Hold your horses! First, this semi-rant...
It's not so much that I think these things are funny. Some are, some aren't. But I receive them from various places: Usenet, the UC Martial Arts Mailing list, other mailing lists, my good friend Mary Beth and her friend Connie, my excellent friend Kyrie, my good friend David Donahue, my accomplice Lea Daugherty, Nirvan, and various other not-so-good friends.
I'm sure you receive a lot of "humor" mail as well; and, like you, I'm in a curious dilemma about this stuff. Should I tell people not to send this stuff to me? No, because some of it is funny and besides, that would be rude. What to do, what to do?
I can't throw them away; after all, they're gifts, like neckties. So to be polite, I archive 'em. And now you, the audience, can read them too.
To me, the fascinating thing is how often they have been forwarded: so many times that the mail headers are longer than the article itself. (Don't panic, I edited the headers out to protect the guilty.) The other interesting thing is how many times I receive the same material...
Sociologically, it's exactly like the old "office humor" folklore -- such as "When I Get Around To It" and "The Plan" and other mildly annoying things -- that get photocopied and faxed back and forth a million times. Like urban legends, invariably, the original source is removed or unknown.
For some of the documents, I've unearthed the author, and sometimes the author's name was left intact. But in most cases, I haven't a clue. I try to put a source at the bottom anyway.
All I'll say is that I didn't write any of these. (Oh, except one, which I reconstructed from memory of the original.)
Read, enjoy, but let me know if you know who wrote the ones where I
have the author listed as "unknown."
"
label just means that it's new to this archive; it was probably actually
WRITTEN years ago.
I tend to add in clumps, and I have a lot more sitting around waiting to be added. But I last amended these on 2/27/96.
E. Stephen Mack
(estephen@emf.net)