taken.

“You’ve got to have a room somewhere.” he pleaded. “Or just a bed–I don’t care where.”

“Well, I do have a double room with one occupant,” admitted the manager, “and he might be glad to split the cost. But to tell you the truth, he snores so loudly that people in adjoining rooms have complained in the past. I’m not sure it’d be worth it to you.”

“No problem,” the tired traveler assured him. “I’ll take it.”

The next morning John,came down to breakfast bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

“Never better.”

The manager was impressed. “No problem with the other guy snoring, then?”

“Nope. I shut him up in no time!”

“How’d you manage that?”

“He was already in bed, snoring away. when I came in the room,” John said. “I went over, gave him a kiss on the cheek, said, “Goodnight, beautiful, and he sat up all night watching me.”

A recent Toyota ad running on MSNBC’s website was a banner that ran across the bottom of the screen and read, “Feeling trapped inside your old car? Escape here Toyota.” Unfortunately, the ad was pulled when it was accidentally run under a news photo of the Mercedes-Benz in which Princess Diana was killed. The web site’s Debby Fry Wilson called the incident “an unfortunate coincidence.” (SF Chronicle)

I’m tired because I’m OVERWORKED. The population of this country is 3 million. 0.8 million are retired. That leaves 2.2 Million to do the work. There are 0.8 Million in school, which leaves 1.4 Million to do the work.

Of this total, there are another 0.8 Million employed by the government, that leaves 600,000 people to do the work. 350,000 people are serving the Singapore Armed Forces and that leaves 250,000 people to do the work.

100,000 musicians, performing artists and Howard Stern cronies, which leaves 150,000 to do the work. There are 120,000 people in hospitals and handicap, thus that leaves 30,000 to do the work. 20,000 people are self-employed, so that leaves 10,000 to do the work. Now, there are 9,998 people in the prisons. That leaves just two people to do the work. You and me.

And YOU’RE sitting there reading this. No wonder I’m tired! So stop reading this and help me do my WORK! Where are our competitors?

You know you’re addicted to the internet when…

Surfin’

• Your bookmark list takes 15 minutes to scroll top to bottom.


• Your eyeglasses have a web site burned in on them.


• You find yourself brainstorming for new subjects to search.


• When looking at a pageful of someone else’s links, you notice all of them are already highlighted in purple.


• Your dog has its own home page.


• You’ve already visited all the links at Yahoo and you’re halfway through Lycos.


• You leave the modem speaker on after connecting because you think it sounds like the ocean wind…the perfect soundtrack for “surfing the net”.


• You are so familiar with the WWW that you find the search engines useless.

Staying Connected!

• You refuse to go to a vacation spot with no electricity or phone lines.


• You finally do take that vacation, but only after buying a cellular modem and a laptop.


• All your daydreaming is preoccupied with getting a faster connection to the net: 28.8…ISDN…cable modem…T1…T3.


• When you turn off your modem, you get this awful empty feeling, like you just pulled the plug on a loved one.


• You can’t call your mother… she doesn’t have a modem.


• You have commandeered your teenager’s phone line for the net and even his friends know not to call on his line anymore.


• You laugh at people with 2400 baud modems.


• Actually, you secretly distain them.


• Even though you died last week, you’ve managed to retain OPS on your favourite IRC channel.


• You begin to wonder how on earth your service provider is allowed to call 200 hours per month “unlimited.”


• You never have to deal with busy signals when calling your ISP… because you never log off.


• Your friends no longer send you e-mail; they just log on to your IRC channel.


• Your modem isn’t working, and after a few minutes you begin to sweat, your hands start to tremble…


• You pick up the phone and hum modem signals to communicate with your ISP


• You succeed.

Walk the Walk

• You find yourself typing “com” after every period when using a word processor.com


• Even your night dreams are in HTML.


• Your heart races faster and beats irregularly each time you see a new WWW site address in print or on TV, even though you’ve never had heart problems before.


• You turn on your intercom when leaving the room so you can hear if new e-mail arrives.


• You check your mail. It says “no new messages.” So you check it again. There were 84 new ones …last hour.


• Your phone bill comes to your doorstep in a box.


• You code your homework in HTML and give your instructor the URL.


• You name your children Eudora, Mozilla and Dotcom.


• As your car crashes through the guardrail on a mountain road, your 1st instinct is: search for the “back” button.


• You wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom–and check your e-mail on the way back to bed.


• You tell people you live at http://123.elm.street/bluetrim.html


• You actually tried that 123.elm.street address.


• You get a tattoo that says “This body best viewed with Netscape 1.1 or higher.”


• You buy a Captain Kirk chair with built-in keyboard & mouse.


• When channel surfing the informercials, you grab a remote control and double-click.

…and Talk the Talk

• You refer to going to the bathroom as “downloading.”


• You start introducing yourself as “Jim at I-I-Net dot net dot au.”


• You refer to your age as 3.x.


• You start tilting your head sideways to smile.

Serious Warning Signs!

• You kiss your girlfriend’s home page.


• You spend half of a plane trip with your laptop on your lap and your child in the overhead compartment.


• You step out of your room and realise that your parents have moved and you don’t have a clue when it happened.


• You realise there is not a sound in the house and you have no idea where your children are.


• Your wife drapes a blond wig over your monitor to remind you of what she looks like.


• Your son tells you he’s had the beard for 2 months.


• You miss more than five meals a week downloading the latest games from Apogee.


• Your wife or husband says communication is important in a marriage… so you buy another computer and install a second phone line so the two of you can chat.


• You forget what year it is.


• You ask your doctor to implant a gig in your brain.


• You move into a new house & decide to Netscape before you landscape.


• You tell the kids they can’t use the computer because “You’ve got work to do” and you don’t even have a job.


• You ask a plumber how much it would cost to replace the chair in front of your computer with a toilet.


• Your spouse’s new rule: “The computer cannot come to bed.”


• You don’t know what gender over three of your closest friends are because they have neutral nicknames.


• You email this message to your friends on the net. You think about printing it out to show it to your others and… what others?!?

– Compiled from various sources by Bert Pasquale

A polar bear is a rectangular bear after a coordinate transform.

When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail. — Abraham Maslow

He who dies with the most toys, is, nonetheless, still dead.

The cost of living hasn’t affected its popularity.

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.– English Professor, Ohio University

When you’re swimmin’ in the creek and an eel bites your cheek, that’s a moray! – Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light-bulb?

A: Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly coloured machine tools.

Q: How many minimalists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: One

Character density: The number of very weird people in the office.

Save the whales. Collect the whole set.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. — Dorothy Parker

To err is human, to moo bovine.

The meek shall inherit the earth—they are too weak to refuse.

Grabel’s Law: 2 is not equal to 3—not even for very large values of 2.

Diplomacy is the art of saying “nice doggy” until you can find a rock.

There are two major products to come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.

By James Lileks

I had a favorite cereal; ate it every morning. One morn I took a look at the nutritional information and discovered that it was, in essence, oat-flecked divots of lard. I spent a monkish year choking down Grape Nuts, which resemble a bowl of rugged BBs, but with less taste. Now I just eat what’s cheap. This week it’s Frosted Cheerios.

The word “Frosted” on the box guarantees that the sugar is clearly visible, not hidden, just as the word “Fruit” assures you that several pieces of fruit-hued putty with Real Fruit Flavor will tumble from the box, and the word “Fiber” means that the package will have the digestive effect of consuming a Chore Boy scouring pad.

Of course, I could scorn high cereal prices and buy the store brands with the cheap graphics. The boxes say things like “if you like Fruit ‘n’ Fiber, you’ll love Pits ‘n’ Chaff!” “If you like Lucky Charms, you’ll love Frosted Pixie Gizzards!” If you like “Alpha Bits, you’ll be temporarily confused by Toasty Random Shapes!”

The cartoon characters on these boxes look like losers who couldn’t get work with a real cereal. I’m sure the cereals taste fine. But I cannot bring myself to start the day with Oaty Clown Balls, not when the mascot leers like John Wayne Gacy on the last few hours of an amphetamine jag.

Actually, I don’t have to commit to a cereal for an entire week just because I have a coupon. There are single-serve containers: The Kel-Bowl-Pac. In the 60s, this was a brilliant advance in cereal technology – a small single-serving box that doubles as a bowl. It was like something “Q” division would whip up for James Bond. They came in groups of four – Frosted Flakes, Rice Krispees, Sugar Pops, and Special K, a cereal that has had the flavor scientifically extracted. The weakest child got the Special K; it was nature’s way.

It takes skill to use a Kel-Bowl-Pac, particularly if you are camping. You take a knife and cut along the dotted line, puncturing the inner membrane and plunging the knife into your leg. You now have a small box of cereal stuck to your thigh. Next step: scream uncontrollably, causing an adult to quiet your misery by giving you someone else’s Frosted Flakes. Thus does the weakest child develop a sense of guile. It is nature’s way.

The different between Frosted Flakes and Frosted Cheerios? The Flakes have a mascot: Tony the Tiger, Mr. Swank, the relaxed old pro, the Arnold Palmer of the mascot circuit. Sugar Puffs had Sugar Bear – that Rat-Pack refugee with the sleepy eyes and the Dean Martin manner, the spokescreature most likely to be brought up on a morals charge. (His co-defendant would no doubt be Toucan Sam, the Peter Lawford of cereal spokesmen.) I always got the feeling that Tony the Tiger would beat Sugar

Bear to a moaning pulp if he got the chance; guys like Sugar Bear must have bugged Tony. Sugar Bear would have protested the Vietnam War; Tony would have supported it.

Where Frosted Cheerios stands on the matter of post-colonial Communist insurrections, I don’t know. I just eat it because it’s cheap. Next week it goes off sale, though, and I’ll have to find something else. Lucky Charms, perhaps. Nice and apolitical.

Please don’t tell me the leprechaun was caught running guns to the IRA.

At a medical convention, a male doctor and a female doctor start eyeing each other. The male doctor asks her to dinner and she accepts. As they sit down at the restaurant, she excuses herself to go and wash her hands.

After dinner, one thing leads to another and they end up in her hotel bedroom. Just as things get hot, the female doctor interrupts and says she has to go and wash her hands. Once she comes back they go for it.

After the sex session, she gets up and says she is going to wash her hands.

As she comes back the male doctor says, “I bet you are a surgeon”. She confirms and asks how he knew. “Easy, you’re always washing your hands.”

She then says, “I bet you’re an anesthesiologist.”

“Wow, how did you guess?” asks the male doctor.

“I didn’t feel a thing.”