2-2-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What do you think of the President's plan to give our tax dollars to faith-based charitable organizations?

--Wary in Gary 

Dear Wary:

It has the potential to be one of the biggest moneymakers of all time. I've already filed my application as the First Church of Nettie, Charitable. I'm frantically working up letterhead and incorporation papers even as we speak. Next week I'll tackle the dogma angle.

It used to be that the Jimmys and Tammys of the world had to swindle hard-working believers for their spending cash. Now the government is putting the pipeline right into their pockets, and I want my share.

You'd be well advised to set up your own church ASAP. This new ruling from Boy George is going to have every voodoo priesthood, sanctified racist, failed Bible salesman and UFO cultist lined up for miles to get their hands in the cookie jar. Remember your Scriptures: "God helps those who help themselves."

I say, Amen!

2-3-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Did you ever smoke? How did you quit?

--Nicotinized in Nicosia

Dear Nicotinized:

Fortunately that was one vice that I passed up, even though a cigarette was the sign of a liberated woman back when I was a flapper instead of a flopper. Inhaling burning dead leaves just never seemed to be the height of sophistication to me.

Of course, Redbone was prime tobacco country, and everyone smoked there, almost from birth. It was nothing to hear a new mother bragging that her little Timmy was up to a pack a day by the time he was weaned. One of the most popular presents for a high-school graduate was an iron lung.

Tobacco, they said, was essential to Redbone's economy, although none of the tobacco workers ever had any money. As soon as the stuff ripened enough to be harvested and cured, a funny thing happened. The workers would show up every day early in the morning even if it was Sunday, or if they weren't being paid at all. It didn't take the growers long to catch on. They dropped the pay rate down to 18¢ a day with no overtime and still the men would work until they dropped, taking deep breaths and coughing their brains out all the while. The worst punishment tobacco workers had to face was being told to stay home, where they would sweat and pace back and forth and chew gum and get all jumpy and snap at people and sometimes even break out in hives until they were allowed to go back to work.

I'll never forget one old man I saw on the steps of the Redbone Employment Security Commission. His whole head was wrapped in tobacco leaves, with eyeholes cut out for him to navigate by. I asked him if he was still working at the tobacco sheds, and what he was doing all wrapped up in Arkansas Burley. He gave me a glum look and said he was trying to quit his job there, and that the leaves were what he called "the patch."

2-4-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I was in a newsgroup and someone posted what looked like Polish and said to use ROT-13 to read it. What on earth is this all about?

--Cryptic in Cryptozooia 

Dear Cryptic:

International espionage agents frequently use ordinary newsgroups to pass along sensitive information to their fellow spies. The reference is to the movie "The Thirteenth Rottweiler" with Bruce Willis and the late Harry Frammis Bunion.

In the movie Willis plays a master spy who develops a code so unbreakable that even he can't figure out how to use it. Driven mad by frustration, Willis's character is thrown into the past when an overloaded script explodes. He spends the rest of his days developing the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring for the Ovaltine corporation, a shadowy cartel in fierce competition with the agents of BOSCO to rule the worldwide dairy enhancement industry.

I suggest you not mess with any ROT-13 messages. By sheerest accident you might unlock the code. Soon afterward you would notice that you were being shadowed by mysterious entities in a variety of clever disguises, including achondroplastic dwarfs, Odd Fellows and Heather Graham impersonators. Then suddenly one dark and stormy night you would be snatched from the arms of your loved ones, spirited away to Latvia in an unmarked 747, rendered down to rat chow and fed to laboratory animals. For me, it's simply not worth the risk.

2-5-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

My cousin told me you were a great source of free information that we could use to avoid doing homework assignments. I'm supposed to find the origin of the word "eavesdropping" for English class, and that means using one of those really thick dictionaries with all the pages, I think, or maybe even finding out where the library is. Can you help me out?

--Eddy Mological in Edmonton 

ps/ Please hurry as it was due yesterday and I don't think Mrs. Peduncle is going to buy the "dog ate my homework excuse" four times in a row.

Dear Eddy:

Aunt Nettie is always happy to help young urchins avoid their scholastic responsibilities. That way when you repeat the grade next year you'll pay closer attention, won't you?

Well, my sources say that the word goes all the way back to the 11th century, imagine that! It originated in the woodworking trade, of all places.

After a medieval carpenter finished building the eaves of a house he would haul them into place with a rope before securing them in place. On occasion the weight of the eaves would be too much for the carpenter; the eaves would drop and the carpenter would be hauled into the air, hanging there until he was rescued by a co-worker, or "cow-orker" as they were called in those days.

While hanging from the rope, the suspended carpenter often heard ribald conversations in adjoining houses, which he would repeat to his cow-orkers when he was back on the ground, much to their amusement. Eventually "eavesdropper" came to mean anyone who deliberately hung by a rope at eaves-level (called eventide near the seashore) to listen in on conversations. This is also why to this day we look for "dependable" carpenters: those who may be depended from a rope to gather gossip.

A related word that's come down to us from medieval times is associated with the training of carpenters' apprentices: if they were caught eavesdropping instead of working they were quite obviously "suspended from the school."


-- The Big Book o' Dubious Facts & Disinformation (London & Bombay, 1986)

2-6-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

February is Black History Month. Was there an African-American presence in Redbone? I'd love to hear about it.

--Melanic in Melbourne

Dear Melanic:

I should say so! Since Redbone was known as the "Crossroads of the Ozarks,"
we had people from all over-- silk merchants, spice traders, explorers, settlers, missionaries, insurance salesmen and I don't know what-all.

I've mentioned Old Hephzibah, who had been the housekeeper for Georgie Washington way back when. She and most of the Afram community descended from Jamaicans who had come over as part of an farm exchange program. You see, Georgie wanted to start raising hemp as a cash crop, since the Navy had a dire need for rope, and the British were threatening to cut off the supply to the former colonies. Without rope the sailors would have nothing to make knots out of, which was the principal occupation of sailors back in the days of the clipper ships.

Now everyone knew that the best hemp came from the Caribbean, so Georgie dispatched several agents to locate a group of hemp-growers who could be persuaded to relocate to the new Republic and teach local farmers the techniques of raising the crop. To avoid arousing the suspicions of the British these families were described on their passports as "master-farriers."

As it turned out, Redbone had the ideal growing conditions for this kind of hemp, which the Jamaicans called "sensimilla," or "tough rope" in their language. So they settled in. The first crops were sown and there was a magnificent harvest, which was duly stripped of its leaves and sent to the Naval rope works in Massachusetts. The Jamaicans carefully saved the leaves of the female plants for their own household use, which we were introduced to when the Jamaicans celebrated the hemp harvest festival and invited the entire town.

The festival was a huge success. You haven't lived until you've heard the "Star-Spangled Banner" rendered on steel drums and set to a reggae beat. Then they broke out the pipes, and before long the solid citizens of Redbone began acting in a most peculiar way. The Calvinist minister stripped to his skivvies and did backup vocals for 'Zombie Jamboree." Miss Prunella, the librarian, won the limbo contest. The Daughters of the Future American Revolution invented the Wet Bodice contest. Oh, it was a sight to behold!

Now, you'd expect that the next day, when reason took hold again, that there would have been a universal sense of mortification, and that the Jamaicans would have been ridden out of town on a rail. In fact, just the opposite occurred. Now that everybody had seen each other with their hair down, so to speak, there was instead a universal sense of camaraderie, and the Jamaicans were immediately made citizens of Redbone. In appreciation they generously donated several large bricks of smoking mixture to the town, which became known as the "keys to the city."

The Jamaicans' influence eventually permeated the town, and Redbone smoking mixture became the official cash crop, exported to all the colonies disguised as tea, which led to the famous Boston Tea Party, where the American patriots got wrecked and threw the British into the harbor to the cry of "Taxation without representation is FUBAR"! 

2-7-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

You never talk about your family. What were your parents like, and did you have any brothers and sisters?

--Geneological in Gender Gap

Dear Geneological:

Oh, who wants to hear an old lady prattling on about her kinfolk? But just for the record I'll mention that I was an only child. My momma ran off with a railroad brakeman soon after I was born and my father was of the "once bitten, twice shy" persuasion. I was mostly raised by the kindhearted folks of Redbone, since Father was preoccupied most of the time.

You see, he was a preacher man by trade, but he was in the wrong business, since he was a merchant through and through, heart and soul. Worse yet, he represented a faith that was pretty far off the beaten path, religion-wise. Essentially he was a Baptist, like all the other preacher folk in the territory, but specifically he was a ante-lapsarian, pre-destinarian, post-millennial, trans-tribulation Rapturist with pronounced pentecostalist tendencies. It was a splinter group, and his particular splinter had fallen rather far from the old rugged cross, you might say.

In any case, he was obsessed with the rapid delivery of a standardized faith package. He had all the right ideas: drive-in chapels, menu lists of sins and blessings, even an instant baptism technology he called Dunkin' Dogma. His First Church of Fast Faith had neon long before the movie theatre and gas station did, and Bingo, too.

He had specials like the Big Tub o' Forgiveness on Saturday nights, suitable for the absolution of a whole family, even including the hired hands. He gave out trading stamps which you could collect and use for appliances and housewares and such at his Redemption Center.

Unfortunately his ideas were way too far ahead of his time. Now, if he had applied those same ideas to food instead of religion, he would have beaten out McDonalds by 50 years and today I would be writing this from the family villa on the Riviera, rather than in a low-budget wrinkle ranch.

2-8-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Where can I hire a Net Nanny? Are there Net Nanny agencies? I'd prefer one that can guarantee the Nanny's US citizenship.

-- Loco Parentis in Los Palamos 

Dear Loco:

You seem to have two concepts confused. There's a software product called Net Nanny® which allegedly keeps the kiddies away from nude volleyball tournaments and naked newscasters, although any horny 12-year-old can work around it in less than a minute. It's what we in the industry call a Parental Feel-Good Product.

There is, however, a similarly named product, NyetNanny® created by out-of-work Russian robotics and software engineers. The NyetNanny is about four feet tall, of indestructible carbon-fiber construction, with built-in 360° vision and surround sound, and is designed to provide either permanent or temporary child care services. No green card is needed, and the robot (the inventors prefer the name "synthetic harridan") speaks flawless English as well as a dozen other languages. Its four hydraulically-powered steel claws can resolve any sibling dispute instantly, and it comes with a variety of blunt trauma devices ("behavior reinforcement tools" in the catalog) to maintain order and discipline in the absence of adult supervision.

Especially attractive to doting parents who are pressed for time is the "obedience belt" which is unremovable without a special key and can deliver electric shocks ranging from a warning tickle to the 50,000-volt Grand Slam. One proud parent reportedly that NyetNanny toilet-trained her toddler in 10 minutes flat, the only drawback being the psychosis.

NyetNanny households are characterized by extreme quiet and none of the usual childish horseplay. After a few days children prefer staring at a blank wall in a near-catatonic stupor, which also reduces time wasted in front of the television set.

Optional add-ons include Belittling Tapes, Verbal Abuse Programs, Plug-in Personality Eradicators and the 120dB NO! chip with bass boosters which cannot be shouted down as long as the power supply is uninterrupted. (California residents are urged to purchase an additional battery pack.)

2-9-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What type of printer do you recommend? I'm undecided between ink jet and laser. Jets? Lasers? Neither of them sounds particularly safe.

--Timorous in Timor 

Dear Timorous:

I feel your pain. You might want to advance to the latest technology, the Dot Matrix printer, which has the safety and reliability of a typewriter.

Dorothy Matrix had been traumatized by exactly the situation you describe. After being blinded in one eye by a disgruntled laser printer and deafened in one ear by a runaway ink jet, she took her generous settlements from the responsible companies and started a printer research foundation in Redbone. She and her married sister Daisy studied all the latest methods of applying text and images to paper, from low-impact aerobic printing to high-stepping Struthers machines.

She finally came up with the printer which bears her name. It uses a simple typewriter ribbon as a source of ink, and between 9 and 24 tiny needles to form the letters and numbers.

Now, if you're the slightest bit belonophobic, you have nothing to worry about. The needles, as I said are tiny, and appear and disappear in a fraction of a second. Even if you somehow managed to get your finger or thumb in the way you wouldn't feel a thing, they move so quickly.

This anesthetic quality has led Dorothy and her sister to patent a spinoff device, the Ten-Second Tattooer, which they have begun to franchise to tattoo artists and biker dudes. There's also the Matrix Booth, which is fully automatic, requires no operator, and is sure to be a hit at malls and amusement parks. By simply choosing a preset pattern, or entering one of your own invention and pressing a button, the Matrix Booth will painlessly and permanently apply a full-color tattoo to any part of the body in seconds. Watch for them in your neighborhood.

However I must caution you against confusing them with the *other* Matrix Booths, which will not only fail to tattoo you, but will absorb you into their software before you can say "Operator."

2-10-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Yesterday you mentioned "belonophobia," which I believe means a fear of eating baloney. What exactly did that have to do with the subject at hand, which was computer printers? And why would anyone fear eating baloney in the first place? I love the stuff!

--Oscarmeyerite in Osceola

Dear Oscarmeyerite:

Baloney is right! If you'd taken the time to look it up in your funkn' Wagnalls, you'd have discovered it was a fear of needles, and perfectly in context.

There are phobias for just about any situation, from Ablutophobia -- which has nothing to do with Popeye, you may rest assured -- to Zoophobia, which has only a marginal connection with zoos.

People who are considering developing a phobia usually pick one of the easy ones, like Claustrophobia -- which has nothing to do with the North Pole-- or Acrophobia -- which has nothing to do with word puzzles. Going begging are whole fleets of really cleverly named phobias which anyone can adopt.

For instance, there's the lovely Porphyrophobia, or fear of the color purple, either the book or the movie. Then there's Zemmiphobia, fear of the giant mole rat, which is found only in Sumatra, so it's not going to be much of a fear in this hemisphere. A Sciophobic is afraid of his own shadow, while a Thaasophobic is afraid of sitting on his.

Something we see constantly here at The Home is Taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive. Relatives looking for an inheritance and morticians and casket salesmen looking for a quick buck are a deadly combination. That's why most of the heavy sleepers have MedicAlert tags that suggest checking for heartbeat and respiration before unrolling the body bag. 

2-11-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

You mentioned that "Dot" Matrix invented the printer named after her. Did she also invent the "dot" in dot.com?

--Periodic in Parsippany 

Dear Periodic:

No, that was a different Dorothy, also a Redbone resident. Dottie Pearson was a maiden lady who worked in the Redbone public library all her life, and was one of the most colorless individuals I've ever met. If she was standing stark naked at the bottom of an empty swimming pool you'd have to look twice to see her.

Dottie had a hobby though, that she managed to work up into a paying business. She invented the "connect the dots" game for children that became so popular. She had the foresight to copyright the dot, and you can imagine our surprise when we went to register our dot.com idea for the Redbone internet and discovered that meek little Dottie had an unbreakable claim to the dot. Everyone who uses dot.com has to pay her estate for the privilege.

Yes, her estate. Poor Dottie came down with a dreadful case of measles during an epidemic. Deranged by fever she tried to connect her own dots with a lead pencil and died of blood poisoning. And, as her German doctor said, dot was dot.

2-12-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What were some of the games you used to play as a child back in Redbone, long before there was television or radio or other distractions?

--Recreational in Recanati 

Dear Recreational:

Oh, my! You're really testing an old lady's fading memory with a question like that.

We played all the old standards that had been passed from child to child down through the millennia, like Hide-and-Seek, Ringaleveo, Simon Says, Mother May I, Tag, and Skip-rope, among others. I wonder if children still play those games in the Pokemon era?

Then there were games unique to our rural upbringing and cultural background, like Goose! Goose! -- Duck! Which was played with a goose and as many bricks as we could carry.

And Crack the Whip, a recess game which has been immortalized in a painting, I understand. In this game a bunch of kids would form a line holding hands. Then everyone would run as fast as possible in one direction. All of a sudden the leaders would change direction abruptly, causing the rest of the line to speed up, with the one on the tail end of the "whip" sometimes hitting a speed of over a hundred miles an hour before impacting a tree or the side of the school.

And who else out there remembers Slap Jack? I've heard that in other parts of the country this was a card game, but in Redbone it involved finding a kid named Jack and slapping him silly. At the end of the game our hands would be red and stinging and Jack would look like underdone meatloaf, if meatloaf could bleed from the ears.

Finally there was Hop Scotch, which was played by the older boys, who would pick up all the leftovers from the hop harvest, ferment them with grain and molasses, then distill the results. This "Hop Scotch" was then consumed in quantities late at night before the boys would sow their wild oats by burning down barns, dynamiting cattle and derailing the midnight freight.

Yes, those were innocent days back then. So unlike these violent times.

2-13-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I'm concerned about all the recent news reports about genetically engineered foods. Do you think we're really at risk, or is this just media hype?

--Organic in Oregon 

Dear Organic:

I'm not too worried. I think the documentaries "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" and "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago" were playing to their viewers' baser fears in an attempt to build audience share.

I know that I've mentioned Redbone's early activity on this subject. One of the scientists at the Redbone Institute of Technology added octopus genes to a common fruit and got a self-peeling orange. That was one of the ones that worked. Not many of the other experiments were what you might call successes. Adding bombardier beetle genes to a Doberman to improve its aggressiveness literally backfired, to the great detriment of the dog.

And no one would ever forget what happened when they added Mexican hairless genes to the sheep, hoping to get a breed that would shed its fleece in one piece. That part worked well enough, but nobody had ever dreamed that all other nearby wool would be affected as well. After hundreds of impromptu stripteases throughout the town, the demand for cotton sent farmers' profits through the roof.

But the biggest disaster was adding hydrogen-producing bacteria to watermelons. Oh, they got their wish-- by September every watermelon patch was filled with thousands of hovering watermelons, swaying gently in the breeze, tethered to the earth by their vines. There were a couple of problems, though. After the harvest you had to keep the melons on strings or in a closed container or they were gone. Of course the melons that escaped soared up as high as they could go, until the bacteria was killed by the cold. With the hydrogen supply cut off, gravity took over, and suddenly 15- or 20-pound frozen watermelons were coming out of the sky over major population centers from 60,000 feet, with predictable results.

The other problem was weather-related. Boondoggle Dungcaster waited a bit too long to harvest, hoping for maximum size and sugar content. He forgot that the bacteria fed on sugar as well, and pretty soon he had thousands of VERY large, round, hydrogen-packed watermelons straining at their vines like barrage balloons. As he was frantically gathering the hired hands for an emergency harvest a thunderstorm came up, and that was all she wrote, as we used to say. Lightning plus hydrogen under pressure makes for some pretty spectacular fireworks, and when you have 30 acres jam-packed, it only takes one bolt to do the job.

They never found Boondoggle or his hired men, nor his barn, tractor or anything else except a flattened anvil two counties over. The townspeople did the best they could, though, and after the crater filled in completely they named it Dungcaster's Lake in his memory.

So to answer your question, you can go organic if you want to, I suppose. But have you actually tried to find an IN-organic carrot or apple? Think about it.

2-14-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Will you be my valentine?

--Love-Struck in Los Sueños

Dear Love-Struck:

Oh, fiddlesticks, I'm way to old for that nonsense. And romance has been dead since young women realized that the whole free milk concept was okay as long as it was good for the cow.

No, we computer junkies have a much better occasion to celebrate on February 14th, for that was the day in 1946 when ENIAC, the very first electronic computer developed outside of Redbone was turned on. ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, used 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 30 tons and took up 3 entire floors of a building. It used as much power as 500 homes, and was able to run for as much as 5 minutes before a tube burned out, screaming along at a blinding 5.0 kHz. At that speed it would have taken about 6 weeks to get to Level One of "Quake."

So let Aunt Nettie be the first to wish all of you out there a Happy ENIAC Day! And if you happen to be carrying out a passionate affair over your corporate intranet, remember that it's perfectly okay so long as it's as good for the client as it is for the host.

2-15-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Do you believe in ghosts?

--Haunted in Hauptsberg

Dear Haunted:

Living as I do in the Home, the "last exit before the Last Exit," I certainly do. Most of us here are just ghosts who insist on continuing to move and breathe occasionally.

And since, as I've mentioned, this place used to be a Mortician's Training School, we have more than our usual share of bogies and haints and spectres and whatnot. So many things go bump in the night around here that I believe they have to take numbers just to be fair.

The oldest resident ghost is the Lady in Mauve, a Victorian ghost who refuses to get on when the Long Black Train pulls in at midnight each night.

Oh, yes, about the train. I should explain that the Mortician's Training School had its own railway spur that delivered the dead to the school and took away the processed and casketed remains to the cemetery. Because of local superstitions about the Graveyard Special the train always arrived at the stroke of midnight to unload one cargo and take on the other, its lights out and whistle muffled to a low moan.

Its last run was in September of 1947. As luck would have it on that very day the tunnel at Struther's Mountain, which had been built during the Civil Disturbance in 1864, finally called it a day too and collapsed, walling up the train and its crew forever.

Yet the next night the train showed up right on schedule, scaring the bejesus out of the night watchmen, one of whom was never right in the head after that.

They tore up the tracks and tore down the old receiving shed, but that old ghost train never blinked an eye. Ever since then at midnight it shows up whenever we have a death here at the home, which is about as regularly as clockwork, given the antiquity and sad state of repair of our residents, not to mention the quality of the food. That same night, at the stroke of midnight, the Long Black Train silently glides in and pauses, while the ghostly brakeman swings down and checks his watch, then waves his dull red lantern for the journey to continue. Now and then you can watch the recently departed climb on board and join all those other dark shapes flitting behind the windows.

Yet the Lady in Mauve, standing primly in the air on what used to be the station platform, never gets on. Every April 15th the fireman climbs down from the engine, glowing as red as his firebox, and appears to argue with her, then picks up his red-hot shovel and moves back to his place again as the train glides away.

Now, as you might suspect, there's an interesting local legend behind all this, but it will have to wait until tomorrow to relate, as it's close to "lights out" here at the Home and I have to shut down before they pull the switch.

2-16-2001

Ghost Story, conclusion:

Well, as I said yesterday, I decided to look a little deeper into the story behind the Lady in Mauve and her relationship with the Long Black Train. Elmira Ratscomber remembered hearing the tale as a child, since her father was the stationmaster in Redbone back then.

Turns out that the Lady in Mauve is the shade of none other than Wilhelmina Gandydancer, ardent Presbyterian and housekeeper at Miss Ruggles' Ladies' Boarding House on Dunpluckett Street. Wilhelmina routinely went into the wicked big city of Little Rock to purchase dry goods and supplies, and on one of those occasions she was seen by Nehemiah Poolsby, the railroad fireman, who was so taken by her that the locomotive firebox was a pale glow next to his burning ardor.

Nehemiah got himself real spiffed up one Saturday afternoon and asked permission to call on Miss Gandydancer, bringing her flowers and chocolates in the best courting tradition of those bygone days. Wilhelmina was flattered with his attentions, and she was drawn to the handsome, albeit slightly toasted features of the young fireman. Finally one evening he popped the question, which put her in a real dilemma. You see, by tradition railroad men were married by the railroad company's parson, and the ceremony was held in the meeting room in the basement of the stationhouse. And Wilhelmina had a lifelong fear of marrying beneath her station.

So she hemmed and hawed and put him off for months in an agony of uncertainty. Finally he gave her the ultimatum: he would meet her at the Redbone Station when the noon train came through, and she would either give him the answer he wanted or he would hop a freight and be out of her life forever.

Well, Wilhelmina thought and thought, and finally decided that she would agree. Dressing in her finest mauve dress, the color which was all the rage that year, she went to the station at noon to bestow her hymeneal assent upon Nehemiah.

Alas, the following morn was the first day of the newfangled Daylight Savings Time, which fell on April 15th back in those days. Worse yet, the train ran on unconsolidated railway time, so they missed each other by a full 2 hours, even though to their minds they were each right on time. Heartbroken, Nehemiah hopped a freight to the West coast. Unfortunately he missed his step and what was left of him they picked up with a blotter and buried in a cigar box. Bereft, Wilhelmina resigned herself to an embittered spinsterhood and died a few years later of an opium overdose during the cholera epidemic.

And so both of them haunt the long-gone railway station, and every April 15th Nehemiah attempts to persuade her to board the Long Black Train, and every year she politely declines and says she'll wait for the noon train.

And that is the story of our resident ghost.

2-17-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

Whoa! I just came across a couple of references in my computer manual to "hot swapping" and I am still in shock. My late husband, the Colonel, would not be amused.

--Straight Lacey in St. Louis 

PS: Is there a chat room for hot swappers?

Dear Lacey:

This isn't anywhere near as rowdy as it sounds.

It simply refers to "Plug and Play" technology, where you can pick up any piece and get it operating smoothly with a minimum of commitment.

No, that's not right... it's a way that you can get your units working together regardless of what platform you're using.

Um... it's a way for you to switch AC/DC functions without having to power back up again....

Let me try an example: suppose you've worn out your floppy and want to replace it with a new hard-- Ahem. I agree with the late Colonel. This is nothing for proper folks to fool around with. You're on your own for a chat room.

2-18-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What is your position on gun control?

--Charlton in Charleston

Dear Charlton:

Simple. I think men should be prohibited from owning them, and women required to carry them. It would certainly make life easier all around.

It would also spark a fashion revolution, I believe. Gucci and Coach and other companies would get into the holster business pretty quickly, and you'd see the rise of the dual-purpose brassiere, with sizes like .38-calibre "D". We could expect to see a whole new generation of supermodels based on Annie Oakley.

Less well-endowed women could take advantage of the double-barreled "Blunderbra," which would come in various sizes up to the 12-gauge "DollyP." This would be fully supported by the NRA, which has always defended the right to arm bras.

Gun companies would have to swing their advertising and design departments around 180 degrees, of course. You'd see ads with tag lines like, "Made for a woman, yet strong enough to take down a man," and "If Nature didn't, Smith & Wesson will." And, of course, it would bring a whole new meaning to "Winchester."

2-19-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

My hobby is collecting idiomatic words and expressions. Were there any words you can remember that were unique to Redbone?

--Verbal in Verbena 

Dear Verbal:

I'm not sure if they qualify as "idiomatic" or not, but we had some that I've never heard anywhere else.

Like the thing on the front of an old locomotive was called a "bullscuttle" instead of cowcatcher. An old motorcycle was a "grannywhapper." Day-old baked goods were "crunchmuffins." The restaurant critic in the local paper was a "slamgravy," and the local speech therapist was a "stutterbuster."

We called an overachiever a "busthumper." A ventriloquist was a "slingpatter." A trombone teacher was a "tootertutor."

There were lots more that I can't repeat in a family publication. Let's just say that nobody ever bought a condom with a straight face.

2-20-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I'd like to sell my soul to Satan pronto. Is there a way I can do this on-line?

-- Cashless in Cashman

Dear Cashless:

I'm afraid the Internet has been the ruin of the ancient and respectable business of soul-selling. People like Faust and Simon Magus could demand a king's ransom for signing up with Lucifer. Even in our own time Bill Gates or Bill Clinton could have wealth and fame and power by signing on the bloody dotted line.

With the Internet all that has changed. There's such a glut of people wanting to sell their souls that the market has been ruined. Just the other day some youngster offered up a prime soul on E-bay and the highest bid was only $20.40. I've heard that His Satanic Majesty has been receiving so many e-mails that he had to set up an auto-responder to explain that he was only accepting donations at this point. And I see that he's pulled the plug on www.sellyoursoul.com.

My advice to you is to hang onto it and hope that the market rebounds.

2-21-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

There was a rumor e-mailed to me that NASA has perfected a warp drive and is keeping it from the public. Is this true?

--Trekkie in Trebizond

Dear Trekkie:

Now, it stands to reason that if NASA was able to keep anything from the public it would have done a world-class cover-up of most of the recent Mars missions, no?

Stories like this have been around since the Neanderthals accused the Cro-Magnons of hiding the secret to the Perpetual Flame in order to prop up firewood prices. Back in my day it was the Everlasting Light Bulb that Tommy Edison had bought up to keep from the public, or the 200-Mile-Per-Gallon Carburetor that was being suppressed by the oil companies or the car companies, depending on who you listened to.

When you get right down to it, there's no need for a warp drive, since no self-respecting advanced civilization would ever spend time and money pushing tin cans through space at whatever speed. Human beings are the only sentient species who don't have the capacity for telepathy and teleportation. That's the reason why SETI and other programs like it are never going to find radio signals coming in from space: it's like looking for smoke signals from the moon.

If you're curious about just why we can't develop a warp drive, check out http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm.

If, however, you're convinced that this site is just a NASA red herring, another site will be more to your taste: http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/ 

2-22-2002

Dear Aunt Nettie:

For a homework assignment I have to write something about Melanoma. I can't even find it on a map. What can you tell me about it?

--No Scholar in Nova Scotia 

Dear No:

Here's what it says in "The Guy Tourist's Guide to Spanish Coastal Getaways."

"Ah! Beautiful Melanoma, the undiscovered treasure of the Spanish Mediterranean coast. Come with us now down the streets of sun-baked bricks, past the tavernas and the gazpacho stands, out to the stunningly pure pink sands and wave-washed beaches of the Costa del Sol. The road along the first stretch of the coast is at the foot of the la Contraviesa Sierra, which reaches into the province of Granada, running parallel to the shore and skirting the beaches and mountain spurs.

"La Rabita is a good point of departure: an ancient fishing village in the comforting shelter of a small fortress surrounded by cultivated land. A little further on, after leaving behind a stretch of rocky coast, the traveler reaches La Melanoma, a picturesque seaside village hidden from view of all but the cognoscenti.

"In addition to the folklore provided by the unwashed but noble peasants, it is also possible to reach the heart and soul of Andalusia through the popular celebrations. The fiestas, the Holy Week Inquisitions, flamenco competitions, the burning of the Jews, and knife fights to the death are probably the best recommendations for the travelers who are not satisfied with the first thing they come across. Taste the wines of the region in charming wineries from other times. Try the pescadito (deep fried McFish fillets) prepared in accordance with the demanding rules of traditional cooking-- or stick with the ever present "international cuisine".

"Then to the beach, shedding clothes and inhibitions under the burning azure sky of Melanoma. A special treat is watching the delectable young native boys diving for coins-- their tanned and smoothly-muscled nude bodies, oiled with the virginal pressings of the olive, rippling through the water. And what they won't do for a peso! For 2 pesos they throw in the use of a mule, and then..."

I'm sorry, the title of the book is "The GAY Tourist's Guide to Spanish Coastal Getaways." I'd leave out the last paragraph unless your teacher is of the lavender persuasion....

2-23-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I was reading an article about global warming and came across the expression "canary in a coal mine." Since when did canaries start living in coal mines?

--Amazed in Amherst 

Dear Amazed:

In ancient India a canary was sent into a mine to see if there were any pythons lurking about. If the canary never returned, it was considered bad luck to enter the mine.

If the canary returned, but had a sly look on its face, it generally meant that the canary and the python had worked out a deal to lure men into the mine, since a man is a much bigger meal than a canary.

The left hind foot of a python was considered lucky in some parts of India, whereas canaries were generally disregarded as a noisy nuisance, from which we get the expression 'the yellow peril,' a curse used by the ancient Dravidic Indian clans to wish a night full of canary noise upon their enemies, making it impossible for them to sleep, not to mention the mess they left on the cars in the morning.

2-24-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I was in a bookstore lately looking for some titles for my niece's 9th birthday. What on earth has happened to children's publishing? Some of the titles alone made me blush. And who on earth is "Captain Underpants"?!

--Floored in Florida 

Dear Floored:

The problem is that, instead of being merely entertaining, kids' books these days are supposed to be "relevant." And you haven't seen anything yet-- wait till you hit the Young Adult section. Here's a sample:

* Nancy Drew and the Clue in the Condom

* Goosebumps-- or HIV?

* Ramona Jones and the Case of the Funny Uncle

* The Bobbsey Twins' Bondage Adventure

* The Hardy Boys and the Bomb at the Prom

* Trench Coat VI: Encyclopedia Brown Is Mad as Hell and He's Not Gonna Take it Anymore

* The Candystriper Who Couldn't Say No

* Harriet Spice

As for Captain Underpants, I suspect he's in league with that Harry's Potty person.

2-25-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

What's a Hit Counter? Does it hurt?

--Wuss in Wisconsin

Dear Wuss:

It depends entirely on the context.

In boxing it's the person who collects statistics for the judges. Relatively painless.

In the recording industry artists are paid whenever one of their songs are played on the radio or the TV, and they're paid more for popular songs. There are people who listen to the radio or TV all the time and tally up the number of popular songs played to ensure that the artists are paid fairly. Painless, though boredom and hearing problems have to be taken into account.

Among good-looking young women it's an index of relative sexiness. Only painful for the rejectee.

Among hired killers it's an index of success. Only painful for the victim.

The only case I can think of where it would be painful is if you physically expressed your dissatisfaction while arguing over the bill in a diner.

2-26-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I went to a Turkish restaurant with some friends the other night. The waiter kept calling everybody "offendi." Was that a veiled insult, or does it mean something polite in Turkish?

--Dubious in Dubuque

Dear Dubious:

I believe the word is "effendi." It was used a lot in those 1930s movies that were supposedly about the Middle East but were all filmed on a Hollywood sound stage with Dorothy Lamour in a sarong.

According to my copy of 'The Colonial Master's Guide to Dealing With Natives and Other Livestock,' (London & Bombay, 1793), in the chapter entitled "Acceptable Forms of Abasement," the word was originally applied as a form of slavish devotion to Turkish pashas.

When the infinitely more elevated British arrived in India, it was extended to any white person, and generally accompanied by genuflection, prostration, or ritual head-banging against the earth to show abject submission to a superior. During Queen Victoria's Jubilee Year it was customary for native leaders to strike themselves on the side of the head with bricks while talking to anyone in authority.

2-27-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

I know that Redbone was rather far from the Mississippi Delta, but I keep finding references to Redbone and the delta blues in my musicology research. What's the story?

--Musical in Musenyi 

Dear Musical:

Well, there was and there wasn't a delta blues influence. The story is that it wasn't the Mississippi delta, it was the mathematics department at the Redbone Institute of Technology, which had a fairly successful blues band and actually put out a record, "Delta-t Blues: the Calculus of Heartbreak."

It included some of their favorite mathematically-based tunes, such as:

'Hammerin' Vector Breakdown'

'Mama Don' Allow No Transfinite Calculatin' Roun' Here'

'Daddy Was a Tesseract Man'

'Godel's Hotel'

...and that tribute to the great bluegrass man Al Einstein, 'You Can't Come Back Till You've Gone Away Without Causin' a Dimensional Loop an' Consequent Spatiotemporal Paradox,' first recorded on the flip side of his 'I Killed My Own Grampaw Again' originally released on the Parallel Universe label.

2-28-2001

Dear Aunt Nettie:

You said that you have an old gent there at the Home who writes haiku. Does he have any cat haikus? I collect cat poetry and would love to find some in that form.

--Poetic in Port Orchard

Dear Poetic:

You're referring to Bashful Basho, Jr., over in the men's wing. I sent him an e-mail and it turns out that, although he specializes in computer haiku, it turns out he has quite a few cat haikus, mostly dedicated to Murfreesboro, one of our resident cats:

The shortest distance
Between any two places:
Across the keyboard!

Nudge it to the edge
Watch it shatter on the floor.
Cat gravity test!

Toke deep on catnip
Topple splat off the sofa
What's so damn funny?

Fish in a fishtank:
The water is revolting;
The sushi divine.

Furious human...
Well, if it's not a cat toy,
Why call it a mouse?

Two hours 'til dawn.
Wonderful time for cat games!
Twhack! -- cat overruled.

I sleep all day long.
The human drags in half dead.
Evolution-- HA!

For going to the vet
I make certain the car seats
Are duly punished.

There's a dog next door.
It must do tricks to get food.
Pathetic canine!

I am a cat god.
When I climb up the curtains,
Bas-Tet! cries human....

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