8-1-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Why do people snore? Is there a way to stop the snoring? I need the answer soon, before I do something violent to my roommate.

--Awake in Alberta 

Dear Awake:

Now, I personally believe that snoring completely upsets the entire theory of evolution. It stands to reason that if early humans snored the way modern humans so, they would all have been eaten by alert night-roaming dinosaurs and today we would be descended from woodchucks.

Be that as it may, snoring is a bone of contention, especially between married couples. All you have is a roommate and you can change one of them in a flash. Marriage is different, especially where there are children or large amounts of money involved, which makes switching less than spontaneous.

Here are a couple of Aunt Nettie's Sure Cures for snoring, based on homey backwoods recipes. The first is the Ping Pong Ball Cure. Since snorers sleep on their backs with their mouths open, it's fairly easy to pop in a ping pong ball, which usually sparks the gag reflex and instantly awakens the snorer. Dip it in Tabasco for added effect.

Another good one is the Krazy Glue Cure. If the mouth doesn't open, the snores don't get out, right?

You might also get a little sound-activated microphone and wire it up to the smoke alarm.

I'm afraid the only permanent cure is what my medical Website calls "laser ablation." They use a laser beam to blast away that little dangly bit at the back of the mouth, and that cures the snoring for good. Any well-equipped university physics lab has a couple of medium-powered lasers lying around, most of which will fit conveniently under a coat. The next time the snoring starts, set the laser on full blast, aim carefully and your problems are over, once the smoke clears. If you miss, however, your problems are just beginning.

8-2-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What's a firewall, and how do I get one?

-- Pyrophobic in Portland 


Dear Aunt Nettie:

My friend Hissyfit says that flaming can be a lot of fun on the Internet. Can you give me any details about fuel costs, temperature settings, etc.?

-- Pyromaniac in Pensacola 

Dear P & P in P & P:

I've answered these two together since they have to do with the same subject.

One of the truly wonderful things about e-mail is that one can remain completely anonymous while saying things that would get your features rearranged if you said them face to face. This is called "flaming," and dates back to the old Christian tradition of burning at the stake anyone who disagreed with you. Here's a good example of one of the many inconsiderate e-mails I receive in the course of a week. Since this is a site that may be accessed by children I've left out some of the less temperate language.

"On 7/23/00 you replied to a straightforward question about Search Engines with some ______ ________ about ______!! You old ________!! Don't you ______ know that ________ search engines have _________ to do with the ______ railroad?!! What a _______ load of ________. You should be __________ and shot!!!"

Well, perhaps e-mail is not completely anonymous. I was fortunately able to track this dreadful "flame," back to its source, and I responded with a message that was just full of apologies, contriteness and submission.

Then I got to work on a little gift for the sender. The Bishop is certainly going to be surprised when he starts getting his trial subscriptions to The Advocate, Screw Magazine, and Barnyard Lust (featuring Hot Heifers), plus the American Nazi Party newsletter, the White Citizens Council newsletter and the Ku Klux Klan newsletter (also featuring Hot Heifers). I've signed him up for the Man-Boy Love Association, Popular Pornography and Swish!, The Cross-Dressers Web site. The entire subscriber list of meathunk.com has received his e-mail address along with a .jpg that I captured from one of those sites that feature oiled young gentlemen au naturel who have their own built-in pole vaulting equipment, so to speak. Yes, it's going to be a hot time at the rectory over the next couple of weeks.

Now a firewall is what you use to prevent yourself from receiving nasty e-mail like the one above. You can buy one at Radio Shack that will read all your e-mail before you see it, then flush all the unpleasant ones so your tender morals won't be offended. But I say, what the ____ kind of fun is that? After all, as it says in the Good Book or someplace, revenge is sweet.

8-3-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I noticed that there is a Swap File on my computer. Is this where I put stuff I want to get rid of on e-Bay?

--Materialist in Manhattan

Dear Materialist:

Yes, that's exactly what it's for. Simply load all your unwanted possessions into the Swap File, press Ctrl-Alt-Del and they'll be magically whisked off to be auctioned by the Vapor People of the Planet Mungo.

In case the sarcasm was a little over your head, sonny-- no, the Swap File has nothing to do with online auctions! Swap Files are what Windows uses to make certain that you run out of memory every few minutes. Have you ever noticed that no matter how much memory and hard drive space you have, you always run out after exactly 17 minutes? The good people at Microsoft © ™ ® RegUSPatOff Resistance Is Futile have repeatedly assured me that this is a feature, not a bug. 

The Swap File was also designed to make sure that all the computer code in your Windows programs is treated equally. For instance, if you're about to save that Excel spreadsheet that you've worked on so hard, the Swap File will decide that that's the perfect time to exercise the Frag utility, which will break up all the code in your spreadsheet into little batches and tuck it into random places where it can never be found again. Then everything will freeze. Remember the Microsoft motto: "You Wanted to Go Where Today? Oops!"

There are many ways of getting around this annoying problem, but as soon as someone comes up with a fix a special SWAT team in Redmond WA, working closely with That Guy In Bulgaria, develops a patch that neutralizes it. People who use Linux don't have any of these problems, which is why the folks in Redmond are frantically at work sponsoring legislation to have all Linux users declared Undesirable Aliens and deported to some country with unstable electricity and 300 baud modem connections.

8-4-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I keep hearing all these horror stories about viruses that you can get through e-mail. Where do these come from and how can I protect myself against them?

--Antiviral in Apalachicola 

Dear Antiviral:

Viruses-- and their cousins the worms and Trojan horses and suchlike-- are almost as old as the Internet itself. Back in the dawn of the computing age two young college kids who were taking Computer Science long before it was fashionable realized that you could make a mint by creating a damaging piece of software, then selling people protection against it. It was based on a concept made popular by pharmaceutical companies, who learned long ago that they could make carloads of money selling people over-the-counter medications that had no effect whatsoever on viruses.

So young John McAfee and young Peter Norton went into business together, recruiting lots of smart computing people with bad teeth and no social skills, who worked around the clock inventing new damaging software, then creating protective software against it. Eventually the damaging software programs came to be known as "viruses," since they had the same effect on computers as these germs do on the human body.

John and Peter became so rich and powerful that in 1988 the Justice Department forced the breakup of the company into two parts, one to manufacture the viruses and the other to create the protection against them. And so it remains to this day. Every computer is dutifully equipped with antivirus protection, which routinely attempts to download the Virus-of-the-Month from the virus distribution center in Murfreesboro, TN. Then the ever-alert antivirus program of the month pops up a little window that says that such-and-such a file has, say, the dreaded WOMBAT.awk virus and what would you like to do about it:

  A. Let it destroy your computer.
  B. Isolate and destroy it with HumBug© Brand antiviral software-- now with chlorophyll for extra breath protection.

Well, of course you're going to select B, at which point another little window pops up saying that your virus protection software has expired 15 seconds ago and would you like to upgrade for the bargain price of $39.95, or shall we turn this sucker loose on you? Please have your credit card handy.

This is known as the Free Enterprise system, so fondly embraced by that wonderful B-movie actor Ronnie Reagan, whose autobiography "Huh?" I suggest you all buy and read. It has nothing to do with viruses, but I get a couple of bucks for promoting it.

8-5-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I'd like to get rid of my stretch marks. How have you dealt with the problem? Or are you one of those lucky types who never got them? You know, like Cindy Crawford, or Cher?

--Distorted in Dubuque 

Dear Distorted:

Land sakes, this is one of the easiest problems of all to fix. Simply look in your monitor manual and it will tell you how to get rid of that annoying stretched effect on your screen. What celebrities have to do with it is beyond me.

8-6-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

My boy friend spends all his time online playing stupid trivia games. Who's more important, me or the name of the fattest US President?

--Ignored in Indianapolis 

Dear Ignored:

It was William Howard Taft, 27th President of the United States, at 312 pounds.

What did I win?

8-7-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

If you had to live your life over again, what would you do differently?

--Metempsychotic in Memphis

Dear Metem-whatever:

To begin with, I'd pick different parents. My mother would be a living goddess and my father would have the strength of ten because his heart was pure. Both of them would be independently loaded, and I would be an only child, so they would have no distractions in their attempts to utterly spoil me. I would attend the best schools on both continents, where I would never receive less than an "A" in any subject. Surrounded by servants from many lands, and with a natural gift for languages, I would speak 15 of them fluently by the time I was 10.

When I reached puberty I would be such a knockout that even blind men would be overcome with lust, and I would be accompanied everywhere by armed eunuch bodyguards for my protection. Crowned heads of state would shower me with gifts, each one trying to outdo the others. While accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for resolving the Middle East conflict I would sing a little song of my own composing, and all other female singers would either retire or take the veil to live out their lives in cloistered seclusion.

When I decided to marry a contest would be held where the world's most eligible men would compete for my favor, and the winner would die on his wedding night of sheer bliss. Saddened by this, I would compose a brief tribute to him which would remain at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 17 years, then retreat into the world of pure science and mathematics, where I would discover the source of eternal free energy and develop the faster-than-light drive that would allow our species to colonize earth-like planets circling distant suns.

After developing the elixir of perpetual youth and acquiring my eighth Nobel in Physics and Chemistry I would discover that I had the Healing Touch. Beings from all the intelligent races of the universe would come to my home planet to be restored to health and vigor. Weeping tears of pure petroleum, the Grand Qvzr of Glink would abandon his plans to conquer the galaxy out of sheer gratitude for my having cured his beloved Q'o'osh. I would become legend, then fable, then an object of veneration for all time....

Or then again, I might have become a lady wrestler.

8-8-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What is overclocking and how do I do it? 

--Speed Freak in San Fernando

Dear SF in SF:

Overclocking is a sneaky trick, but that's what companies get for installing such heartless devices as time clocks down at the mill. Years ago a man could sweet-talk the timekeeper in the office and she'd overlook a couple of late arrivals or early departures, but not any more.

The best way to overclock is to work out a deal with one of your buddies-- one of those 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' arrangements. You can punch each other's cards and sometimes gain a whole hour in a day.

The downside is if you happen to get caught. Not only will the foreman fire you on the spot, but he's likely to clean your clock as well....

8-9-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What were the first words transmitted over the Internet?

--Historical in Hannibal 

Dear Historical:

Well, as you know, the first telegraph message was "What hath Garn God wrn wrgt wrot wrought," sent by a very nervous Sam'l Morse, who apparently lisped as well.

The first telephone message wasn't quite as noble: " Oh s**t, I just spilled battery acid on my pants! Mr. Watson come here, I need you. No, no, you sex-crazed fool, you keep *your* pants on! -- that's not why I need you."

With the Internet I'm afraid it descended another notch. The very first e-mail message was sent by Hopworth "Hap" Hazzard, and it was this:

"Sam Tyler, you tell your boy Lemmy to stay away from my sheep, or some night when I see his lily-white ass pumping in the moonlight I'm giving him a 12-gauge rock salt enema."

I can hardly wait for the next great leap in communications technology....

8-10-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Are you a dog person or a cat person?

--Pettable in Punxsutawney 

Dear Pettable:

I'm not partial to either species, to tell the truth. I've never cared for the way dogs look at you when you're naked, and I simply don't trust cats. We had a family cat back in Redbone who did all the charming things cats do, like eating and sleeping, but whenever she slipped out of the house we never could tell where she would wind up. We found her once three counties over, living in a cheap motel under an assumed name with a cocker spaniel. The offspring of that particular affair were truly curious beasts. They would chase themselves up trees, then sit there barking up at themselves until they were rescued.

8-11-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What is a "beta" version? I've often seen references to these things when surfing through computer software sites. And by the way, what's your favorite program?

--Zorba from Zagorsk

Dear Zorba:

"Beta" means "somewhat closer to being finished, yet still not ready for prime time." Software designers, or "nerds," first produce the "Alfred" version, named after the famous MAD magazine character. Then they produce a version that's "beta" than that, and finally the "best," which is the one what's sold to folks.

My favorite program was "Mary Noble, Backstage Wife." I listened to it for years on our old Atwater-Kent back in Redbone. I can still hear the announcer's voice-- "The story that asks the question: Can this girl from a small mining town in the midwest find happiness as the wife of a wealthy, and titled, Englishman"? All us girls would just sob our hearts out over poor Mary's trials and tribulations. I felt really gypped that it never made it over to TV.

8-12-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I took an on-line IQ test. Are these tests reliable? Apparently I have the mental ability of a cabbage. What should I do?

--C. Slaw in Sea Coal 

Dear C.S.:

There's no reason to be embarrassed if your IQ score has flatlined. There are many fields where lack of intelligence is not a handicap, like politics and televangelism. In the former it's almost a drawback.

Surely you can find a group of like-minded people to enjoy life with. Just look around you for people who read the Weekly World News. If they move their lips while they're reading, even better. Or search out people who paint themselves in funny colors before they go to a sporting event, or who are passionate about professional wrestling, or subscribe to the Psychic Dogs Hotline.

Furthermore, take pride in your lack of intellectual depth! Remember what former vice-president Dan Quayle said on the subject: "A mind is a terrible thing."

8-13-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I've noticed that your hair is a lovely shade of fuchsia. How do you keep the color from fading?

--Beautician in Butte

Dear Beauty Boy,

That IS a fuchsia, you lamebrain! So you think I'm one of these durnfool kids with purple hair and a bone through my nose? Think again, sonny. I may be old but I haven't gone foolish quite yet.

As for the fuchsia, I keep it from fading by staying out of direct sunlight and treating it with regular applications of 20-20-20 balanced fertilizer applied with a spray nozzle. Sometimes I even remember to take it off first.

8-14-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Can you explain *streaming video* in terms I can understand?

--Dense in Denton Falls

Dear Dense:

Well, now, in order to understand streaming video you first have to understand the other kind, which ranges from limpid video to stagnant video. Back in the bad old days of the Internet, if we wanted to see, oh, let's say, President Cleveland explaining to the house subcommittee why he chased his 19-year-old fiancée buck naked through the Oval Office, you'd have to download the entire file before you could watch it, and back in those days the fastest transfer rate was only 14 bps. That was *real* stagnant video.

With streaming video you can watch things happen before the entire file has loaded, so you can see that nice Clinton boy explaining to a house subcommittee why he chased his 19-year-old intern buck naked through the Oval Office in what we call "real time." If you have access to the Secret Service tapes on the Oval Office cam, you can watch the chase itself. I don't have the address for it right off the top of my head, but if you do a search for Oval Office Live Cam I'm sure you'll find it.

Today we also have much better sound, which we didn't back then. As a matter of fact the sound was so poor that we all used to gather around the monitor-- or the merrimac south of the Mason-Dixon line-- and make up clever phrases to put into the mouths of the speakers. Young Eb Hutterbee got so good at this he went into vaudeville with an act he called "MST1900."

8-15-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Somebody asked me what the "bawd rate" on my modem was. I looked up the meaning of "bawd" in the dictionary and it refers to a "trollop, strumpet or woman of easy virtue." Have I been insulted, or is this just another reflection of the general decline in American morals?

--Bluestocking in Bluefield 

Dear Bluestocking:

I'm afraid it's the latter, and you have my sympathies if it offends you. The bawd rate for modems was established to predict the amount of time it would take to download a particular piece of pornography. When modems were slower, it might take an entire night to download a single photo, especially if it was a large file because livestock were involved. So manufacturers assigned a bawd rate to their modems based on how fast they could download the racier stuff. The scale ranged from 1 (topless Kate Moss) up to 10 ("Chesty" Morgan, 56FFF and her pony Sylvester Stallion).

With DSL and cable the bawd rate has ceased to have much meaning. The old fool Lester here at the Home frequents sites with names like "Nympho Cheerleaders," "Debbie Does Dallas" and "Madonna Does Everybody Else" and brags that he got a buck-naked Jennifer Lopez into his hard drive in 20 seconds. Of course, that's the only hard drive he's got these days....

8-16-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Does Kyle Cessna like me? he always acts like I'm his girl...and he said in an email that he has a crush on someone but can't say who it is so I was just wondering if he liked me. Please help me! 

Thanks,

--Racine in Racine 

Dear Racine:

Oh, that Kyle-- he's such a vagabond heartbreaker, that boy! The whole Cessna family was like that. I remember Kyle's great-great-grandfather, Clyde, who was a barnstormer back in the days when FAA only meant "flying an airplane." Clyde built his first plane in 1911 strictly for the purpose of picking up girls. He and his Midget Air Aces would swoop into a town, take some sweet young things up for a ride, then abandon them the next morning with hardly a thought. It was a combination of lust and vanity that finally brought about his downfall. He had marked each of his conquests with a notch cut in the wing of his biplane. Eventually this weakened the airframe so much that the wings sheared off while Kyle was trying to avoid anti-aircraft fire from a couple of outraged fathers. He died like a man, though, his joystick firmly grasped in his hand.

Personally I wouldn't trust any of Clyde's descendants. Kyle may say he has a crush on you, but in that family a crush today means a crash tomorrow.

8-17-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I recently spent some time at Area 51 and quickly realized that I was lacking a certain social skill that isn't taught in finishing school. Specifically, what is the proper way to address an alien? I tried "Your Blobness", but that salutation merely enraged the poor bugger.

--Alienated at Area 51 

Dear Alienated:

Well, it's difficult to give advice on alien etiquette without knowing which breed of cat you're dealing with. The saucer people we used to get back in Redbone were the tall skinny variety that always seemed a bit afraid of us, as though we were laboratory animals of some kind. They communicated by telepathy and appeared to think that squirrels were in control of the planet, from the way they treated them. The squirrels were invited into their ship before any of the rest of us were, which certainly made the mayor look foolish, him in his tuxedo and all.

The squirrels got the Universal Cure and the Secret of Immortality, too, and began packing little silver beamers on their tool belts. Anyone who was crazy enough to go squirrel hunting after that never came back out of the woods. All we would find were their teeth fillings and a belt buckle or two. And Old Man Murphy's tin hip joint that they put in over at the VA hospital.

Then the squirrels started dressing up in these cute little metal mesh overalls and walking on their hind feet all the time so they could handle tools better. A bunch of them moved into the library so they would have access to mathematics and physics textbooks. They took over the Redbone Internet lock, stock and barrel and built a big soup-bowl shaped metal contraption on the top of Grandpa's Knob. They seemed real excited when they started getting e-mail from Fomalhaut or someplace like that.

After that the tall skinny saucer people left for good, taking with them Buster Letchpoot for their zoo or something. Good riddance, we said, although I felt sorry for the poor aliens. If Buster ever got hold of some beans and cabbage and beer that spaceship wouldn't be a fit place to raise hogs in, and if there was an open flame they never would have made it out of the solar system.

As for the squirrels, one night in October there was this roaring noise in the sky and the biggest iron pecan you ever saw came down on top of Grandpa's Knob and all the squirrels got on board. The last one turned to us and transmitted a farewell message: "Nuts to you, Earthlings!"

We were never quite sure how he meant that.

8-18-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I was shocked to hear someone in a computer store advising me to upgrade my computer's bias. Is it possible that prejudice has crept into the computing industry? Can't we all just get along?

--Unbiased in Umberton

Dear Unbiased:

Although they try to conceal it, it's true that there's a deep-seated prejudice at the heart of computer technology. Although laws have been drafted in an attempt to give Macintosh users the same rights as regular computer folks, the Computer Conservatives always manage to defeat them. In some small towns you can be locked up for exhibiting your PowerMac to a group of schoolchildren, and it's worth your life to suggest that there's equality between Motorola and Intel chipsets.

Periodically this attitude spills over into violence. Young PC thugs, driven to frustration by repeated system crashes, will carry a microchip on their shoulder toward "applebangers" as they scornfully refer to them. Mac bars are careful to keep a low profile and always keep the iMacs in a back room out of sight. More than once an unruly pack of Windozers have raided the premises and forced the owners to paint these flamboyant machines a nice sensible shade of beige.

Need I mention what happened in Ogden, Utah? That poor schoolteacher who went into the storage area and came out of the closet with a day-glo see-through laptop never had a chance.

Some prejudiced Web sites have even published "clues" for detecting inverts. Are they nervous when confronted by the second button on a mouse? Are they stunned and helpless when a blue screen appears? Do they naïvely ask where the Geneva font is? Do they push random buttons on the keyboard in an attempt to start the machine?

Hopefully someday this will all be a thing of the past, and, in the inspiring words of Steve Jobs, there will come a day when a man is judged not by the color of his case, but by the courage of his code.

8-19-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I've been "pinged".  What should I do?

--Pinged in Pensacola

Dear Pinged,

Pong.  That'll teach them.

8-20-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I couldn't help noticing from your picture on your web site that you are what we call in this PC era, dentally challenged. I thought I would share this link with you, since it's obvious you don't much care for wearing your dentures:

http://www.wackyuses.com/efferdent.html 

Dental in Des Moines

Dear Dental:

Another smart-aleck youngster with a full head of expensive caps, I'll bet. Unfortunately, here at the Home they cut corners on dentures along with everything else. Our store teeth are supplied by a mail order company, http://www.drbukk.com/bukkstyles.html, and you can see what they look like. Would you wear any of these contraptions? I'd rather keep straining my soup through a sock.

8-21-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Why are they called the "dog days of summer"?

--Hottie in Hattiesburg

Dear Hottie:

Many people think that "dog days" has something to do with summertime weather, but it actually commemorates an old Native American custom. Puppies that had been born in the spring were all ready to be harvested by late August and the meat smoked or salted and stored away for the long winter. "Dog days" referred to the holiday feast that accompanied the thinning of the herds. Even today no summertime event would be complete without hot dogs.

In Mexico there was a similar festival involving both dogs and donkeys; the chihuahua is still the international symbol for a taco, and the burrito, of course, can be found in restaurants and grocery stores everywhere these days.

8-22-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Please tell me what this Napster commotion is all about. Do you have a personal opinion about it?

--Pirate in Penzance

Dear Pirate,

You're darned tootin' I've got an opinion about it! Why the Home hired a Napster is beyond me. All of us here are perfectly capable of falling asleep during the day without any motivation or direction. Organized naps are plain silly. If you ask me it's nepotism plain as day. I don't think Harriet the Napster could get a job anywhere on earth, so her relatives hired her on in the Home. I predict she won't last very long. That idiotic recreation director who was organizing wheelchair volleyball tournaments only lasted 3 days before we managed to load her Gatorade with digitalis.

8-23-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I have a font addiction. I have so many fonts saved on my hard drive now that it is practically immobilized for any meaningful work. But I can't give them up, I just can't. Is there a 12 step program for font addicts? I've admitted that I have a problem - I know that's the first step. But I'm kind of clueless about the next 11.

--Flagrante Delicto Ultracondensed in Fontainebleau

Dear FDU:

Well, now, I'm going to have to step up to the pulpit and testify, I guess. It so happens that I am a fellow sinner, hopefully on the road to recovery.

With me it began as a desire to "dress up" a recipe I was sending to an acquaintance who was putting together a cookbook of Arkansas mountain cookery. Muskrat Surprise, I believe it was. I thought I'd just make it a little different by changing the title words to Copperplate. It looked real smart, it did. Little did I know that I was starting down the slippery slope to perdition. Then I went to the FontPool site and downloaded a few more typefaces like Kids and Dom Casual and Friz Quadrata, just to liven things up a bit, telling myself that I could always erase them if I got tired of them.

After a week I was spending 6 hours a day downloading fonts like RubberLips, Splat!, Outtafocus and Strawberry Ripple. I sent an inquiry to the Social Security people in Groucho Embossed with Mambo Heavy initial caps and Razorwire italics. I renewed my subscription to "Deathwatch" magazine in Barberpole Light with RedHot Branding Iron adjectives and BomberJoint Slabserif prepositions. I began leaving notes for the night nurse in Curse of Cthulhu, PeckerTrax and Bo-Peep Industrial.

One day I found myself sending a sympathy note to a recently widowed friend in bright orange 48-point Buckshot Baby Teeth with a neon green drop shadow and I knew I had hit bottom. Fortunately there was Fontaholics Anonymous. After a few weeks of intensive therapy I bit the Bullit Extended and erased every one of them except for Courier. And I am a better woman for it. I suggest you look up the nearest chapter of FA and throw yourself on their mercy. Their One Face At A Time program works wonders.

And you know, Courier sorta grows on you after a while....

8-24-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Are you a political animal?

--Pollster in Poulsbo

Dear Pollster:

Not in the least. To me the current political fuss is just "gorebush in, gorebush out." 

8-25-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What do you think of same sex marriages? Inquiring minds want to know.

--Bidirectional in Baltimore

Dear Bi:

Personally, I don't think much of *opposite* sex marriages these days, what with the divorce rate and all. It used to be that a man and a woman were perfectly happy to live out their lives together in misery, raising warped kiddies and seeking solace in alcohol and laudanum, with only the occasional homicide thrown in. Nowadays youngsters have lost sight of these old-fashioned family values. No wonder marriage licenses are printed on recycled paper!

As for the same-sex kind, the only advantage I can see is that you could wear each other's clothes. If a traditional married couple tried that they'd be the talk of the neighborhood. Most neighborhoods, anyway.

8-26-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What was the very first Internet hoax, and where did it start?

--Gullible in Galveston

Dear Gullible:

I'm semi-proud to say that my little village of Redbone was the home of the very first Internet hoax. Ed "Iron Ears" Landau used the Redbone Internet to spread the rumor that the entire Arkansas congressional delegation had jumped ship and thrown its votes behind Rutherford B. Hayes in the Presidential election.

Now, since Arkansas has been solidly Democratic since the days when mammoths roamed the earth, you can imagine the consternation this caused. The menfolk got likkered up and broke out their shooting irons and swore that this betrayal would not go unavenged. A torch-bearing horde swooped down on Little Rock and the carnage was awful. For years afterward you could see the hides of Republicans nailed up on barn doors throughout the county.

When the hoax was finally revealed, us Redbone folks were certainly embarrassed and contrite, not that it made much difference to the Republicans at that point. One night a bunch of the menfolk got likkered up (this was essential to the functioning of the local political process) and decided to teach Iron Ears a lesson he wouldn't forget. And thus the barbed-wire enema as an indicator of civic displeasure became associated with our town....

8-27-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Who was the great love of your life? How many times have you actually tied the knot? Have you ever untied it? What do you think about no-fault divorce?

--Large Liz in Loma Linda

Dear Liz:

Ah, the memories! I will prudently draw the curtain over my dalliances for the moment. The plain fact of the matter is that I have never been led to the hymeneal altar, as we used to say. Not that I wasn't asked. Like that O'Hara girl in the movie, I had more suitors than an outhouse has flies in summertime. I think it was partly due to my tendency to go skinny-dipping in warm weather. Seemed like every time I did, the bushes around the pond got closer in, and there were more of them. On occasion they almost appeared to move, in a decidedly un-shrubberylike manner.

So every weekend, as you might expect, I had my dance card plumb filled up, and the young bucks were always popping the question to me. A few of them even mentioned marriage. But somehow I was always looking for something better. It was like wandering through a forest looking for the perfect flower. Every time I was tempted to make a decision I decided to wander a bit further in the hopes that an even better one would show up. Then one day I suddenly realized that it was the middle of December and I was clean out of the woods!

As for no-fault divorce, there would be no need of such a thing if there were more no-fault marriages. 

8-28-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I've never had much need for computers (that's what the enlisted men are for), but now that I am retired, I have this thing at home and, by Patton's ivory-handled sidearms, I'm going to master it. The only problem is the de-frag utility. I am deathly afraid of it. As an infantry officer, I saw my fair share of fragging. Indeed, I was a target more than once. Is it possible that this utility program can finish off what so many men tried to start in Nhi Ha? I am so ashamed.

--Captain X., USA (Ret) in Xenia 

Dear Captain X:

Your concern is very real, I'm sure, although somewhat outdated. While it's true that early computers would explode with the slightest provocation, today the defrag utility prevents all but the most lamebrained mistakes on the part of the user (like pressing Ctrl-Alt-F13 while humming the theme to "Friends.") What the Defrag utility does is go through your computer very carefully looking for instances where you almost triggered a fatal key combination. It then sends these key combinations to Microsoft to be placed in your personal file. If you accumulate too many of these fatal key combination errors (FKCEs) you can expect a visit from the Microsoft Security Administration or the Computer Intelligence Agency. Usually late at night.

One of the orderlies here at the Home was looking over my shoulder while I was responding and noticed the name Nhi Ha. He turned all white and began shaking and wanted to know if you had also been at Long Dong. As a courtesy I traced your real name and address and gave it to him, as I think the military male bonding experience is important and should be maintained. He took some hardware items out of his locker and headed for the bus depot. Say hello to him from Aunt Nettie if you see him first.

8-29-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What is wrong with my Active Desktop? I've enabled it on my computer, but my desk still just sits here. Frankly, I was expecting a little more action.

--Bored in Beaumont 

Dear Bored:

Perhaps you'll find the answer in these FAQs that I downloaded from the Steelcase Office Desk Web site:

1. Is your desk plugged in and turned on? A surprising number of service calls result from failure to verify these simple points. Your Steelcase® Active Desktop™ requires a 120v, 60Hz power supply in the USA, 220v, 50Hz in Europe and Asia.

2. Are you running the latest Steelcase software? Your office desk came with a CD-ROM that must be run before the Active Desktop feature will function. Very often moving companies or delivery personnel will forget this vital step, or assume that it's the customer's responsibility.

3. Is your desk chair compatible with Steelcase equipment? Steelcase Office Products recommends its black leather Executive Dominator (or burgundy leather Executive Dominatrix) model for a trouble-free interface with your Steelcase desk. Note that your desk will not function if Eldon, Balt or Leda chairs are used, and use of inappropriate seating hardware may damage your desk or void your warranty.

4. The small slide-out shelf above the top right-hand desk drawer is NOT for holding coffee cups. Your Steelcase Active Desktop cannot function if this feature is locked in the open position or prevented from loading by the presence of inappropriate objects.

5. Is the security lock in the OPEN position? In the middle of the center drawer of your Steelcase desk is the Steelcase Security Keylock™. Try opening this center drawer. If you cannot, this indicates that the Steelcase Security Keylock is functioning normally, preventing unwanted intrusions into your Steelcase product. For the Active Desktop feature to function, you must insert one of the keys that came with your desk and turn it in a clockwise direction until a click is heard and the drawer opens and closes smoothly. If your desk did not come with keys, please contact your company's office maintenance department, or call 1-888-STEELCASE (USA only) for a replacement. The serial number on the plate attached to the rear of the desk is required for replacement keysets.

We hope that these FAQs have solved your problem. If not, please call 1-888-STEELCASE during regular business hours and follow the recorded instructions for reaching our technical support or service departments. Your satisfaction is important to every one of us here at Steelcase Office Products-- the world's largest manufacturer of quality Office Environments™.

8-30-2000

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Every once in a while, my computer pops up a message or command referring to "Twain." I assume that this is a reference to Shania Twain, the very covers of whose albums are a scandal. How can I delete this reference? As Chairwoman of the Friends of Classical Music Consortium in my town, I could well lose my position if it became known that I was involved in any way with lowbrow country music.

--Indignant in Indianapolis 

Dear Indignant:

ROTFLMAO!, as we say in e-mail slang. You'll be pleased to hear that the "Twain" message has a much nobler ancestry than some cowgirl chanteuse. It was developed by none other than Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who became one of America's greatest writers under the pen name of Mark Twain.

Samuel was a big fan of technology. Few people today recall that he was the first author to compose a novel on a typewriter, and his book "An Arkansas Yankee in King Arthur's Court," about time-travel, became an American classic under a slightly different name insisted on by his New York publisher. Samuel spent a great deal of time in Redbone, my home town, where the original Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer lived. Neither of those two turned out well, I might add. Huck was shot during a poker game for possessing a surplus of aces, and Tom met his Maker at the end of a noose after swindling half the town out of their life savings for investment in a spurious South American rubber mine.

Anyhow, Samuel was frustrated when he tried to use the Redbone Internet because it would handle only words. Unbeknownst to the world Samuel had another pseudonym in a completely different field-- he was later known as the reclusive "French" painter Georges Seurat, the so-called inventor of Pointillism. Anyone who's ever been forced to sit through an art lecture knows that pointillism is a technique for creating large-scale paintings by dabbing on itsy-bitsy dots of the three primary colors: gooseberry, tan and mauve. Few people realize that this technique was developed in Redbone through Samuel's experiments to send art over the electrical wires. By assigning a different primary color to combinations of basic bindery code, he was at last able to send his doodles over the wire to Paris where they were reproduced in large panels, the most famous of which is "A Sunday Afternoon by Jat's Pond in Redbone," which the French horribly mangled in the translation, just has they did with his story "The Incredible Jumping Frog of Redbone, Arkansas."

For further information about Mark Twain's adventures in Redbone, see his autobiography, "The Remembrance of Things Past," which was also plagiarized by some Frenchman. I don't know why Europe puts up with those people.

8-31-2000

Chère Tante Nettie:

I was astounded, moi, that you would claim that the estimated Georges SEURAT, one of la belle France's most premiere modernistes, was vraiment a pigment of the imaginativity of your cowboy auteur Samuel "Longhorn" CLEMENTS. That is a lie of such magnitude horrific that I am immediately calling for a buycott of all these McDonalds so-called "restaurants" here in Paris. What they call fries "french" is likewise an insult, and with their "mayonnaise" I would not lubricate my Citroën!

--Bouleversé en Bois de Boulonge

Dear Froggy:

Well, I'm sure it came as a blow to your enormous but misplaced French pride to discover the truth, which is why Sammy insisted on keeping it under wraps for so long. It was perfectly obvious to anybody who took the time to look that "Mark" means "notice' and "Twain" means "two of us." Sammy was really modest about his artwork, especially since it was so avant-garde, as we say over here. I've got the originals back in the town barn in Redbone, if you're interested. What you people have hanging in the Louver is just the color copies that Sammy faxed over while he was working the bugs out of the Redbone image transmission protocol.

As for your slam on McDonalds, this is really funny coming from a country that cooks slugs in garlic and washes them down with wine no Californian would lubricate his dog with.

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