I wouldn't believe it in a million years!!!!! you seriously blinked...

You have shown weakness..

I'm glabberfasted......

I've studied you.... all of the others too.. but you remain a step above all others....

Regale me with your final thoughts on the illuminati one world government thing... Can I smite the virgins before they get to heaven?

Are all oleanders.....
destined to kill?

"Foget about itttttt!!!!! " fatso collins told everyone...

"He's gone!".. fatso looked around and laughed... "letsa eat!""

Little did fatso know that Tina durant, his ailing mother in law was onto h im....

She slowly reached down between her, enraged throbbing thighs, slipped her fingers into her panties and clicked off the safety on her 12" barrel 44 magnum .

Smiling and yet amazingly tittilated... she began her leap.............

Your FEN has a "Queen" being guarded in the jail.

And you said not to worry about thinking I was the Queen by saying it was a Hannibal Lector FEN!!!

If Hannibal is a Queen then <Anthony> is a cross dresser.

He gets very upset when takes him an hour to fashion a Windsor Knot.

this one will kick your .....

This is a better version..... you renember...... you renember......

Exhausted!! I'll never catch him.
he's onto me.
Exhausted. running. running.. stomp stomp stomp... 300 pounds of weight.. stomp stomp.....

taking time to look at me, I fired.
Another Hit!!! Damn... he wont fall?........

@#$%!! there they are again.. Lay low.. stay down... he keeps running. quickly ..

I laid down. exyausted.. body shaking.. sweating. mud on my lips..

furious exhiliration.. fear.

Up again...!!! the target dims..

Mad rush... ruck off... run.. sprint.. sprint.... furious kill...

tagsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss-
ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss-
ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss-
ss

He packed up his gear. There wasn't anything of value... never was..

"Where to now?..." he thought to himself. Locking all the windows and closing all the doors except the front... he made his rounds ensuring all was well and in order for the new tenants.

"200 dollars! @#$%. where's that going to get me." he thought...

Suddenly the most powerful light entered his room and he was bestowed with the greatest of gifts and treasures...... magically... he lived happily ever after.....

or.....

Little Jimmy And The Green Puppy

Jimmy Simms was a good little boy. His Mother and Father were always nice to him and he was always happy. Except when he didn’t get what he wanted.

Whenever Jimmy wanted something and his Mother and Father didn’t want him to have it. He would cry. He knew that if he cried real loud his parents would give him whatever he wanted so that he would not cry.

Jimmy knew that it was bad to cry so much but he wanted some things really bad sometimes. He promised himself that he would be a good boy from now on.

Then one day Jimmy was walking with his mother in the neighborhood mall and he saw the prettiest little green puppy in the whole world!!!

He could not stop looking at how pretty it’s green fur was. “Mommy?, why does the puppy have green hair?” Little Jimmy asked?

It’s because it’s a silly dog and has no reason to have green fur.” Jimmy’s Mother replied.

Little Jimmy could not understand what she meant. “Mommy, why is it a silly dog?” He asked.

“Never mind Jimmy let’s go”. That’s when the trouble started. Jimmy started to cry and the puppy started to bark and bark and Jimmy kept on crying. Everyone in the store was staring at Jimmy and his Mother. She was so embarrassed she said, “OK! OK! , I’ll get you the dog” she screeched. Jimmy was so a happy that he ran to hug the puppy, but ran into the glass instead. He rubbed his nose and smiled. The little green puppy smiled too.

Suddenly a large green dog appeared from behind the store Window. Jimmy pulled out his Oozie which he had at fully automatic. Peppering the entire store with bullets, “my little friends!” Jimmy liked to call them, as the mutilated corpse of the Large Green Dog slumped to the floor. As employee after employee and customer after customer fell, the green puppy realized that he was in love with his new owner.

It was a match made in heaven. Little Jimmy sh ot a short burst through the green little puppy’s window and grabbed the mutt by the throat. “From now on Little Green Puppy, I’m running this place!!” Little Jimmy exclaimed!! ..”And you are my new sidekick!” he yelled as he kicked his mother’s bleeding carcass across the pet store. She had never felt any pain.

Jimmy and the little green puppy took off as fast as they could into a barrage of volley fire from the local police department. Undaunted, they continued to roam the world clinging to each others hopes and dreams.

The End.

Ich kann nicht anders.

There's a slightly plausible theory that it *already has*. We're living in a simulation -- albeit a vastly older and more complex one than the simple machine conspiracy of the Matrix movies. Or some silly Baudrillardian metaphor based on half-digested pop science filtered through the pomo neo-catholic theology of Saint Andy (Warhol) and Saint Marshall (McLuhan).

Well, hell, if *I* was Pope I'd saintify 'em pronto. Just 'cause old Ratzinger has to make it official forgotten ... and if he wants miracles beyond the scope of science, there's Sarah Palin. A pity that Robert Altman died before seeing this real-life blend of *Secret Honor* (Nixon: "The Founding Fathers was a bunch of English pricks") and *McCain and Mrs Abel* ("I told you when I came I was a stranger").

A perfect simulation is indistinguishable from the original -- almost. There remains a tiny irreducible amount of fuzziness: in our world that fuzziness is found in quantum physics, but it could just as easily be some anomaly in shark behaviour.

There's a fictional version of this simulation story in the novel Brasyl by Ian McDonald. Which I recommend anyway -- three strands of interwoven stories set in Brazil at different times: 18th century, 2006, and 2032.

Like 'Indians', Brazil seems to have been given its name from an east/west mix-up by early European 'explorers'. They already knew of East Indian hardwoods (used for dyeing as well as luxury building) known as 'brasil': finding similar trees around the Amazon, they called the 'new' land *terre de brasil*. Ironically, and inexplicably, there's also an ancient Irish myth which situates a paradise island in the western ocean -- and names it as 'Hy-Brasil'.

John Wyndham, English sci-fi pioneer, wrote a book (The Outward Urge) with the slogan 'Space is a Province of Brazil'. The premise, from around 1960, was simple: all the northern hemisphere nations annihilate each other in a nuclear war, leaving the southern hemisphere to inherit what's left. Brazil gets space.

And now McDonald's book shows that cyberspace is also a province of Brazil. Although that link has existed for years in the form of connections between Haitian and Brazilian syncretic religions (candomble, voudoun, orishas, etc) and the work of such people as Maya Deren and William Gibson.

I wonder if 'orisha' is connected to 'orison', a Latin prayer ... "O Nymph at thy Orisons" ... ? The Virgin Birth Theorem in data-processing might have its own <Orison Effect> ...

If the universe has already collapsed, one might imagine that the gods would know about it. But apparently they're so busy with requests, prayers, and incense -- you can get an oil-burner incense habit if you inhale too much -- that they fail to notice what's going on.

Like humans, I guess. Which makes sense, given that each lot invented the other.

Any monotheists in the audience should perhaps avert their eye around now. Or, if they happen to have two, why not become a *bitheist*? There are some innaresting Gnostic and Manichaean ideas on this theme...

Not to mention Pynchon's Herero/Schwarzkommando mythology on the same trope: two Rockets, one evil, one good - a good Rocket to takes us to the stars, and a bad Rocket for the world's suicide.

"There was a young fellow named Crockett
Who had an affair with a rocket.
If you saw them out there
You'd be tempted to stare
But if you ain't tried it, don't knock it."

<Frogspawn QOTD>: If a *hapteron* is a "holdfast or attachment organ to a plant thallus" ... then what's a pants holdfast or attachment organ to a phallus called?"

Meta-oracular, that one. Hie thee all to thy informatic junk boats and oracle coracles, and look for answers where the hand of no man has ever set foot ...

QOTD will be a recurring feaute, *if* I remember to post one. If I don't, feel free.

In fact ... feel free anyhow, no matter what I do or don't.

Oh, right, yeah, almost forgot. My premium membership expires any minute now ... ("you have .. <0> ... days left ...) and I don't, um, seem to have a functioning credit card at the moment.

Maybe, despite my denial of same to <Seersucker888> and <MattMcMacMcO'Mk>, I *do* have problems after all. But there are always solutions and workarounds, as my Uncle Billy, formerly of Greyfriars School, used to say.

I'm lodging a cheque/check tomorrow, honest, and I'm expecting a Postal Order for five bob.

Yaroo, I say you fellows, yaroo. You can't treat a Bunter like this, I'm the emaciated ectomorphic Fat Owl of the Remove...

What was a <Remove> anyway? A special vocational class for public schoolboys who wanted to drive removal vans when they grew up? Or some kind of drug conspiracy?

Look, chaps, as soon as we've processed the raw opium that Hooray Henry Jam Singh smuggled back from Prepskulistan in his cricket bat, working in Dr Squelch's science lab after midnight -- we'll need to kidnap one of the swots from IV-A, blindfold him, and threaten him with a monkey on his back for the rest of his life ... look, fellows, this *will* work ... the junior forms are full of 14-year-old junkies and Bunter minor is already pressing me for the formulae to MDMA, crystal meth, and crack ... we're talking 8000% profits here, Harry, just borrow a chunk of the Windsor trust fund and Bob's yer uncle.

Yaroo! Yes, I know Bob Cherry isn't literally your uncle, but you aristos are so bleedin' incestuous I wouldn't be surprised. Second cousin once removed, Bob? I shan't forget that in a hurry ...

Yaroo! No, Hurree, that was *not* a racist remark, now where's the sodding opium? And if it smells of Indian jockstrap again, heads will bleedin' roll. I've squared the filth, I've squared the firm, I've made a nice contribution to the headmaster's pension fund - out of my own postal order, too ... so let's rock'n'roll, chaps.

[my Uncle Billy ended up a very rich man, although he had to hide out in a cave in Prepskulistan for 23 years, during which time his old school friend, the Rajah Hurree, converted to Wahhabi Islam and disembowelled an American every day (or, if he couldn't get one, three Europeans, or two Canadians, or 75 Russians).

Billy eventually cut a deal. He got ritually disembowelled by the best surgeon in town, had his intestines snipped, and walked away thinner, healthier, and alive. Leastaways, that's his story.

That's cool. Chess players, language teachers and crack hoes (two out of three ain't bad) are never sent into combat zones, as their brains are too valuable. Decoding stuff in the cases of the first two, and salivating in the cases of the 3rd -- all the work Pavlov's dogs used to do until those liberal dog-lovers shut him down -- but there's no Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Crack Hoes, so the bells ring merrily on.

Anyways, that's not *your* chapter of the story. You'd be whisked off to the Korean version of Bletchley Park, introduced to Korean versions of Alan Turing, Harry Golombek, C.H.O'D. Alexander, and Sir Stuart Milner Barry ... given a bicycle wheel, a portable typewriter, a machine for going click-clack, and a firm grounding in Remorse Code.

Then it's just you and Kim Jong-Il's private codebook:

- Hello Mabel, are you able?
- To come out to play, Dear Leader?
- No. Western dupe. Bring on Shazza.
- Greetings, Mountain of the East.
- It's 'Volcano of the Orient', pig. Next.
- You play capitalist & slave with me, mighty one?
- Ah, more like. You memorize position 65 in book? Screwing customer? - Of course, dear leader ...

[ ... ehhh, sorry, I seem to have wandered off ... anyhoo, you transcribe the codes, you make a dash for freedom, I'll meet you at the Transylvanian border, and you dictate your memoirs while I do the typing, and we have big best seller until Dear Leader calls his friend Rupert and has us blacklisted ... still, it'd be an adventure.]

"The name's Cyphertexte. Jessica Cyphertexte ... and this is my story."

Her name is barbara...

Here is the song which I hvae dedicated to her... I hope that you are all happy for me....

God's turban and tutu! I can just about understand calling a dance 'the hucklebuck' or 'the boogie woogie' ... but the *fox-trot*?

Zey are depraved persons, zese Eenglish aristos.
- Fox-trot, dahling? My brush bristles with anticipation ...?

*she slaps his face*

- How dare you, sir? We haven't been introduced!
- But, Brenda, m'dear, you spent the night in my cabin! We fornicated like a pair of Welsh rarebits!

- That is *quite* different. I'm afraid you'll still need an introduction if you wish to dance. There's rather a long waiting list ...

With the introduction of such devices as flashbacks and flash-forwards - strongly influenced by cinema - prolepsis became much more common in fiction. It is now such a standard device that it is often barely worth remarking on, though it can be used to create certain literary special effects.

Example: the 'visionary seer' in a historical novel.

Once the text has suspended our disbelief and persuaded us that it's 1845, then a character who says "Prince Albert will die young, but Victoria will reign for another 55 years ... the Americans will fight a terrible civil war, become the greatest power on Earth, and destroy two Japanese cities with atomic bombs ..." ... would be laughed outta town. But us readers might go "Hey, this guy can see the future!"

There's a slightly more subtle example in Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It's 1945, the end of WW2, and an old black marketeer is trying to do biz the way he always has. "So what'll it be?" he sez to the new mark in town, "Girls, dope, identity papers, guns ...?"

"Uh, information?" comes the reply. The black market guy is not happy.

"What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information the only real medium of exchange?"

OK - this seems a tad obvious now: but it was published in 1973, before PCs and the internet, before cyberspace or the information society. It actually did look prophetic: detecting a change that was still in process, but catching it on the cusp and back-projecting it a few years into the past.

William Gibson also does this very well, minus the back-projection. He's very good at picking up on new trends and extrapolating them into the near future.

A cheap proleptic effect is the cameo role by a celeb before they were famous. The ultimate example of this comes from a film (and sounds so ludicrous it's probably true): a young couple are strolling by the cliffs of south-east England in 1909. They hear a buzzing noise, look up, and see ... a flying machine.

Basically, yes. But you need to strike a balance between the two sides of Dr Lecter.

Cannibalism and incest are best avoided. Anything to do with census-takers, pigs, or the Fritzl household in Austria - the one with the private concentration camp in the basement - is to be *totally* avoided.

On the other hand, a certain sleek and sexy combination of good taste and etiquette goes down well. But the taste has to be *really* good -- better than Thomas Harris, who everdoes the Chateau d'Yquem and the petty snobberies.

The ideal, as one former lady friend of Lecter's says, is to "make a girl's fur crackle".

A ticket for an unusual but high-class social event - with no question of sexual reciprocity being part of the deal - is also a good idea.

In fact, a sexual version of the *Prince Hal Dodge* has much to commend it: pretend to be gay, and then tell her she's cured you.

Like the affable sheikh of Algiers, whose limerick I cannot repeat, as I got banned from CG last time and the forum was shut for obscenity.

Is that how the movie 'Hannibal' ends? I remember that Jodie Foster was unwilling to reprise the Starling role if it compromised the character's integrity from 'Silence of the Lambs' - as, she felt, any sort of consensual relationship with Dr Lecter would do.

But the book most definitely ends consensually. A new life in a city far away, where he no longer feels the need to indulge his former culinary 'hobbies'. Thanks to the love of a good woman.

This is basic Hollywood plot #1. The comedian Rich Hall has a brilliant routine about Tom Cruise. There are different versions in circulation, but the formula goes like this ...

<Top Gun>
Tom Cruise is a fighter pilot, a pretty good fighter pilot, but has some bad luck. He suffers a crisis of confidence but the love of a good woman helps him turn it around.

<Cocktail>
Tom Cruise is a cocktail waiter, a pretty good cocktail waiter, but has some bad luck. He suffers a crisis of confidence but the love of a good woman helps him turn it around.

<The Color of Money> Tom Cruise is a pool player, a pretty good pool player, but has some bad luck. He suffers a crisis of confidence but the love of a good woman helps him turn it around.

<Days of Thunder>
Tom Cruise is a racing driver, a pretty good racing driver, but has some bad luck. He suffers a crisis of confidence but the love of a good woman helps him turn it around.

<A Few Good Men>
Tom Cruise is a Navy lawyer, a pretty good Navy lawyer, but has some bad luck. He suffers a crisis of confidence but the love of a good woman helps him turn it around.

*Do we begin to see a pattern here?* This is hilarious in its own right -- especially when you've seen the movies and you know how true it is, and you've heard Rich Hall's version where he keeps talking faster and faster until the climax. The climax is interesting too. They often are.

In the version I originally heard, Hall didn't give the movie titles. He let us figure 'em out for ourselves. This is good, because they're either redundant (Cocktail) or forgettable (Days of Thunder - uh, that's the car racing one, yeah?).

And Hall originally finished with one going something like this:

Tom Cruise is the brother of a retard, a pretty good brother of a retard, but has some bad luck. He suffers a crisis of confidence but the love of a good woman helps him turn it around.

Heh.

Except the version I've seen doing the rounds on the net is different. It goes:

Rain Man
Tom Cruise is a car salesman, a pretty good car salesman, but has some bad luck. He suffers a crisis of confidence but the love of a good woman helps him turn it around.

Eh? What about Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut? Where does *that* fit?

"Tom Cruise is a doctor, stinking rich but maybe not a good doctor really. He has some bad luck, suffers a crisis of confidence, and the love of a good woman just makes everything worse. So he tries voyeurism, sex with masked people, and the love of a bad woman -- and know what? It helps. Maybe."

Only Stanley could pitch that.

*conclusion*

Somewhere along the way car salesmen became funnier than brothers of retards. Or it became politically inappropriate to use the R-word, perhaps.

Actually, Dustin Hoffman's character is more an *idiot savant* than a retard, but we'll let that pass.

No, hold on, we *can't* let it pass, 'cos it's a perfect example of *shot-by-both-sides syndrome*.

*Nobody* likes it when you say 'idiot savant'. The victim-lobbyists and PC types hear only the word 'idiot' and don't understand that savant is French for wise man or genius. So they're just as insulted as if you'd said 'idiot retard' or 'idiot idiot'.

Meanwhile, their mortal enemies, the freedom-of-speech gang, who think PC euphemisms fellate (as in "There's no gravity here: the Earth sucks") ... they're pissed off too. They think you've given in to the enemy by *not* saying 'retard', never mind that your euphemism of choice might be more accurate.

Where you get utopias you get dystopias. Where you get euphemisms, you get dysphemisms. We got Europe, across the Atlantic there's Dysrope ... more than enough to hang yourself with.

Here's an idea for a Borgesian fable. In the original Borges story, the Emperor commands his royal cartographers to create a map on a scale of 1:1 -- a map as large as the territory and *almost* indistinguishable from it, when fully stretched out and put in position.

In the Borges version, the Empire passes on, as empires do. Both map and territory decay and are forgotten -- until eventually just some remote patches of desert, with scraps of the enormous map still rotting on them, survive as relics of the whole mad experiment.

But, as I've said, I like to see hubris clobber nemesis. In *my* version, the Empire consists of two landmasses, roughly equal in size. Australia and an unfrozen Antarctica, maybe, or Oz and an India that never rammed Asia.

The Emperor's palace is on Midway Island, a small volcanic outcrop between the two landmasses. This island is actually mentioned in Dante's Inferno, as one of the entrances to Hell.

So *my* Emperor commissions *two* maps, one for each of his continents. And only when the Imperial Sappers start to install them ahead of an Imperial inspection on Tuesday, do the bureaucrats realize they've screwed up and sent the wrong maps to the wrong islands.

These 1:1 maps are bulky: the entire imperial navy took a year to tow each into position. No chance to switch back. What to do?

The Emperor is a map buff, pretty benign as emperors go, but he's still an Emperor. Standards must be upheld. Heads will roll. But the bureaucrat who cocked up is a modern bourgeois bureaucrat, with no interest in suicide, seppuku, or playing the Roman fool and falling on his sword.

Far easier to have a coup. So they whack the emperor, have a brief but bloody civil war between the two island continents (during which all bureaucrats are killed and the maps are damaged badly, but the sappers succeed in forcing the leftover bits into place).

Which is why, to this day, archaeologists digging in the Republic of South Island sometimes find traces of typical North Island culture, and vice versa. Although nobody on the outside knows much about NorthCon Island, which is a hereditary communist geronto-ochlocracy and has been off-limits to foreigners for 1200 years.

During the Dark Ages after the Civil War, fires and explosions, the world's magnetic poles toggled back and forth a few times. So the terms north and south are meaningless in historical contexts.

Midway Island, and its palaces, sank into the sea during the war. Nobody knows whether it was a volcanic eruption, a nuclear strike, a plate tectonic adjustment, or the action of a jealous god. Midway was never mapped.

THE END

Notes
(1) When the British Empire was at its height towards the end of Queen Victoria's reign, plans were drawn up for elaborate municipal buildings in Delhi and Dublin. They were sent to the wrong destinations, but built anyway: which is why Dublin has an Indian building and Delhi an Irish one.

After 1.e4, whose games was in its last throes, according to Breyer?

(a) White

(b) Black

(c) The Romanovs

(d) The Hapsburgs

what you ae doin is impossible. Pleae slow down. you will vector... and we all know that vectoring at the rate at which you are transcending.... could be calamatous.