19971219
LONG-LOST NEWS:  |
| Roslin Institute's Dolly |
12/10/1997
OCEAN BEACH (iSpam news service) - Polly, the first "designer" sheep, and Dolly, the sheep whose birth stunned the world in March when she was cloned using an adult cell from the sheep's mammary gland, are merely the first of a herd of super sheep planned for the next two years by a child prodigy in this San Diego suburb.
Tommy Blue, an eight year old gene engineer and graduate of Scotland's Roslin Institute
has revealed his plans to improve upon Polly the sheep. Polly's milk produces Factor IX, important to producing a key blood clotting substance for hemophiliacs.
Blue plans to produce a herd of designer clones in the next two years. According to Blue, "Dolly and Polly are just hints of what I plan to achieve. There is no reason we must limit ourselves to medical problems. For example I plan to clone Jolly, who will be the funniest thing on cable TV since the reruns of Sgt. Bilko!"
Jolly will be implanted with genes from comedians including Phil Silvers, Al Franken, Bob Hope, Milton Berle and Bozo the Clown. "We plan to raise her on a corn-only diet," Blue confided, "though we're positive she'll be the corniest thing on the planet in any case."
Other plans include:
Folly, which will be a politically conscious result of synthesizing Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Robert McNamara and Bill Clinton. Most sheep will follow anything, but Folly will only follow whatever moves right.
Golly, a singing cloned-again mix of Kenny G and Rush Limbaugh will be able to bleat for hours on end without repeating the same note or uttering a cogent sentence.
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19971227
LONG-LOST NEWS:
Curser Starts Here
by Steve Kemp
December 27, 1997
December 27, 1997
OCEAN BEACH (iSpam news service) - I recently purchased voice-to-text software for my PC. The price for this kind of software has at last become affordable and though the software generally works as advertised (I am dictating this), I have the sneaking suspicion that whoever programmed this went to great lengths to make it politically correct -- which, I suppose, is to be expected from "PC" software.
For example, when I dictate the pledge of allegiance, this is what I see:
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States Comerica and to the republic for which it stands one nation under Todd indivisible with liberty and justice for all."
As you can see, this is pretty accurate, except for the "Comerica" and the "Todd". Now, "America" is certainly a word one would expect American software to recognize, don't you think? But no. This software is lending its own coloration to the pledge in order either to express diversity or else pay homage to our corporate overlords -- I haven't figured out which, yet, but this flawed software clearly does not have any sensitivity to the word "America".
Worse yet, one must wonder if the substitution of Todd for God is really a blatant reference to the author of the software (at least the authors of the Macintosh had the grace to hide the authors' names inside the case!) And if so, Todd must certainly have a gigantic ego, for God's sake.
Now, just as a good test of the software's "correctness" (actually out of frustration,) I did my best to express myself in a normal fashion. Sometimes this worked okay, but whenever I tried to express common everyday contemporary working-class notions, somehow the software seemed to sense the incorrectness of this line of thought.
For example, in one of my more frustrated moments I tried in vain to express the way I felt about some of the translations it tended to make, and involuntarily muttered "bullshit". The software rendered "will ship" -- to which I repeated "bullshit" -- this time the software rendered "bullish at" followed by bull shut, bull should, bullish it, bullish yet and bull hit.
Finally, by making the software let me spell it out (bravo-uniform-lima-lima-sierra-hotel-india-tango = bullshit), I was able to force the Victorian-minded logic to accept ordinary everyday American speech.
Now the reasoning behind this software "correctness" may be well-intended, if misdirected, but imagine the confusion that will arise when a business memo that means "bullshit" winds up saying "will ship" or "bullish yet"! This could lead to disastrous snafus -- or "Situation normal, all flocked up."
Some other mis-translations that I repeated over and over to no avail and then had to spell out:
1) "this voting thing is thought -- this booking thing is fountain -- this booking thing is about -- this footing thing is about -- this Hocking thing is plucked -- this hooking thing is dock -- this booking thing is talked -- this working thing is talked -- the shocking thing is thought" (The spelling of this was "this foxtrot-uniform-charlie-kilo-india-november-golf thing is foxtrot-uniform-charlie-kilo-echo-delta", and let me tell you that by the time I say all that, those particular sentiments have lost all their impact... and now I am seething!
2) "Tom talk -- dumb flocked -- dumb flocked -- Tom Fox -- dump truck -- Tom Stockton -- dome thought -- don't thought -- don't flocked -- some thought -- don't talk -- dumb thought" (The spelling was "dumb foxtrot-uniform-charlie-kilo")
Finally I had had enough, and I was sick and tired of spelling.
So when it comes to voice-to-text software my final words were left unspelled: kiss my pass -- kiss my is -- kiss my at us -- kiss my us -- kiss my past -- kiss my an us -- kiss my hands!
Ultimately, after days and days of training my software by reading to it out loud from a Dave Barry piece (all 131 paragraphs, supplied by the vendor,) I did successfully teach my software to recognize my speech with about 85% accuracy -- it could now almost cuss in true American English. And so finally I did come to appreciate my Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, for awhile.
Ed. note: Unfortunately there are still errors whenever I try to use it. And the nature of the beast ensures these errors always pass the spell-checker! That is a step backwards. So, at the end of the day, Dragon NaturallySpeaking could never work for me.... but it was a good try, Todd bless it!
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19971227
LONG-LOST NEWS: It's Official: Eat, Drink and Be Merry!
by Steve Kemp
Saturday, December 27, 1997
(iSpam news service) - The best gift this Christmas was news from the scientists and medicos that contrary to prior studies neither broccoli, iced tea nor celibacy are on the path to long life.
The New England Journal of Medicine reported on December 11th that in the "middle-aged and elderly population, moderate alcohol consumption... reduced overall mortality."
On December 23rd in a study from Harvard Medical School, researchers said that among 832 men whose health histories were traced for 20 years, reduced incidence of strokes was tied to "increases in total dietary fat, particularly saturated and monounsaturated fats, ...such as those found in meat and dairy products, canola, nut and olive oils."
Best of all, in mid-December, 900 old Welshmen offered evidence to British researchers confirming their long held suspicions about the Welsh. Writing in the British Medical Journal, the scientists were delighted to report that the
Our Ocean Beach staff has exhaustively researched and correlated dietary, nutrition, geographic, and legal factors using the above criteria. The vast resources of the Internet have helped us to determine the optimal locale for maintaining healthy lifestyles.
We have made an absolute determination that, due to the availability of cheap prime rib dinners, steak and eggs breakfasts, free drinks and legal brothels, the healthiest place on this planet is Las Vegas, Nevada.
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19971229
LONG LOST NEWS:Microsoft Users To Be Shielded From DOJ "protection"
by S. P. Kemp
Ocean Beach (iSpam news service) -- In a preemptive legal strategem today, computer giant Microsoft made a bid in U.S. District Court to enjoin the Department of Justice from restricting the software maker's right to maintain its long-standing "error trap logic" referred to in the computer industry as Fault Utilization Blunder Application Registration (FUBAR), but known to Microsoft Windows users as GPF (General Protection Fault) technology.
 |
| A FUBAR screen - no worries, this was only a game |
The Redmond, Washington corporation stated, "Windows users have labored intensively to master bootstrapping techniques (the method used to repeatedly restart Windows, ed.), and our extensive marketing research indicates that GPF-less systems would unnecessarily make irrelevant this hard-learned knowledge to the dismay of many loyal Windows users. We believe that consistency is the most important factor in user loyalty. Therefore GPF technology is critical to the operation of our system." Observers noted that GPF technology also keeps the Windows name on the tongues of users, consistent with Bill Gates' assertions that "Any publicity is good publicity".
There is much evidence to support the claim that Windows users worldwide are well versed in GPF technology. Researchers have found ample evidence that Microsoft is serious about this technology, and that its software is heavily dependent upon GPFs. For example, Internet search engines found over 2000 website documents with references to GPFs, and more than 38,000 references were found in Internet newsgroups, including German, French, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Czech and even four Romanian references.
The Microsoft Technical Support Center on the Internet stopped at 1000 references to GPFs since November 30th of this year. The 998th reference exemplifies the ubiquitous nature of this important Windows technology:
------------------------------------------------------
998.
Pressing BACKSPACE in WinWord Document Causes GP Fault
Excerpt from this page: If you press BACKSPACE many times in a document to delete text, Word for Windows may hang (stop responding), and one of the following error messages occur:
Application Error: WINWORD caused a General Protection Fault in module WINWORD.EXE at... (size 11,734 bytes, updated 11/30/97 5:19:44 PM GMT)
------------------------------------------------------In a surprise move, computer makers Sun, Apple and IBM applauded Microsoft's move to protect its Windows operating system, but balked at the notion of integrating GPF technology into Solaris, the Mac or OS/2. According to a spokesperson for the vendors, "Our systems have elements in place that would make it very difficult for us to generate GPFs more often than about once every couple of months or so. But we want to be clear that we back Microsoft's right to provide GPF functionality in every software component they have, and indeed, their track record is clear on this: they are quite accomplished, and by this point in the game they certainly have adequate technical staff to support GPF technology and the depth of experience and knowledge to back it up."
According to Department of Justice insiders, officials were caught by surprise at the announcement, and had worked through the night to prepare a rebuttal. Just as they were making final corrections to their response on their PC, Microsoft Word crashed with no recovery. DOJ is expected to file a typewritten response tomorrow morning in Washington DC.
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19971231
LONG-LOST NEWS:Chicken Soup Balm For Asian Markets?
by S. P. Kemp
Wednesday, December 31th, 1997
 |
| CDC chart of infection cycle |
The press release noted, "While the ongoing slaughter of chickens does have a certain limited local impact on the chickens, there may be a silver lining. In the process of solving the problem of just what to do with a mountain of poultry carcasses, it soon to became apparent that there would be a surfeit of feathers and other valuable by-products including use as poultry feed, which of course will be in great demand as we strive to re-populate the poultry market."
International health observers hastened to point out the bad experience of beef farmers who fed cow parts to their herds of cattle, which was held responsible for Mad Cow disease. But Hong Kong financial pundits dismiss these concerns as counter-revolutionary.
The press release went on to say that Asian entrepreneurs were already making inquiries about the poultry by-products, including queries from Australia and South Korea.
 |
| Mass chicken kill |
Making the most of the up-side of down, an Australian startup has been founded by two students of Charles Sturt University in Darwin, Australia. The pair, graduates of marketing, global trade and environmental management, have targeted the tourists of Mount Evelyn, near Darwin, as the pilot market for a product named the Crook Chook Down Vest, designed for cold weather high-altitude mountain trekkers.
Commerce hungry South Korea is showing an interest in poultry as poultry feed. The cities of Seoul, Pusan and Taegu are prodigious producers of chicken, and have already dedicated an Internet website called Korean Chicken Home, where marketers describe as "mouth watering" the potentially burgeoning market in poultry-fed chicken for starving North Koreans.
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"Yup, he's got it, and I'm not kiddin. Those folks with all the intelligence don't know about it yet, but I've got my own intelligence. I heard it on the radio, you know, yo habla comida Mexicana real good, and in all my years of presidenting I've never heard more convincing evidence. Sure as shooting, he's got it, and he's using it," Bush reportedly said.
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2002409
LONG-LOST NEWS:
Cuban Death Ray Threat
April 9, 2002
by Steve Kemp
Crawford, Texas (iSpam news service) - According to an unnamed guest at George Bush's Texas White House barbecue this weekend, Bush stated that Cuba has a death ray and personally accused Cuba's Fidel Castro of developing a weapon of mass destruction.
 |
| Fidel laughs |
Describing as evidence the fact that Cuba has been completely silent on this issue, Vice President Dick Cheney is quoted as saying, "In fact Castro has never mentioned it even once, and this time he's not going to get away with that."
In Crawford, Bush went on to say, "The death ray is a weapon of mass destruction, because it was used to kill a transmission by the anti-Castro Radio Marti," and described the incident as "a low-down yellow-bellied bushwhack on the mass media and its innocent listeners that they killed it right in the middle of a bunch of little children who were singing the Batista-ista Cubanic national anthem."
According to unnamed U.S. sources in Havana, the Cuban people are reportedly "just laughing" at the quotes.
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20030502
LONG-LOST NEWS:President Denies Codpiece
by Steve Kemp
June 1, 2003
 |
| "All Iraqi combat operation are over" |
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
According to the interview, Marine Corps Lance Corporal Ida May Kisse of Chula Vista, California, was on duty at the pre-flight ready room at North Island Naval Air Station, San Diego. She recounted how Bush, while suiting up prior to the flight, observed Marine pilots who were going to accompany the flight. Kisse said, "He looked a little stirred up and asked his aides to clear the ready room of military personnel. I was the only one allowed to stay, because I was on duty." |
| Bush enhances image? |
She then went to the female pilots' dressing area and returned with a khaki sanitary napkin. According to Kisse, Bush was very pleased with the results and later remarked, "I might have to hunch over a little, but that's okay. This'll make those guys eyes pop right out of their heads."
One of the Marine pilots accompanying him said, "We thought it was funny. We knew he did it, you can see us laughing in the photo."
But the the White House issued a stiff rebuttal stating, "The President wore only regulation olive drab flight gear. The assertion that he would don any kind of theatrical device is pure poppycock."
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LONG-LOST NEWS:
Rumsfeld: Democracy Doesn't Work
20030502
"…that's not the way we want to go." |
| Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld |
Washington D.C. -- Today, former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated, "Democracy just doesn't work" at a conference held privately at Fox News headquarters, when asked how abandoning the promise of Democracy will affect American-Iraqi relations.
Rumsfeld also said, "I'm not talking about the Iraqis. Democracy will never happen there, so how could it ever work there, anyway? No, I am talking about us, the American people, a god-fearing people. Democracy is messy. Now I know, we've had this democratic form of government for a long time in America -- but not as long as the rule of God."
When asked whether he was talking about democracy in the U.S., he said, "Yes. Yes. The U.S. is what I am talking about. Why should godless voters ever want to subvert the laws of the Bible, anyway? I am talking about a higher ruler, here. I am talking about the highest form of government here. Elections can't be trusted anyway, anyone can see that, and having them just gets people's hopes up, unrealistic hopes, and that's not the way we want to go."
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All Stories © 2010 Stephen Kemp. All Rights Reserved.
