From billa@sun5.cs.wisc.edu Thu Feb 29 20:18:54 1996 Received: from sun5.cs.wisc.edu by sea.cs.wisc.edu; Thu, 29 Feb 96 20:18:50 -0600; AA15788 Received: by sun5.cs.wisc.edu; Thu, 29 Feb 96 20:18:47 -0600 Date: Thu, 29 Feb 1996 20:18:46 -0600 (CST) From: William Alford To: findings@sun5.cs.wisc.edu Subject: Collage 225 (fwd) Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Good timing from the HumourNet list. An issue devoted to airline humor, when I'll be flying next week. I've chopped out the header. Bill Alford --- billa@cs.wisc.edu | University of Wisconsin - Madison | *your favorite quote here* Computer Sciences Department | 1210 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI 53706 | ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 29 Feb 1996 19:54:12 -0500 From: HumourNet To: HumourNet: , The Internet's Moderated Mailing List for Humor ; Subject: Collage 225 Collage 225 29 FEB 96 [chop] SUBJ: Weird AeroNews Among cities in which "mile high club" entrepreneurs were reported operating recently were Hayward, CA, Santa Monica, CA, Meriden, CT, and Cincinnati. For fees ranging from $199 to $279, a pilot will fly a couple around for an hour so that they can have sex while airborne. [San Francisco Chronicle, 2-13-95; Cincinnati Enquirer, 11-14-94; Chicago Tribune, 5-5-94] In September, after U.S. Air had suffered two fatal crashes in two months -- bringing to five the number of fatal crashes in five years for the airline -- Steven Fink, a Los Angeles public-relations specialist, told the Wall Street Journal: "To the casual observer, there seems to be a disturbing pattern." [Wall Street Journal, 9-21-94] ========================< H U M O U R N E T >======================= SUBJ: Airplanes and the Military "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." - Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre ========================< H U M O U R N E T >======================= SUBJ: Puddle Jumping Q: How can you tell if you're making love to a nurse, a schoolteacher, or an airline stewardess? A: A nurse says: "This won't hurt a bit." A schoolteacher says: "We're going to have to do this over and over again until we get it right." An airline stewardess says: "Just hold this over your mouth and nose, and breath normally." ========================< H U M O U R N E T >======================= SUBJ: Not All Wrights Are Natural Pilots "I used to be an airline pilot. I got fired because I kept locking the keys in the plane. They caught me on an 80-foot stepladder with a coat hanger." - Steven Wright ========================< H U M O U R N E T >======================= SUBJ: Seinfeld on Air Travel Are there keys to a plane? Maybe that's what those delays are sometimes, when you're just sitting there at the gate. Maybe the pilot sits up there in the cockpit going, "Oh, I don't believe this. Dammit, I did it again." They tell you it's something mechanical because they don't want to come on the P.A. system and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to be delayed here on the ground for a while. I uh ... Oh, God this is so embarrassing ... I, I left the keys to the plane in my apartment. They're in this big ashtray by the front door. I'm sorry, I'll run back and get them." ========================< H U M O U R N E T >======================= SUBJ: Murphy's Laws for Frequent Flyers 1. No flight ever leaves on time unless you are running late and need the delay to make the flight. 2. If you are running late for a flight, it will depart from the farthest gate within the terminal. 3. If you arrive very early for a flight, it inevitably will be delayed. 4. Flights never leave from Gate #1 at any terminal in the world. 5. If you must work on your flight, you will experience turbulence as soon as you touch pen to paper. 6. If you are assigned a middle seat, you can determine who has the seats on the aisle and the window while you are still in the boarding area. Just look for the two largest passengers. 7. Only passengers seated in window seats ever have to get up to go to the lavatory. 8. The crying baby on board your flight is always seated next to you. 9. The best-looking woman on your flight is never seated next to you. 10. The less carry-on luggage space available on an aircraft, the more carry-on luggage passengers will bring aboard. ========================< H U M O U R N E T >======================= SUBJ: Pilots' Hell The following joke appeared in Reader's Digest: Mac died at the controls of his plane and went to pilots' hell, where he found a hideous devil and three doors. The devil was busy escorting other pilots to various "hell rooms." "I'll be right back--don't go away," said the devil, and he vanished. Sneaking over to the first door, Mac peeked in and saw a cockpit where the pilot was condemned to forever run through preflight checks. He slammed that door and peeked into the second. There, alarms rang and red lights flashed while a pilot had to avoid one emergency after another. Unable to imagine a worse fate, Mac cautiously opened the third door. He was amazed to see many beautiful, scantily clad flight attendants answering to a captain's every whim. He quickly returned to his place seconds before the devil reappeared. "Okay, Mac," said the devil, "Which door will it be, number 1 or number 2?" "Um, I want door number 3," answered Mac. "Sorry," said the devil. "You can't have door number 3. That's flight attendants' hell." (Contributed to RD by Anna Florin) ========================< H U M O U R N E T >======================= SUBJ: Fly the Friendly Skies During the final days at Denver's old Stapleton airport, a crowded United flight was canceled. A single agent was rebooking a long line of inconvenienced travelers. Suddenly an angry passenger pushed his way to the desk. He slapped his ticket down on the counter and said, "I HAVE to be on this flight and it has to be FIRST CLASS." The agent replied, "I'm sorry sir. I'll be happy to try to help you, but I've got to help these folks first, and I'm sure we'll be able to work something out." The passenger was unimpressed. He asked loudly, so that the passengers behind him could hear, "Do you have any idea who I am?" Without hesitating, the gate agent smiled and grabbed her public address microphone. "May I have your attention please?" she began, her voice bellowing throughout the terminal. "We have a passenger here at the gate WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHO HE IS. If anyone can help him find his identity, please come to the gate." With the folks behind him in line laughing hysterically, the man glared at the United agent, gritted his teeth and said, "F**k you." Without flinching, she smiled and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but you'll have to stand in line for that, too." The man retreated as the people in the terminal applauded loudly. Although the flight was canceled and people were late, they were no longer angry at United. [The weird thing is that I'm using United -- BJA] ******************************************************************** ******************************************************************** To subscribe to the "HumourNet" mailing list, send the following command to listproc2@bgu.edu: subscribe HumorNet your_name, your_city, your_state or country Where "your_name" is your real name, and "HumorNet" is spelled the American way--with only one "u" (although the *official* name for the list remains "HumourNet"). Thus, my sub request would read: subscribe HumorNet Vince Sabio, Washington, D.C. To unsubscribe, send the command "unsubscribe HumorNet" (without quotes) to listproc2@bgu.edu. For info on retrieving back Collages, send the command "info HumorNet" (without quotes) to listproc2@bgu.edu. Send contributions for upcoming Collages to HumorNet@bgu.edu. This address can also be used if you need to reach me directly. >>> Note: Attributions in Collage openers are to the contributors, not necessarily the authors. Authors' credits are included in the text whenever possible. <<< Permission is granted to forward or post this Collage, provided that 1) the message is forwarded/posted in its ENTIRETY, from the line containing the Collage number and date to the end of this paragraph, and 2) no fee is charged. ******************************************************************** From billa@sun5.cs.wisc.edu Thu Feb 29 20:59:16 1996 Received: from sun5.cs.wisc.edu by sea.cs.wisc.edu; Thu, 29 Feb 96 20:59:13 -0600; AA16481 Received: by sun5.cs.wisc.edu; Thu, 29 Feb 96 20:59:11 -0600 Date: Thu, 29 Feb 1996 20:59:08 -0600 (CST) From: William Alford To: findings@sun5.cs.wisc.edu Subject: An interesting read Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII This is (in a round about way) from John Perry Barlow a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The opening part about the book is regarding the 24hours in Cyberspace book (or was it 48 hours :) Bill ---------- Forwarded message ---------- [headers chopped] I had also been asked to participate in the creation of this book by writing something appropriate to the moment. Given the atrocity that this legislation would seek to inflict on the Net, I decided it was as good a time as any to dump some tea in the virtual harbor. After all, the Telecom "Reform" Act, passed in the Senate with only 5 dissenting votes, makes it unlawful, and punishable by a $250,000 to say "shit" online. Or, for that matter, to say any of the other 7 dirty words prohibited in broadcast media. Or to discuss abortion openly. Or to talk about any bodily function in any but the most clinical terms. It attempts to place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria, where I have dined and heard colorful indecencies spoken by United States senators on every occasion I did. This bill was enacted upon us by people who haven't the slightest idea who we are or where our conversation is being conducted. It is, as my good friend and Wired Editor Louis Rossetto put it," AS THOUGH THE ILLETERATE COULD TELL YOU WHAT TO READ". Well, fuck them. Or, more to the point, let us now take our leave of them. They have declared war on Cyberspace. Let us show them how cunning, baffling, and powerful we can be in our own defense. I have written something (with characteristic grandiosity) that I hope will become one of many means to this end. If you find it useful, I hope you will pass it on as widely as possible. You can leave my name off it if you like, because I don't care about the credit. I really don't. But I do hope this cry will echo across Cyberspace, changing and growing and self-replicating, until it becomes a great shout equal to the idiocy they have just inflicted upon us. I give you... A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions. You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose. In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us. You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat. In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. Davos, Switzerland February 8, 1996 **************************************************************** John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow