Silicon Soapware #237

[bubbleblower]

Silicon Soapware #237 is out. Look in

http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0237.txt

or check out my main page at

http://www.well.com/~bubbles/
.

                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                                Issue #237
                        New Moon of March 30, 2014


Contents copyright 2014 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative 
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.  See the Creative 
Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details.

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.


                          *********************

April come she will, with or without showers or cruelty or fools.  Poets 
looking at April have seen all of these, or one or another of them, or 
sometimes none.  Perhaps April's secret real name is Rorschach.


                          *********************

April first has long been a day for pranks and hoaxes, with the 
mainstream media sometimes participating.

For example, back on April 1, 1957, the BBC showed a supposed documentary 
on how spaghetti grows on trees.  Since pasta was not as well known in 
Britain then as it is now, a fair number of people fell for it.  Another 
hoax, this one in the Seventies and early Eighties, consisted of 
scientists claiming that an upcoming line-up of planets would reduce the 
apparent gravity felt by people on Earth.  Supposedly if you jumped up in 
the air at the right moment you would be able to feel yourself floating.  
Some actually claimed to be able to feel the difference, even though 
calculations by reputable scientists showed the effect to be far too 
small to detect except perhaps by extremely sensitive instruments.

This brings up a question: When real news happens on April 1, how do you 
report it without being disbelieved?  For a recent example, there was a 
large earthquake under the ocean off Chile on the evening of April 1 
(local time).

The Wikipedia article on "April 1" shows many more events happening on 
that date over the years.  Some of these were triumphs, some were 
tragedies, and still others were sort of both or in between.  And, 
perhaps depending on your views, some were more plausible than others.  
So when something is reported on the first day of April, how do you know 
whether or not to believe it?


                          *********************

The list of fiftieth anniversary dates (early April 1964) shows more 
items, but few really seem to stand out in retrospect.  One such is the 
Rolling Stones releasing their debut album in the middle of the month.  
And of course the Beatles continue their conquest of the pop music scene.


                          *********************

"That psychic you hired for our carnival isn't doing too well."

"Really?"

"Her recent predictions have almost all been wrong.  And for some reason 
they all seem to involve blizzards and other winter weather, even for 
things that are supposed to happen in the summertime."

"I think I know what the problem is."

"What is it?"

"Her crystal ball broke a couple of months ago.  So while she's looking 
for a new one she's been using a snow globe as a temporary replacement."

"That sounds like it could be it.  Could you speak to her about it?"


                          *********************

Someone in another forum said something about a movie preview in which 
some actor looked especially bad.  That led me to thoughts of wanting to 
make a movie seem bad so as to discourage people from going to see it.

Suppose some movie theater needs to do some remodeling or some such, but 
the society it's in has a taboo against closing for, or even mentioning, 
such things.  So even if all of the seats have been ripped out along with 
the projectors and screen, they have to have a token showing of 
something, even if it's on a temporary setup that's little more than a 
curtained-off corner of the lobby with a TV fed from a VCR, and a 
half-dozen folding chairs for the audience.

So what they do is try to pick a movie as few people as possible will 
want to see, and present it in as bad a light as possible.

There may even be movies (and trailers for them) especially made for this 
market.

The problem the makers of such things face is how to make something bad 
enough that no one will want to watch it, while not inadvertently 
becoming some sort of cult classic like "Plan 9 from Outer Space".  That 
doesn't happen often, but it supposedly does now and then.

And then once the work is done and the main facility is usable again, how 
do you get your previous audience you've driven away to come back?

It's a strange field to work in.


                          *********************

Speaking of odd happenings, I once saw a restaurant surprise a customer 
with a free order of fries because their check totaled exactly 
seventy-seven cents.

This was many years ago, when a dollar was worth something, and 
restaurant checks were written by hand, not printed by a computer.  After 
listing all the items ordered along with their prices the server would 
add all the amounts up and write the total in big print in the middle of 
the check, where it would be easy to notice.  Thing is, when a customer 
asked for something special that would be emphasized in a similar manner.

To further complicate matters, people in different countries have 
different styles of writing numbers.  Specifically, in many places they 
put a horizontal line across the "7", perhaps to avoid confusing it with 
the "1", since people in those places often make the serif at the top of 
the "1" larger than is common here.  The result is that their "7" looks a 
little like a mirror image of our lower-case "f".

So when the total of this particular check was seventy-seven cents the 
cook saw the big "77" on the check with the crossed sevens and misread it 
as "ff", and took that to mean that the customer wanted fries.

I left while the server and the customer and the cook were still trying 
to figure out what happened, so I don't know if they ever really worked 
it out.  But the above is my best guess.


                          *********************


                             Alternate Routes

He was crazy.
We all knew that.
All his talk of strange exotic lands 
     he would someday run away to proved it,
Since it was well known
That here was the only place there was.
Still, he could be quite convincing
So we had to keep reminding ourselves
That he was crazy.

Further proof:
One night late, driving home from a party or something,
As he approached the curve in the road
We saw him signal to turn right.
He tried to explain about another road to the left
They had taught us not to see
But that only proved
How crazy he was.

And so we went,
Being careful not to look too hard as we passed the curve,
Until
One night late, driving home from a party or something,
As he approached the curve in the road
We saw him signal to turn left
And vanish.  

We all stood there, 
Telling each other that we could see,
Way down in the canyon,
His flaming wreckage.
I felt it best not to mention
That to me the faint red glow
Looked more like tail lights
Dwindling toward the horizon.

                                   -- Thomas G. Digby
                                   written 0420 hr  5/17/80
                                   entered 2115 hr  2/08/92


                          *********************

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