Miscellany

Names have been removed to protect the stupid!

Not all health clubs are problem-plagued, but don't be surprised if yours is filled with illness-causing bacteria, employs a poorly trained staff and makes it expensive to quit.

How school textbooks go from the publisher to your child's classroom.

Skyler Bartels kept looking over his shoulder. It's a habit he picked up living at the Windsor Heights Wal-Mart for three days.

Really living there. Eating, sleeping, checking out the DVDs, never leaving. The plan was to spend his entire spring break there. Under the radar.

(Includes The 8 Traits of A Disinformationalist)

by H. Michael Sweeney

Built upon Thirteen Techniques for Truth Suppression by David Martin, the following may be useful to the initiate in the world of dealing with veiled and half-truth, lies, and suppression of truth when serious crimes are studied in public forums.

For all the folks who only heard "some woman got a kabillion dollars from McDonalds because she spilled her coffee on herself."

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, or Food?

In an effort to clarify questions about the purported durability and unusual physical characteristics of Twinkies, we subjected the Hostess snack logs to the following experiments:

By MSgt. Andy Bufalo USMC (Ret)

A terrible thing happened. I woke up this morning and came to the realization that I have become civilized. It has been a slow evolution to be sure, but a steady one nonetheless.

San Jose better watch out. Santacon '98, the gathering of Santa-suited hellions that has invaded cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles in recent years, is due to hit Silicon Valley's geek ground zero 12 December. Revelers plan to carry on their traditions of drive-by caroling, inappropriate gift-giving, and general absurdity.

• ...you answer the door before people knock.
• ...Juan Valdez named his donkey after you.
• ...you ski uphill.

Some people say cats never have to be bathed. They say cats lick themselves clean. They say cats have a special enzyme of some sort in their saliva that works like New, Improved Wisk -- dislodging the dirt where it hides and whisks it away. I've spent most of my life believing this folklore.

1. Pull out a harmonica and play blues songs when your date begins talking about himself/herself.
2. When ordering, inquire whether the restaurant has any live food.
3. Without asking, eat off of your date's plate. Eat more from their plate than they do.

From a recent thread in rec.pets...

Okay - I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.

The case of the counterfit bill that wasn't.