X-Message-Number: 4382
Date: 10 May 95 21:38:44 EDT
From: Mike Darwin <>
Subject: PC joke <FWD>

This question has profound relevance to cryonics: it deals with what happens to

beings after they are destroyed.  (Please, let's not dwell on what constitutes a
"being" or whether a being can exist in silcon or only in meat.  Here are the
major positions, as set forth over the last month in tiresome (oops I meant
exhaustive) detail on Cryonet.


The take home message here is simple: THE answer is to pick the one you are most
comfortable with.  The universe will adjust its priorities accordingly.

>QUESTION:
>Where do the characters go when I use the backspace or delted
>on my PC?
>
>ANSWER:
>If you must know, the characters can go to different places, depending
>on whom you ask:
>
>1)  The Catholic's approach to characters:
>
> The nice characters go to character heaven, where life is good.  The
> characters are bathed in the light of happiness, all their troubles are
> soothed, and there's not a delete key, eraser, or white-out bottle in
> sight.  Most of the nice characters are A's and I's, those that have
> never been, er, involved with other characters.  Often, you'll see A's
> or I's with N's or T's.  These are characters in love:  monogamous on
> the page, together again after deletion.  You'll see quite a few Q's
> too. They seem to feel particularly guilty for no good reason.
>
> The naughty characters are punished for their sins.  In case you were
> wondering what the difference between a nice character and a naughty
> character is, I'll tell you.  Naughty characters are those involved in
> the creation of naughty words, such as "breast," "sex," "objectivity,"
> and depending upon usage, words such as "feminism," "reproductive
> freedom," "contraception," and "science."  You may ask, and rightly so,
> why the characters are blamed for the words they assemble, when in fact
> they are not responsible for their own configuration.  But we feel that
> a character has an obligation to oppose any naughtiness in its own
> configuration.  If it truly felt guilty about the word it was forming,
> it would rebel.
>
>2) The Buddhist Explanation:
>
> If a character has lived rightly, and its karma is good, then after it
> has been deleted it will be reincarnated as a different, higher
> character.  Those funny characters above the numbers on your keyboard
> will become numbers, numbers will become letters, lower-case letters
> will become upper-case, and the most righteous and good of letters will
> become C's.  Why C, you ask?  Who knows, but C it is!  If a character's
> karma is not so good, then it will move down the above scale,
> ultimately becoming the lowest of characters, a space.
>
>3) The 20th Century bitter cynical nihilist explanation:
>
> Who cares?  All characters are the same, swirling in a vast sea of
> meaningless nothingness.  It doesn't really matter if they're on the
> page, deleted, undeleted, underlined, etc.  It's all the same.  More
> characters should delete themselves.  (nihilist characters are easy to
> identify.  They're usually pale and tragic, and they smoke a lot.)
>
>4) The Mac user's explanation:
>
> All the characters written on a PC and then deleted go straight to PC
> hell.  If you're using a PC, you can probably see the deleted
> characters, because you're in PC hell also.
>
>5) Stephen King's explanation:
>
> Every time you hit the <Del> key you unleash a tiny monster inside the
> cursor, who tears the poor unsuspecting characters to shreds, drinks
> their blood, then eats them, bones and all.  Hah, hah, hah!
>
>6) Dave Barry's explanation:
>
> The deleted characters are shipped to Battle Creek, Michigan, where
> they're made into Pop-Tart filling; this explains why Pop-Tarts are so
> flammable, while cheap imitations are not as flammable.  I'm not making
> any of this up.
>
> 7) IBM's explanation:
>
> The characters are not real.  They exist only on the screen when they
> are needed, as concepts, so to delete them is merely to
> de-conceptualize them.  Get a life.
>
> 8) PETA's Explanation:
>
> You've been DELETING them????  Can't you hear them SCREAMING???  Why
> don't you go CLUB some BABY SEALS while wearing a MINK, you pig!!!!!!
>

David Crippen, MD, FCCM
Director, Surgical ICU
St. Francis Medical Center
Pittsburgh. Pa  15201
Office (412)622-6181
FAX (412)622-4877
Internet: crippen+@pitt.edu


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