Collage 053 H u m o u r N e t 1995 Welcome to Collage 53! Thanks are due to Randi for the Al (D'Amato) piece. Steve gets the credit for "Bill Gates Goes to Heaven" (don't worry, it'll never happen), and Perri makes her debut with the first installment of the "You Might Be a Redneck If ... " humor (there's surely more out there, but this is a start). Happy Bytes! - Vince Sabio HumourNet Moderator HumourNet@telephonet.com ____________________________________________________________________ Opener (above) Copyright 1995 by Vincent Sabio Permission is hereby granted to forward or post this "Collage"; please observe the guidelines stated at the end of the message. ____________________________________________________________________ Well, ol' Howard ain't worth the trouble of pokin' fun at, and though I am sort of fond of Al, (the fiesty little booger!), weeeell, he deserves this... (To the tune of "The Beverly Hillbillies") Lemme tell ya a little story 'bout a senator named Al, Who's always windin' up on the radio somehow, But then one day he was shootin' from the lip, And his target was our one and only fave-rave courtroom Nip.- -ponese, that is. Funny hair. Custom chair. Well the next thing you know ol' Al he's on the run, says he really didn't mean to offend the Rising Sun. He said, "Hey, c'mon! It was just a great big joke!" And the Asians in America they all began to choke. Al, that is. Conservative dude. Somewhat rude. Now the judge in California didn't quite know what to think, So he decided to ignore the little New York fink, And with Marsha and F. Lee makin' motions to supress, Ito did what he does best, callin' a recess! From work, that is. Is this a trial? In a while! Now the press wasn't happy that ol' Ito kept his cool, And some they really thought that D'Amato was a fool, So without any juicy bits to put upon their press, They dragged out a picture of a guy in a dress. Lance kicked him out. He wore pearls and a pout. Well it's time to bring my little story to an end, I'd like to thank ya'll for kindly droppin' in. And if by chance these folks you ever meet, Imitate a cheetah, and be really, really fleet! Run, that is. Very fast. Very far. ========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]======================= SUBJ: Bill Gates in Heaven Bill Gates died and, much to everyone's surprise, went to Heaven. When he got there, he had to wait in the reception area. Heaven's reception area was the size of Massachusetts. There were literally millions of people milling about, living in tents with nothing to do all day. Food and water were being distributed from the backs of trucks, while staffers with clipboards slowly worked their way through the crowd. Booze and drugs were being passed around. Fights were commonplace. Sanitation conditions were appalling. All in all, the scene looked like Woodstock gone metastatic. Bill lived in a tent for three weeks until, finally, one of the staffers approached him. The staffer was a young man in his late teens, face scarred with acne. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with the words TEAM PETER emblazoned on it in large yellow lettering. "Hello," said the staffer in a bored voice that could have been the voice of any clerk in any overgrown bureaucracy. "My name is Gabriel and I'll be your induction coordinator." Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, I'm not the Archangel Gabriel. I'm just a guy from Philadelphia named Gabriel who died in a car wreck at the age of 17. Now give me your name, last name first, unless you were Chinese in which case it's first name first." "Gates, Bill." Gabriel started searching though the sheaf of papers on his clipboard, looking for Bill's Record of Earthly Works. "What's going on here?" asked Bill. "Why are all these people here? Where's Saint Peter? Where are the Pearly Gates?" Gabriel ignored the questions until he located Bill's records. Then Gabriel looked up in surprise. "It says here that you were the president of a large software company. Is that right?" "Yes." "Well then, do the math chip-head! When this Saint Peter business started, it was an easy gig. Only a hundred or so people died every day, and Peter could handle it all by himself, no problem. But now there are over five billion people on earth. Jesus, when God said to 'go forth and multiply,' he didn't say 'like rabbits!' With that large a population, ten thousand people die every hour. Over a quarter-million people a day. Do you think Peter can meet them all personally?" "I guess not." "You guess right. So Peter had to franchise the operation. Now, Peter is the CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. He just sits in the corporate headquarters and sets policy. Franchisees like me handle the actual inductions." Gabriel looked though his paperwork some more, and then continued. "Your paperwork seems to be in order. And with a background like yours, you'll be getting a plum job assignment." "Job assignment?" "Of course. Did you expect to spend the rest of eternity sitting on your ass and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to pull your weight around here!" Gabriel took out a triplicate form, had Bill sign at the bottom, and then tore out the middle copy and handed it to Bill. "Take this down to induction center #23 and meet up with your occupational orientator. His name is Abraham." Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, he's not that Abraham." Bill walked down a muddy trail for ten miles until he came to induction center #23. He met with Abraham after a mere six- hour wait. "Heaven is centuries behind in building its data processing infrastructure," explained Abraham. "As you've seen, we're still doing everything on paper. It takes us a week just to process new entries." "I had to wait three weeks," said Bill. Abraham stared at Bill angrily, and Bill realized that he'd made a mistake. Even in Heaven, it's best not to contradict a bureaucrat. "Well," Bill offered, "maybe that Bosnia thing has you guys backed up." Abraham's look of anger faded to mere annoyance. "Your job will be to supervise Heaven's new data processing center. We're building the largest computing facility in creation. Half a million computers connected by a multi-segment fiber optic network, all running into a back-end server network with a thousand CPUs on a gigabit channel. Fully fault tolerant. Fully distributed processing. The works." Bill could barely contain his excitement. "Wow! What a great job! This is really Heaven!" "We're just finishing construction, and we'll be starting operations soon. Would you like to go see the center now?" "You bet!" Abraham and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data processing center. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger than the Astrodome. Workmen were crawling all over the place, getting the miles of fiber optic cables properly installed. But the center was dominated by the computers. Half a million computers, arranged neatly row- by-row, half a million .... .... Macintoshes .... .... all running Claris software! Not a PC in sight! Not a single byte of Microsoft code! The thought of spending the rest of eternity using products that he had spent his whole life working to destroy was too much for Bill. "What about PCs???" he exclaimed. "What about Windows??? What about Excel??? What about Word???" "You're forgetting something," said Abraham. "What's that?" asked Bill plaintively. "This is Heaven," explained Abraham. "If you want to build a data processing center based on PCs running Windows, then .... .... GO TO HELL!" ========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]======================= SUBJ: You Might Be A Redneck If ... You go to your family reunion to meet women. Your Dad walks you to school because you're in the same grade. You think a tube-top is appropriate attire for a wedding. Your front porch collapses and kills more than 3 dogs. ========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]======================= Q: Why did the chicken cross the road? A: To show the opossum that it could be done. ========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]======================= More sigs: "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea-- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." -- Gene Spafford "Only a lowlife asshole would burn the American flag, and everybody knows it. But in America, there's no law against being a lowlife asshole, and I'd like to keep it that way." "It used to be that no matter where you went there you were. With cyberspace, no matter where you are, you can be someplace else." ******************************************************************** Anyone Without a Sense of Humor Is At The Mercy of The Rest of Us. ******************************************************************** "HumourNet" is brought to you by Lyris -- an innovative new e-mail list server from The Walter Shelby Group, Ltd. For more information on Lyris, see . To subscribe to the "HumourNet" mailing list, send the following command to : subscribe HumourNet your_name, your_city, your_state or country where "your_name" is your real name, etc. If you run into problems, then either (1) send any message to for a more detailed set of instructions, (2) subscribe via Lyris's Web interface at , or (3) send a *detailed* description of the problem to . To unsubscribe, visit our Web interface at or refer to your Welcome message for detailed instructions. For instructions on contributing to HumourNet, send any message to . >>> Note: Attributions in Collage openers are to the contributors, not necessarily the authors. Authors' credits are included in the text wherever possible. <<< The HumourNet archives can be accessed via the Web and FTP: Web: FTP: Permission is granted to forward or post this Collage, provided that 1) the message is forwarded/posted in its ENTIRETY, from the line containing the Collage number and date to the end of this trailer, and 2) no fee is charged. There are "relaxed" forwarding/posting guidelines available; for a copy of them, send any message to , or refer to your Welcome message. ******************************************************************** "HumourNet" is a trademark of HumourNet Communications, Ltd. ********************************************************************