Silicon Soapware #223

[bubbleblower]

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                            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 #223
                       New Moon of February 9, 2013


Contents copyright 2013 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.  


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

Valentine's Day will be upon us by the time this gets distributed.

The main thing I recall about Valentine's Day is the valentine box we did 
in grade school.

Sometime after the groundhogs had done their thing the teacher would get 
a big cardboard box, cut a slot in the top, and cover the sides with 
pretty wrapping paper plus paper hearts and such.  We were then expected 
to bring valentines addressed to the other kids in the class and drop 
them in the box.  On the big day the box would be opened and the 
valentines handed out to the lucky recipients.

And no, when we did this in first or second grade I had no real idea of 
what "being someone's valentine" actually meant, if anything, beyond it 
being a sort of friendly thing to say.  It was just something the people 
who printed up store-bought valentines printed on them.

As I recall there was something of a competitive feel to the whole thing, 
as in kids asking each other how many valentines they'd gotten.  I was 
not one of the popular kids so I never got all that many, although I 
always did get at least a few.

There may have also been some enjoyment from getting one with an 
especially interesting message, sort of like the way adults compare 
fortune cookies after eating at a Chinese restaurant.  I don't recall if 
the valentines were supposed to be signed, or anonymous, or some of each.  
I think some of the ones I got were signed and some not.

There were no rules as to who could give valentines to whom and no 
requirement that you give one to everybody else in the class.  As far as 
I know the teacher didn't count them or vet them for content or anything.  
There were no rules about anonymous messages, even those involving 
insulting attempts at humor.

Also, everybody just sort of knew that valentines were an opposite-gender 
thing, so there would have been no stated rule about that.

In other words, there were none of the attempts at political correctness 
we see around Valentine's Day in schools nowadays.  But we somehow 
survived.


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

At a recent poetry reading someone read a piece that included mention of 
a light-colored car receding into the distance like the spot of light you 
used to see when you turned off an old CRT-based TV set.

The first TV my family got, back when I was in fifth grade, did that.  It 
would take maybe four or five seconds after you turned it off for the 
picture to shrink down to a point of light, and then that point would 
take a minute or more to fade completely.

Then the engineers found that that could eventually damage the picture 
tube, so more recent models included circuitry to blank out that spot.

So that little lingering spot of light when you turned off the TV was 
another thing that the younger generation may have never experienced.


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

                     Little-Known Aquarium Creatures

                        The Plergbonisian Milkfish

The Plergbonisian Milkfish has been engineered by scientists to live in 
milk instead of water.  This means you don't have to get any fancy fish 
food for it, or remember to feed it on a schedule: It justs drinks the 
milk it lives in.

Since the species was developed in a cartoon universe where nobody ever 
has to go to the bathroom, keeping these fish fed is simple: As the fish 
drink their milk, the level in the tank goes down.  When it gets low you 
just add more.

The developers sell a system wherein a milk supply connected through a 
float-activated valve takes care of this chore automatically.  The user 
still needs to order refills every week or two, but that's still less of 
a chore than dropping in a carefully measured amount of fish food every 
day or remembering some more complicated schedule such as doing it every 
other day.

Since the system keeps track of how much milk it has on hand it can issue 
email or smartphone reminders as required.  There are rumors that a 
system that can order the milk and take delivery via a robot or something 
is in the works, although the company refuses to give details.  All the 
users need to do is sit back and enjoy their fish, and also pay money 
every now and then.

There is one caveat.  You need to populate your aquarium with just the 
right number of fish, not too few and not too many.

If there are too few fish in the tank the milk may turn sour faster than 
the fish can drink it.  The eventual consequences of this are too yucky 
to describe here.

Too many fish, on the other hand, will result in tempers getting short 
due to overcrowding.  This leads to frequent fights.  Although milk is 
opaque so you can't really see much of what's going on, if you notice 
constant thrashing and splashing and general commotion in your fish tank 
that's probably what's causing it.

The good news is that this situation is usually self-correcting.  These 
fish reproduce quite rapidly, so having too few is not a problem if you 
start with almost enough fish.  Likewise, if there are too many the 
winners of the ensuing fights will eat the losers, so there won't be too 
many for very long.

There is a small chance that one individual fish will have gotten enough 
bigger than the others to win all its battles, and will be too aggressive 
to stop picking fights once the overcrowding has been abated.  Thus it 
will end up as the only survivor.  Lacking a partner of the opposite sex 
it will be unable to reproduce, leading to the situation of too few fish 
(see above).  But this doesn't happen very often.

The Plergbonisian Milkfish is not for everyone.  If you are easily bored 
you probably won't want this species.  Since the fish lives in milk 
rather than plain water there isn't much to see except when an occasional 
fish bumps up against the glass.  Even then you don't see the whole fish.  
All you get is a glimpse of fish lips or an eye or something.

This is why nobody knows what this species of fish look like.  A few 
preserved specimens exist, but since the colors of many fish species fade 
at death it is not known what the Plergbonisian Milkfish looks like when 
alive.

The company is rumored to be working on a sonar-based visualization 
system that will send images of what the fish are doing to your TV.  That 
may be useful for monitoring their activities, including whatever fights 
they get into, but it still won't show very much about what the fish 
actually look like.

This fish is also not for the paranoid.  What with living in a tank of 
milk, the only thing for the fish to see is when they put an eye up 
against the side of the tank and look outside.  They are rumored to enjoy 
watching humans, especially when those humans are engaged in non-standard 
sexual activities.  Even if you don't do kinky sex in front of your fish 
tank, it's easy to get the feeling that you are being watched.  Even 
exhibitionists seem to find this rather spooky.  So you may want to put 
your aquarium in its own room away from your other everyday activities.  
Or you may want to delay your purchase until the sonar system mentioned 
earlier becomes available.

Sales so far have been slow, although the company expects an increase 
once enough people start bragging at parties and on the Internet about 
having such an exotic species.


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

One common science fiction thing back when I was reading a lot more 
printed stuff than I do now was some sort of Time Patrol, usually a 
quasi-military or police-like organization of people with time machines, 
constantly patrolling the past, present, and future.  Sometimes they 
would be trying to optimize the time-stream (whatever that meant), or 
maybe find and stop people who were doing stuff that didn't happen, or 
perhaps trying to fight a rival bunch of time travelers.

One thing I don't recall them doing is going back into the past for the 
purpose of using some particular word or image as a trademark before the 
people who invented it thought of it.

What brought this to mind was a news item about some game company 
claiming trademark rights to the term "Space Marines" despite the fact 
that the term had been showing up in science fiction stories since at 
least the 1930's.

Although the technology to play computer games didn't exist back then, 
there were board games and other low-tech formats.  So all they'd need to 
do would be to create a board- or print-based game that they could call 
"Space Marines" and which would be similar enough to their present-day 
game to plausibly be an ancestor of it.  Go back to the late 1920's or 
whenever, put it on the market, and claim trademark rights.  How well it 
does or doesn't sell wouldn't matter, as long as it or its successors 
stayed in print from then up to the present.

So if they were to do that, would the Time Patrol be able to stop them?


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

One adult forum I read fairly regularly has been having problems with the 
bank that processes their credit card payments.  Details are kind of 
hazy, but the bank seems to be insisting that the forum censor certain 
categories of material, even when posting such material is not against 
the law.  The forum is considering changing its Terms Of Service to 
forbid posting those specific types of material, assuming they ever get a 
clear answer from the bank as to exactly what is forbidden.

They did say they'd considered changing banks, but all the ones they 
asked had similar criteria.  That leads me to think that what's OK with 
one bank is likely to be OK with them all.  Since I don't want to get the 
forum into more trouble, I'm thinking that the next time I write 
something that's kind of weird and also sort of sexual I'll take a 
printout down to my bank and have a teller or somebody look it over.  I 
may even put a line at the bottom for the teller (or whoever they 
escalate it to) to sign, something like:


       "Approved by _______________ Bank 
       for posting on the Internet, 
       signed _____________ dated ___/___/___."


Then I'll keep it on file so if anybody ever complains I'll have the 
signed approval to show them.  

I'll also recommend that other forum members get their postings 
pre-approved by whatever bank is most convenient.  That should keep 
everybody happy.


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


                             THE SEA ANEMONE

She never found out how her name had gotten entered,
But she had won a free sex-change.  
Full of vague dissatisfactions she'd never really acknowledged
She thought she'd at least check it out. 

The shop was one of those places you read about in old books
That hint of things beyond our rational world. 
And when she wasn't sure about taking the obvious type of sex-change
They handed her a 200-page catalog. 
She finally decided to put in a sea anemone. 

When she returned to the singles-bar scene
Reactions were, you might say,
Interesting.  

Many a Casanova followed her home,
Interested in only one thing
And that one thing
Was not a sea anemone. 
More than one had run screaming into the night. 
She got quite adept at finding out which insane asylum
To deliver the left-behind clothing to. 

Others, made of sterner stuff,
Plunged ahead anyway
But soon learned that sea anemone tentacles
Have little stingers, like jellyfish,
For hauling in prey. 
And if that didn't stop them 
Their manhood would go numb 
Until they couldn't be sure 
It hadn't already been digested. 

Since she swung both ways 
She brought home some singles-bar women.
"Can't do much with that," they'd say
And take their leave.  

Then through the grapevine
She began to hear of other anemone people.
They'd lie together in the night
Feeding each other sardines down there
And thrilling to a sensation 
Others had no words for. 
But even this lacked something. 

She drifted away from the singles bars
And began putting more of herself
Into other parts of her life. 

Then once in a great while 
She'd meet someone special,
Sometimes man, sometimes woman,
Or sometimes someone with another anemone
Or flowers or something. 
Exactly what didn't seem to matter. 

"Can't do much with that," they'd say,
Looking between her legs,
But then they'd find plenty of possibilities
With the rest of her
And with the rest of themselves.  

These were the ones she treasured.
They soon learned how that part of her liked sardines
And how other parts of her liked other physical pleasures.
But they also knew that the most important parts 
Were not between the legs, 
But between the ears
And in the heart. 


                                   Tom Digby 
                                   bubbles@well.sf.ca.us 

                                   written  Feb 27, 1995  23:20
                                   edited   Mar  1, 1995  22:05



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

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