============================================================================ ********* *** *** ****** ********* *** *** *** * *** *** *** *** ** *** ********* ******* *** *** *** *** ** *** *** *** *** ** *** he *** *** umus *** ** eport THE Electronic Fun Zone dedicated to fertilizing Mother Earth in the finest possible tradition. Serving Mother since the 1950s. Issue 007, Vol I July 1988 copyright (c) 1988 caren park chief bottle washer, owner, publisher, editor, other stuff all rights reserved, and all that legal rigamarole ============================================================================ A very few words::: After a sojourn that took me about 10,000 miles this past month, I'm back... uh, let's not clap so loud that I can hear you... This issue will contain, among other things, the first of two never- ending series on (1) REVENGE and (2) Stuff From Comics, THE Real Programmer of all time, "How to Regain Your Virginity", and our usual assortment of odd and bizarre items... We can thank the following people for their contributions to the world of Humus: the RPC-4000 computer, politicians who didn't make last month's installation, some students at CalTech, and a number of anonymous donations from "out there"... So, without further adieu, on with the show... ============================================================================ "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here..." ============================================================================ July was a slow month for birthdays of the famous and infamous folk... July 1st was when Wolfman Jack, venerable DJ with the distinctive voice, was first heard... Rube Goldberg (4th, 1883), for whom we can ascribe the words "Murphy would have loved this man"... Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong (4th, 1900), one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time... PT Barnum, for whom a sucker was born every minute, himself birthed on the 5th in 1810... Robert Angus Heinlein, one of the first to really give science fiction a direction beyond the pulps, born 07 July 1907... R Buckminster Fuller (inventor/philosopher/man of many trades, 12th of 1895)... Milton "Uncle Miltie" Berle, a man of many faces (12th, 1908)... Woodie Guthrie, folk singer, political conscience (14th, 1912)... Red Skelton, comedian, honest nice guy (18th, 1913)... Inventor of Spoonerisms, the Reverend William Archibald Spooner hisself (22nd, 1844)... Amelia Earhart, for whom we may never find out what happened (24th, 1898)... the first baby born under the sign of Pyrex, test-tuber Louise Brown, 25th of 1978... Mick Jagger, of the "My Lips are Huge" and the Rolling Stones, on the 26th of 1943... and, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, redecorator, editor, jet setter, etc (28th, 1929)... First class postage DROPS from 3 cents to 2 on the 1st, 1919, but goes back up again to 3 on the 6th, 1932... The Golden Gate Bridge was finally paid for (in full) on the 1st in 1971, and more than a few people are asking themselves why there is still a toll for crossing... President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on the 2nd, 1964... Congress passes the first minimum wage law on the 12th in 1933. Minimum? 33cents per hour... The 19th saw the first Women's Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, NY (1848), and the first parking metres installed (in Oklahoma City, 1935)... Disneyland opens its doors for the first time on the 17th in 1955, and the first baby born on Alcatraz Island arrived on the 20th, 1970... Voyager II flitters past Jupiter on the 9th (1979), Apollo 11 is launched on the 16th in 1969... The Eagle lands on the Moon at 13:18edt on the 20th, and Neil Armstrong first steps on the Moon's surface at 02:56:15gmt on the 21st (I don't know why the change in time references... just to confuse, I suppose)... Thoreau gives Doonesbury some place to talk about once in a while by moving into his shack on Walden Pond on the 4th, 1845... The Liberty Bell cracks... again (8th, 1835)... The first public demonstration of ice made by refrigeration occurs on the 14th in 1850, with the First Ice Cream Cone invented on the 23rd (1904), but National Ice Cream Day isn't celebrated on either date: it's the 15th... Bastille Day happens on the 14th, Saint Swithin's Day on the 15th (what is a Saint Swithins?), and the National Blueberry Festival on the 16th... The start of the Black-eyed Peas Jamboree in Athens, Texas, occurs on the 26th every year... The Hamburger is created by Louis Lassing in Connecticut on the 28th in 1900... And, during the last week in July we have the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California... My, the things you can learn by reading The Humus Report... Boggles the mind... ============================================================================ Our first installment in the "Stuff From Comics" collection comes from a talented performer that goes by the name of Franklin Ajaye. You might have seen him on The Tonight Show or Late Night with David Letterman, but chances are you wouldn't have seen these particular pieces on network television... ----- Hair is a symbol; like Don King, his hair is a symbol. It took me about four years before I realized that he was going to wear his hair like that for the rest of his life. I kept waiting for someone to come along and tell Don, "Hey, you should get your hair cut soon." Then it dawned on me that he gets it cut like that. They had an interview in Ring Magazine with his barber, titled "The Man Who Cut's Don King's Hair". It had a picture of him standing next to a chair with an axe. They asked him how he prepares for a visit from Don, and he said, "Don calls up, tells me he wants the usual, be in about one hour. When I hear that, I immediately start drinkin' a lot of wine, dropping lots of pills, 'cause I gotta be sure that I don't know what the hell I'm doing when he gets here, so I can get it right." We take our hair for granted. One thing about the hair on your head is that you do have to cut it, but there's hair on your body you don't have to cut at all. You know, like your pubic hair. Your whole life, they stay the same length, which saves you a lot of money. You never have to go into a barber shop. "Say, Joe, how much for a pubic trim? Stuff's gettin' out of hand, man. Got a job interview tomorrow. $30!? I don't want them styled, just want 'em cut. Hey, easy with that blow-dryer, man!" ----- I remember when I first got my place. It was exciting to go to the supermarket. I made a few errors when I first went to the market, and I was walking down the bread aisle, and I said, "I know what I'll do. Let me get this giant 90-slice loaf. I don't eat a lot of bread, and this way I won't have to buy anymore for about 3 more months." And I took it home. Damn thing turned into penicillin about slice 20. It had me backing out of the kitchen, thinking about science fiction, you know: "Boy, I'm glad I woke up before the bread did." But I didn't throw it away. No, I saved it. Used it to cure my friends. Whenever one of them called me about VD, I said, "No problem. Come on over and I'll give you a slice of toast" ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Handy Guide to Modern Science: .1. If it's green or it wriggles, it's biology. .2. If it stinks, it's chemistry. .3. If it doesn't work, it's physics Cerf's Extensions to the Handy Guide to Modern Science: .4. If it's incomprehensible, it's mathematics. .5. If it doesn't make sense, it's either economics or psychology ============================================================================ Once in a while, you run into someone who is an absolute genius at what s/he does best. Well, this is the story about a programmer who definitely fits that mold. I don't remember where I found this particular tale, but the first time I saw it was in the early 70s. I find myself wondering who this guy is, and if he is still in programming. I'd love to see examples of source code he might be writing today... Enjoy... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Real Programmers Don't Use Fortran, Either! A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming ("Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal," by ucbvax!G:tut) made the bald and unvarnished statement: Real Programmers write in Fortran. Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software, but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not Fortran. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly. Lest a whole new generation of programmers grow up in ignorance of this glorious past, I feel duty-bound to describe, as best I can through the generation gap, how a Real Programmer wrote code. I'll call him Mel, because that was his name. I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp, a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of the day) drum-memory computer, and had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, and weren't here to stay, anyway. (That's why you haven't heard of the company, or the computer.) I had been hired to write a Fortran compiler for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didn't approve of compilers. "If a program can't rewrite its own code," he asked, "what good is it?" Mel had written, in hexadecimal, the most popular computer program the company owned. It ran on the LGP-30 and played blackjack with potential customers at computer shows. Its effect was always dramatic. The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show, and the IBM salesmen stood around talking to each other. Whether or not this actually sold computers was a question we never discussed. Mel's job was to re-write the blackjack program for the RPC-4000. (Port? What does that mean?) The new computer had a one-plus-one addressing scheme, in which each machine instruction, in addition to the operation code and the address of the needed operand, had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum, the next instruction was located. In modern parlance, every single instruction was followed by a GO TO! Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it. Mel loved the RPC-4000 because he could optimize his code: that is, locate instructions on the drum so that just as one finished its job, the next would be just arriving at the "read head" and available for immediate execution. There was a program to do that job, an "optimizing assembler," but Mel refused to use it. "You never know where its going to put things," he explained, "so you'd have to use separate constants." It was a long time before I understood that remark. Since Mel knew the numerical value of every operation code, and assigned his own drum addresses, every instruction he wrote could also be considered a numerical constant. He could pick up an earlier "add" instruction, say, and multiply by it, if it had the right numeric value. His code was not easy for someone else to modify. I compared Mel's hand-optimized programs with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembly program, and Mel's always ran faster. That was because the "top-down" method of program design hadn't been invented yet, and Mel wouldn't have used it anyway. He wrote the innermost parts of his program loops first, so they would get first choice of the optimum address locations on the drum. The optimizing assembler wasn't smart enough to do it that way. Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either, even when the balky Flexowriter required a delay between output characters to work right. He just located instructions on the drum so each successive one was just *past* the read head when it was needed; the drum had to execute another complete revolution to find the next instruction. He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure. Although "optimum" is an absolute term, like "unique", it became common verbal practice to make it relative: "not quite optimum" or "less optimum" or "not very optimum." Mel called the maximum time-delay locations the "most pessimum." After he finished the blackjack program and got it to run, ("Even the initializer is optimized," he said proudly) he got a Change Request from the sales department. The program used an elegant (optimized) random number generator to shuffle the "cards" and deal from the "deck," and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair, since sometimes the customers lost. They wanted Mel to modify the program so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console, they could change the odds and let the customer win. Mel balked. He felt this was patently dishonest --- which it was --- and that it impinged on his personal integrity as a programmer --- which it did --- so he refused to do it. The Head Salesman talked to Mel, as did the Big Boss and, at the boss's urging, a few Fellow Programmers. Mel finally gave in and wrote the code, but he got the test backwards and, when the sense switch was turned on, the program would cheat, winning every time. Mel was delighted with this, claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical, and adamantly refused to fix it. After Mel had left the company for greener pa$ture$, the Big Boss asked me to look at the code and see if I could find the test and reverse it. Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to look. Tracking Mel's code was a real adventure. I have often felt that programming is an art form, whose real value can only be appreciated by another versed in the same arcane art; there are lovely gems and brilliant coups hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever, by the very nature of the process. You can learn a lot about an individual just by reading through his code, even in hexadecimal. Mel was, I think, an unsung genius. Perhaps my greatest shock came when I found an innocent loop that had no test in it. No test. *None*. Common sense said it had to be a closed loop, where the program would circle, forever, endlessly. Program control passed right through it, however, and safely out the other side. It took me two weeks to figure it out. The RPC-4000 computer had a really modern facility called an index register. It allowed the programmer to write a program loop that used an indexed instruction inside; each time through, the number in the index register was added to the address of that instruction, so it would refer to the next datum in a series. He had only to increment the index register each time through. Mel never used it. Instead, he would pull the instruction into a machine register, add one to its address, and store it back. He would then execute the modified instruction right from the register. The loop was written so this additional execution time was taken into account -- just as this instruction finished, the next one was right under the drum's read head, ready to go. But the loop had no test in it. The vital clue came when I noticed the index register bit, the bit that lay between the address and the operation code in the instruction word, was turned on -- yet Mel never used the index register, leaving it zero all the time. When the light went on it nearly blinded me. He had located the data he was working on near the top of memory -- the largest locations the instructions could address -- so, after the last datum was handled, incrementing the instruction address would make it overflow. The carry would add one to the operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set: a jump instruction. Sure enough, the next program instruction was in address location zero, and the program went happily on its way. I haven't kept in touch with Mel, so I don't know if he ever gave in to the flood of change that has washed over programming techniques since those long-gone days. I like to think he didn't. In any event, I was impressed enough that I quit looking for the offending test, telling the Big Boss I couldn't find it. He didn't seem surprised. When I left the company, the blackjack program would still cheat if you turned on the right sense switch, and I think that's how it should be. I didn't feel comfortable hacking up the code of a Real Programmer metheus!ogcvax!tektronix!uw- beaver!cornell!vax135!floyd!harpo!seismo!hao!cires!nbires!ut- ngp!utastro!nather Wed Dec 31 16:00:00 1969 ============================================================================ I'm a Frisbeetarian. We believe that when you die your soul goes up on the roof and you can't get it down - Alice Cooper - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- HOW TO REGAIN YOUR VIRGINITY Day 1 Go out and have a good time. You may never have one again. Day 2 Behavior modification day. By the end of today, you may not have become a virgin, but you will behave like one. And, after all, virginity is 25 percent behavior. Behavior modification is based on the theories of the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who taught his dog how to ring a bell when he (the dog) was hungry. The process is a simple one of learning by doing, and is based on reward and punishment. Day 3 Eat grapefruits all day. This usually does not work, but it's worth a try. Day 4 Prepare for mental Virgination. Derived from an ancient Hindu formula that was lost for centuries and was only recently rediscovered by the authors of this book, this treatment promises to leave you innocent as a lamb. At 7am, to rid your mind of all unclean thoughts accumulated overnight, vacuum out your head with a good, sturdy rug attachment. Midmorning is a time when many are tempted to go off their Clean Thought Regimen. Don't let this happen to you! Hang by your feet, shaking your head vigorously for half an hour to shake out mental germs. 8pm: Time for bed! But tonight you will be wearing your new Thought Pasteurization Earmuffs, which destroy disease-producing bacteria in your mind by heating your ears up to 145 degrees Fahrenheit. Clean dreams! Day 5 Now that you have learned the ways of a virgin and your thoughts are clean it is time for you to move forward and become acquainted with the Virgin Creed. The Virgin Creed A Virgin believes in being clean in thought, word and deed A Virgin believes in letting her conscience be her guide and never seeking help from consenting adults A Virgin believes that a good time the night before will bring a MOURNING after A Virgin believes that a reproductive organ is not as good as the original A Virgin believes in docu-dramas but not fantasies A Virgin believes in marriage, as long as she and her husband are "just friends" A Virgin believes she is a kite sailing in the sky on a cloudless day in May ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hams do it with greater frequency ============================================================================ Revenge: I'll just let the following speak for itself. If you know of any "practical jokes" or "revenge tactics", please let us know about them so we can include them in a future issue. After all, there are oh so many folks out there who deserve just what is coming to them... :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Animals: If your mark is an oily cuss with a credibility problem you should easily pull of this stunt suggested by good old country boy Emil Connally. It involves a cop, reporters, SPCA folks and some farm animals. According to Connally, here's how it works. You have two marks. The prime one is a farm owner with the credibility problem. We'll call him Mr Big. The secondary mark is a cop who's made an enemy of you. In this case, pick one of your local Attila the Hun cops because he's a bully and his ego for a bust will get in the way of his grain-sized brain. Call the cop --- try for his home phone even if it's unlisted --- and tell him you know about a cock or dog fight that's being held at Mr Bigs' farm. Explain you have no morals against animal fighting (build your own macho image) but you lost big money the last time and you think the fights are fixed. Mention drugs and booze, too. Next, call Mr Big and tell him you're an anonymous political ally who wants to warn him about some people holding dog or cock fights at his farm. Call reporters and the SPCA and tell them all about the fight. Mention Mr Big and the cop having a payoff relationship. Give everyone the same general arrival time.... never be too specific. Hopefully, everyone will sort of show up at roughly the same time. You might manipulate things so the press and animal lovers show up first. Even if a real story doesn't develop, you have scattered some strong seeds of distrust. ----- There is a variation if you want a stronger story. Find a dog that has been hit by a car (already dead, of course) and bury it several days before you set up your animal fight scenario at Mr Bigs' place. Tell the reporters and the SPCA where the evidence is buried. It will be fun to hear the two marks talk about these things to the other parties. Maybe there's a story here afterall. Dead animals are so useful. Don't you agree? A nefarious lady known only as Hong Kong Hattie once waited until her mark went to the airport for a five-day business trip departure. Then, using the nefarious methods for which she is so famous, Hattie got to the marks' car in the airport parking lot and got the lock opened. She then stuffed a large and very dead groundhog into the glovebox. Hattie locked the car and strolled away. Reportedly, the mark sold his car at quite a financial loss just a few days after getting back from his business trip. ----- One of the plagues for newspaper deliverers is barking, biting dogs which attack both kids and their bicycles. Tom Frickert, today a newspaper magnate, but once a paperboy, has a solution. "A good quality plastic water pistol filled with freshly-squeezed lemon juice is the ticket," Frickart says with a chuckle. "You shoot the felonious furball right in the eyes and it'll soon stop the canine harassment. "I once shot a nasty big cur with the juice and he never bothered me again.... used to hide under his masters' porch whenever I came down the sidewalk to deliver the newspaper." If your neighbor's constantly yowling and howling dog(s) bother you, congratulations, you're normal. But, unlike most who sit and suffer, you can call the local SPCA and tell them how the neighbor mistreats the animal. Hold your phone near the window so the SPCA official can hear the "evidence" right from the source. ----- I once heard that peanuts in the gas tank could create lots of havoc, seems that they have a neutral (or just slightly negative) buoyancy in gas. Supposedly they will get sucked down to the intake and cut the flow of gas down, the car balks and the sloshing knocks them loose and the flow is normal again. This causes the poor owner of the vehicle to replace all sorts of things trying to correct the problem (all to no avail). Much better than sugar, and much more costly in the long run ----- At work, we once inflated a 12ft weather balloon in somebody's office. It looks very impressive (especially as a surprise) and is very easy to "undo" when the joke is over. A much more radical prank that I heard of was pulled at some university. They lined a room with a strong clear plastic lining and filled it with water (complete with fish). Hmmm, as I recall, the entire dorm room wasn't filled with water. (I HATE when stories get all twisted!) Using chicken wire as a frame, and polyethlene sheets "welded" together, CalTech students build essentially an almost-room-sized swiming pool structure. They then proceeded to balance the pH to that of sea water, and added 3 or 4 live sand-sharks. ============================================================================ The news... such an integral part of our life, and yet we tend to ignore it so blindly... If it weren't for news, we wouldn't be able to bring you such well-written items as these you have before you... Behold... ----- Two pit bulldogs were in custody in the Santa Clara County Animal Shelter yesterday, charged with chewing the tires off a Sunnyvale police car while an embarrassed policeman was trapped in the car. Patrolman Ruben Grijalva didn't want to talk about his encounter with the 35-pound dogs - Lady, 3, and her son Isaac, 2. Bill Manley, an animal control officer, had to stop laughing to discuss the scene he was called to Sunday morning. "There was this patrol car in the middle of the intersection with its red lights on and it had one flat tire in front, with a hubcap lying in the road, and two pit bulls chewing on the back tires and I saw all the tires go flat. The officer (Grijalva) couldn't get out of the car." When he got out of his truck, Manley said, the dogs ran toward him. "I hollered at them and they ran away, into a yard." He went to the house adjacent to the yard, knocked on the door and was greeted by the owner of the dogs, who said he had no idea the dogs were loose. "They're friendly dogs," Noel Alfaro, 17, said. "They just don't like uniforms" - 10 July 1979 SF Chronicle - ----- Two teenage women were in jail yesterday after they allegedly tried to rob a bank by sending a note to a drive-up teller, then waiting patiently in their car for the money. They waited for several minutes --- until police, summoned via silent alarm, came to arrest them. The teller at Chino Valley Bank said the two women sent the stickup note to her through a pneumatic tube and did not seem troubled by the delay in getting their loot - 11 July 1980 Chino California AP - ----- Paul Gallegos spent the weekend in the hospital because he tried to get a friend's pet rattlesnake drunk. Police said Gallegos decided to get a friend's pet rattlesnake drunk by tapping the snake on its head with one hand, and trying to pour beer through the snake's mouth when it reared up to strike with the other. The snake got past the beer and sank its fangs into his thumb - 15 July 1980 Blackfoot Idaho UPI - ----- A University of Wisconsin student routed from his perch near the top of a 1000-foot television tower said he had no intention of jumping. All we wanted was a good night's sleep. David Marsh, 20, who has worked as a steeplejack, couldn't understand all the fuss when police converged on the scene Sunday. The local Crisis Intervention Center and Marsh's mother were called to the scene to help talk him down. But Dane County Sheriff's Detective Robert Doyle said Marsh, who had been sitting on a platform about 30 feet from the top of the tower, scooted down "like he was on a slick ladder. He said he climbed the tower at 2am Sunday to sleep, and has done it many nights previously because he claims he sleeps better on the tower than at home. "Never before has he been spotted" - 17 July 1979 Madison Wisconsin AP - ----- By now, almost every Italian-American of any note has been interviewed for reaction to Ferraro. Actor Don Novello, aka Father Guido Sarducci, was no exception. Asked whether he was proud to learn an Italian- American was on the ticket, he said, "Yes, I am. But I was hoping it was Fabian" - 22 July 1984 Seattle Times - ----- It was late, and the convention was in its ninth hour when Representative Steven Solarz of New York stepped to the rostrum to be eloquent before nearly 12,000 empty seats. He was reminded, the congressmen said, of the political candidates' night that featured 30 speakers. By the time the 29th speaker got up, only one man was still in the audience. Why was he still there? "Because," said the man, "I'm the next speaker" - 22 July 1984 Seattle Times - ----- "None of the above" was the winning candidate for the Republican nomination for Nevada's lone congressional seat in the state primary Tuesday. But by state law, the second-place finisher, Walden Earhart, will be the candidate on the November ballot. Earhart and Dart Anthony, both unknown politicians, collected 9,838 and 8,096 ballots, but 16,022 voters marked their ballots "none of these", as allowed by state law. The option was first put to the test in May's presidential primary in Nevada, collecting more than 5% of the total vote - 1976 Reno UPI - ============================================================================ And, last but not least, a few words of wisdom. It's true that mankind does not live by bread alone, and we've pretty much proved that axiom with these unusual masterpieces. To quote someone much smarter than myself (hi, kalen!): "I am non-denominational --- I accept all forms of currency. So, open your hearts and empty your pockets!" A wonderful sentiment, don't you think? If you should find it in your hearts to like what we are doing here, and would like to help us stay in business AND solvent, please send your non-tax-deductible donations in whatever amount pleases you to: caren park 2557 Fourteenth Avenue West Suite 501 Seattle, Washington 98119 (01 January 1992) We will acknowledge, in print, those with the warmest thoughts for our survival... We leave you now with a few thoughts... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl - Mike Adams - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops - Henry (Brooks) Adams - ...until next month...