Love, Cholly ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 8 Dec 93 20:19:41 EST From: WretchAwry Subject: Re: A smopping-up operation Mitch mitches mitchfully: ... > WRT the other major life event recently reported in these pages, it was good > to learn that Neil was unhurt in the fire. Ditto for me, Neil! (More to come) > In a strange way, it brought to > mind the recent discussion of the _Equipoise_ cover art as an expression of > counterbalancing phenomena. On the one hand, we have "Feed the Fire," but > on the other hand we have "Beat It Out." :-) :-) Good one! I hadn't thought of that. I haven't said it lately, so I'll say it now: Mitch, I *LOVE* YOUR POSTS!! I really, really do. Thank you for being here, *HUG* Vickie ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 8 Dec 93 18:59:58 PST From: Neal Copperman Subject: santa: the scientific evidence Here is another humorous (though still a serious issue) tidbit that fell into my mailbox. Neal > > As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help > from that renowned scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990), I am > pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus. > > IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS? > ======================= > > 1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species > of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are > insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer > which only Santa has ever seen. > > 2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT > since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and > Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total -- 378 > million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) > rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One > presumes there's at least one good child in each. > > 3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different > time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to > west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. > This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, > Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down > the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under > the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, > get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that > each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth > (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our > calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per > household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do > what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and > etc. > > This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 > times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- > made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 > miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per > hour. > > 4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming > that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 > pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is > invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can > pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see > point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job > with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the > payload -- not even counting the weight of the sleigh -- to 353,430 tons. > Again for comparison, this is four times the weight of the Queen > Elizabeth. > > 5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air > resistance -- this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a > spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer > will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In > short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the > reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. > The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a > second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces > 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems > ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 > pounds of force. > > In conclusion: If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's > dead now. ----- End Included Message ----- ======================================================================== The ecto archives are on hardees.rutgers.edu in ~ftp/pub/hr. There is an INDEX file explaining what is where. Feel free to send me things you'd like to have added. -- jessica (jessica@ns1.rutgers.edu)