Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/10/04

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Subject: Re: [Leica] I am so stupid I can't believe it!
From: ternahan <ternahan@sonic.net>
Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2001 15:38:04 -0700

times have changed...my youngestphysics/chemistry major (Reed) who is now an
artist- glass-blower indulged in creating fire-breathing dragons made fom
shopping carts and old car bodies for the senior thesis parade and a
motorized reclining chair for campus commuting..
t

> From: "Barney Quinn, Jr." <barney.quinn@noaa.gov>
> Reply-To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> Date: Thu, 04 Oct 2001 16:22:52 -0400
> To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> Subject: Re: [Leica] I am so stupid I can't believe it!
> 
> Brian,
> 
> Good for you! To keep this temporarily on topic I shot with a pair of
> IIIf's in my college and grad school days. I went to Syracuse University
> in the early and mid-sixties. Syracuse approached the housing or the
> animals - er athletes - differently. Rather than keeping them in a
> centralized barn, which seems to have been Maryland's approach, Syracuse
> distributed them four per floor through out the men's dorms. Horses for
> courses. Do you want major damage to one building or light to moderate
> damage to all buildings.
> 
> Before I continue let's have full disclosure here. My undergraduate
> record has more than one blemish on it, and I thoroughly enjoyed
> creating each and every one. :-) Second semester of my freshman year
> some members of the football team who will be nameless except to say
> that every one of them went on to become brand name athletes were having
> a pick up lacrosse game in the corridor outside my room. I was
> desperately trying to study for my Calculus final. To this day I don't
> believe that I went out into the hall and told them to knock it off
> because I was trying to study! Nor do I believe that I lived to be
> typing this. I understand the economic and PR importance of collegiate
> sports, but having said that I also have to say that it was very
> aggravating when you asked one of the prize steers how they did in a
> particular course and they replied, "The coach fixed it for me." This
> happened more often than one might think.
> 
> Barney
> 
> Brian Reid wrote:
>> 
>> Most of you know that there has been something wrong with the Leica
>> Users archives for several weeks, since the middle of September. Some of
>> you know that I've tried for weeks to find and fix the problem.
>> 
>> Just now I have found the problem, and fixed it, and I am slowly
>> restoring the archives. I can't entirely decide whether this episode is
>> because I am stupid, or because God is punishing me for something cruel
>> that I did in 1968.
>> 
>> Let me first tell you what I did in 1968 that makes me fear Divine
>> retribution, and then I will tell you what the problem was.
>> 
>> I went to the University of Maryland. I lived in a dormitory called
>> Cambridge A. That was the men's honors dorm. Across the quad from us was
>> Bel Air B, the football player's dorm. During the spring semester of
>> 1968 the men in the football player's dorm brutally harassed the
>> eyeglass-wearing scholars in the honors dorm. And this being a state
>> university in the era when the football coach ran the university, we had
>> no resource save to put up with it or to solve the problem ourselves.
>> 
>> I took charge of the "solve the problem ourselves" venture, and for one
>> week we made their lives miserable. We waited until the week of midterm
>> exams, figuring that the easiest way to hurt a football player was to
>> get them declared ineligible by the NCAA, and that flunking midterms
>> would be a good way to do that. Every night, mysteriously, their dorm
>> lost power. Their water supply kept getting turned off, so they couldn't
>> shower. Their phones stopped working. Their radios were somehow
>> mysteriously jammed. Bizarre smells permeated their building.
>> 
>> After three days the university physical-plant people figured out how we
>> were turning off their water every night, and they welded the manhole
>> shut. So  instead of turning off the water to the building, we went into
>> the building in the middle of the night and turned off, individually,
>> every plumbing fixture. We turned off every sink, every toilet, every
>> shower, every drinking fountain. Anything that was supposed to have
>> water was turned off.
>> 
>> Naturally, after 3 days of us turning off the water main and the
>> university turning it back on again, they were programmed to look for
>> some sort of a water-main shutoff. It took them 5 days to discover that
>> there was nothing wrong with the main, but that every single fixture was
>> independently turned off.
>> 
>> What on earth does this college prank of 34 years ago have to do with
>> Leica Users? Well, it turns out that the reason I haven't been able to
>> fix the archive problem is that there's nothing wrong with the archive.
>> The archive mechanism is working perfectly. It's just that every message
>> was being individually deleted before reaching the archive mechanism.
>> 
>> For the entire time that the Leica Users archive has existed, messages
>> that contain the word "unsubscribe" have not been added to the archives,
>> because in the past, such messages have been misdirected requests to
>> unsubscribe, and I wanted neither to clutter the archives with them nor
>> file away the evidence that someone couldn't follow instructions.
>> 
>> Sometime in the middle of September, in order to be helpful and
>> "clarify" things, I caused this line to be added to the end of every
>> Leica-Users message. Notice its second word:
>> 
>> --
>> To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html
> --
> To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html
> 

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