Bush, in Ohio, promises dollars

Portsmouth, OH; September 10, 2004: Speaking in economically-troubled Ohio today, President Bush promised a cheering crowd that, if the must-win state votes its twenty electors for him in November, he will deliver badly-needed stimulus to the state's economy, in the form of "a boatload of cash".

"I promise you all," the President said in prepared remarks to a crowd gathered before the steps of the Scioto County Courthouse, "that if you support me this year, I will support you right back. I will take away money from the other forty-eight states, and give it to you, right here in Ohio".

The President's "Ohio Plan" drew praise from state and local officials.

In a quick response, Democratic Presidential hopeful John Kerry called the President's Ohio promise "wrong for America".

"This is one more example of how this President's wrong choices have hurt this country," Senator Kerry said, speaking at a fund-raiser in Philadelphia, "Unlike President Bush, I promise that if I am elected this November, I will take money away from the other states, and give it to you, right here in Pennsylvania."

The Senator's "Pennsylvania Plan" drew praise from state and local officials.

Bush Offers Amends for Jail Abuse

Washington, DC; May 5, 2004: Calling the treatment of Iraqi detainees in the Abu Gharib facility "abhorrent" and "un-American", President George W. Bush offered today to appear nude on two Arabic television networks, to "make amends for the humiliation" suffered by the Iraqis who were photographed in the nude and in sexually suggestive positions by occupation forces.

The offer, which was presented to the al-Hurra and al-Arabiya Arabic-language networks, would involve nude appearances by President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In many parts of the Arabic world, for a man to appear nude before other men is seen as deeply humiliating; the Bush administration expressed the hope that by publically humbling themselves before the Arab public, the three officials would "allow the dialogue to move on" in the wake of the release of the photographs from Abu Gharib.

Reaction to the offer from the Arab world was swift. "Really, this is not necessary," said a spokesman for al-Arabiya in Dubia, who appeared nonplussed. "The offer is well-intentioned, we are certain, but it would not be, well, you understand --".

Similar responses were expressed by Iraqis in the embattled town of Najaf. "No," said a local religious leader, who asked that his name not be used, "no. Please."

Contrite Lott Interviewed on BET
Endorses King holiday, Tooth Fairy

Washington, DC; December 17, 2002: Embattled Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott appeared last night on Black Entertainment Network, and once again apologized for endorsing the 1948 segregationist Presidential campaign of retiring Senator Strom Thurmond. In the interview, Lott said that his praise for Thurmond has been based not on his views on race, but on his opposition to Communism and Nazism, and his "fiscal responsibility".

Lott also apologized for his remarks praising the "manly virtue" of Ming the Merciless, saying that while he had intended to refer only to the evil emperor's "strong sense of purpose", he now realized that his words could have been misinterpreted.

Saying "I believe I have changed," Lott indicated that he now supports a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, as well as affirmative action programs, gays in the military, a national health care system, the triumph of international communism, the adoption of Latvian as the official language of the U.S., and the establishment of diplomatic ties with the Tooth Fairy.

"Shit," Lott said in a press conference held after the interview, "I'll say anything if it'll let me stay in power."

The Senator later apologized for the remark.

School Murder-Conspiracy Uncovered
"Could have been another Columbine"

Concord, Michigan; November 26, 2001: Just weeks after five junior high school students were arrested in Kentucky following a janitor's discovery of grisly images of teachers and fellow students with 'X' marks drawn over their eyeballs, nearly a dozen high school freshmen in this sleepy Midwestern town have been detained by police for questioning, in what one school administrator said "could have been another Columbine".

Two have already been charged with criminal murder conspiracy, and more charges are expected shortly.

The plot uncovered today involved detailed plans to bring about "the end of school" by means ranging from hitting teachers "on the bean" with decaying fruit, to kicking school officials down the stairs, lying in wait "behind the door with a loaded forty-four" and planting grenades and other explosives in school buildings.

Acting on a tip received from an anonymous source last week, police planted recording devices in a number of school buses. Today, the first day of school after the Thanksgiving holiday, they obtained recordings that apparently include student statements about "the glory of the burning of the school" and grisly cannibalistic "barbeques".

In addition to the students already detained, police say they are looking for an individual known only as "Miss Lucy". It is unknown whether or not she is also a student at the school. Police say that she apparently has a tugboat and, sources say, the tugboat probably has a bell.

Rate Hikes Ineffective,
Fed to Deploy Giant Robot

ROTOREUTERS, Washington D.C., March 23, 2000: Frustrated by the lack of stock-market response to recent interest-rate hikes intended to cool down the booming economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan today announced that he will be deploying a giant firebreathing robot to slow the rate of economic growth.

The robot, named "Goliathor", will be released next week at an unnamed location in Silicon Valley, where it will stomp on helpless Internet start-ups with its enormous spiked feet.

"We did the (expletive) interest-rate thing seven (expletive) times," Mr. Greenspan testified this morning in Congressional hearings, "and the (expletive) market just kept going up!" The new robot strategy, said the nation's chief banker, "should show those (expletive)-fuckers a thing or two!!"

Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the NASDAQ Composite Index were up slightly on the news.

Tech Beat

Internet: Only Weeks to Live?
With key server offline, hundreds of sites already silent

MIRED, Berkeley, August 18, 2000: The shutting down of an aging but vital network server in this California university town has sent shivers through the worldwide Internet. Hundreds of sites have already gone silent, and experts say that without drastic action the Internet itself may shut down within weeks.

"The Internet is a stack of many layers, built up over more than thirty years," says Oliver Kweft, networking expert at Hart, Schafner, and Sklimly, "and all of those layers are still there. Remove one of the bottom layers, and the entire stack collapses."

The layer that was removed last Wednesday was an obscure but important "protocol server", established in 1972 in Santa Barbara, California, and since moved to Berkeley. Like most parts of the then-fledgling Internet, this server, a PDP-12 known as "gandalf", was set up and run by volunteers. Over the years the server, which until recently provided "top-level IMP protocol negotiation" for the Internet, passed from hand to hand, always on an informal basis. Last Wednesday the most recent owner of the machine, a fifty-two year-old graduate student named Dabny Neumann, disconnected it while cleaning up his office.

"It was in the way," Neumann said in a telephone interview. "I mean, it was a winning box for a long time, but now I'm swapping it out. I've got other things queued, you know?"

Deeply buried within the TCP/IP (Transaction Control Protocol / Intetnet Protocol) software code on every Internet system is a set of instructions that requires contacting this server periodically to update key network-access information. As computers require the information and discover that it is not available, they are gradually shutting down.

Asked if he planned to pass the critical server on to another volunteer, or at least make the information on it available to avoid the destruction of the global Internet, Neumann said, "Yeah, I guess, if I get some time. But I'm into some heavy kernel hacking right now, and I'm way behind on SF-Lovers. It's not a big deal anyway; UUCP'll still work fine without it."

Triumph of the a-Barber?

ATT/MCI, Manfred, Utah, October 12, 1999: By now, everyone has heard stories of tech-savvy consumers saving time and money by using their auto-mobiles to go grocery shopping, take the kids to school, and even go over the river to visit Granny. But now industry-watchers have spotted a new trend; a host of new "roadside barbers" allow the wheeled among us to get a haircut or a shave with the convenience of a simple auto-mobile trip.

"It's a godsend," says Wilbur Granley, an auto-mobile enthusiast in Zeebok, Maine. "Rather than walking down to old man Striber's in the town square, where I have to sit an hour in that stuffy waiting room for a chair to open up, I can motor down to Top Cuts in Jander, and get a quick shave and a haircut for only $12.50!" Indeed, a-Barbers like Top Cuts and Hair Zone are springing up all over the "auto-mobile superhighway", not just by the roadside, but also around high-tech "parking lots", where motor-jockeys can easily access many different services with a single trip.

Of course, not all is rosy in the land of the auto-mobile barber. Brent Harris, of Neil's Mules in Freeland, points out that motoring is not for everyone. "We hear stories every day," he relates, "of consumers stranded on the road with no 'gasoline', or unable to get to their favorite barber because no pavement runs near enough to the shop." According to Harris and other experts, there will always be reasons to visit the barber the old-fashioned way: by pack-mule.

COMPUTER PASSES TURING TEST

API/STE, Santa Clara, August 3, 1999: In what experts are hailing as a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence research, a specially-programmed computer today passed the "Turing test", a procedure first described decades ago to determine the presence of true intelligence in a machine.

In today's demonstration at Mathison Labs in Santa Clara, a panel of fifteen human experts were presented with two computer communication terminals, one connected to a sophisticated personal computer running the Windows 98 operating system, and the other controlled by artificial intelligence pioneer Alan Turing. Over the course of an hour, the experts interacted with the two terminals, attempting to distinguish which was controlled by the computer and which by Mr. Turing. Only five of the judges were able to correctly identify the computer's terminal; the other ten were either unsure, or incorrectly identified the computer's terminal as being controlled by the human expert. Panelists called the computer's performance "very impressive", while granting that its task may have been made somewhat simpler by the "extremely restrained" conversational style of Mr. Turing (who died in 1954). "Windows" is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

COMPUTER WINS NATIONAL SIMON-SAYS TOURNAMENT

REUTERS/STE, Santa Fe, August 1, 1999: For the first time since the establishment of the national Simon Says leagues in 1914, a computer program has taken first place in a major U.S. tournament. The victory came in the forty-third round of the Western National Championship in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when the remaining human player, Danny "Whacker" Donod, went out on a rapid series of calls ending "Simon Says hands up, Simon Says hands down, Simon Says hands up, hands down!".

A previous version of the program, "SIMON.BAS", nearly took last year's title, but was eliminated in the thirty-seventh round, due to a hardware malfunction on the call "Simon Says quack like a duck." According to the program's lead developer, Harold "Stinky" Parris, that problem was solved this year; "We got a way better sound card from Allie's dad," Parris declared. The victory in Santa Fe caps an unbeaten year for Mrs. Harvey's fifth-grade BASIC programming class, which will use the $150,000 first prize to buy a really enormous set of those plastic hamster tubes for Fuzzy.

IT'LL BE TWO WEEKS, STUDY FINDS

API/EDU, Syracuse, NY, November 28, 1999: According to a survey soon to be released by Ithaca State College, it'll be about two weeks.

"Give or take," says Professor Merle Hrensk, chief investigator in the three-year project, "it could be a little sooner, but no more than three weeks. Unless," he added, "we get more rain."

The study's results, which were made available in preliminary form to local experts this morning, were greeted favorably by many. "Yeah, definitely two weeks," agreed Hattie Mund, a local granary insulator. "It'll take a couple of days for the materials to come, then there's this other job we need to finish up, but that won't be more than a week, so we're looking at ten days, twelve at the most."

"We had some trouble getting the permits," echoes a highly-placed cabinet source, "but everything's go now, so I can say with confidence that it'll be two weeks, three at the outside."

The final study report is being prepared, and will be released to the public in mid December.