HUMOR: Keyboarding 101

[Alice Yucht <AliceInfo@AOL.COM>]

    "Animate nouns can sleep and crawl.  They don't normally explode."
                   --- Michael Agar, _Language Shock_, p. 43

Where Deleted Characters Go

     by Joel Garreau (Washington Post)

     QUESTION:  Where do the characters go when I use my backspace or
        delete them on my PC?

     ANSWER: The characters go to different places, depending on whom
        you ask:


      * The Catholic Church's approach to characters:  The nice
        characters go to Heaven, where they are bathed in the light of
        happiness.  The naughty characters are punished for their sins.
        Naughty characters are those involved in the creation of naughty
        words, such as "breast," "sex" and "contraception."


      * 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, and lower-case letters will
        become upper-case.

      * The 20th-century bitter cynical nihilist explanation:  Who
       cares? It doesn't really matter if they're on the page, deleted,
        undeleted, underlined, etc.  It's all the same.


      * The Mac user's explanation:  All the characters written on a
        PC and then deleted go to straight to PC hell.  If you're using a
        PC, you can probably see the deleted characters, because you're
        in PC hell also.


      * 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!


      * 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 flammable. I'm not making this up.


      * 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.


      * PETA's (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)
        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!!!!