SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #194 New Moon of October 7, 2010 Contents copyright 2010 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* Summer (what there was of it) is supposedly over, although there seems to be some doubt. After the coolest summer weather in some great long while, we had a heat wave right after the Equinox. Then it cooled off again, with possible showers and drizzle in the forecasts. I didn't see any actual rain, as in water falling out of the sky, but they were predicting a chance of it. But now we're back into another heat wave, at least for another few days. I recently saw an inflatable white plastic ghost in someone's front yard. And a week or two before that the Halloween stores started selling their costumes and such. There's also Halloween stuff up in all the "regular" stores. So is this a more reliable indicator of the seasons than the weather? It may well be, at least for this part of the country. ********************* A friend mentioned finding something strange in a junk pile behind an apartment building he'd been helping another friend move out of: A bicycle that had been completely covered with plaster-like material. It didn't look accidental. Someone had intentionally sprayed the whole thing, frame, chain, pedals, tires, and all. There was no clue as to why. Was it vandalism or someone's idea of a prank? Some sort of art project? Some kind of failed experiment? No telling. Later I got to thinking. Maybe it had belonged to a tenant who had been murdered and his body walled up in some forgotten nook or cranny somewhere. They walled up his belongings along with the body, but didn't have room for the bike. So they covered it with that wall stuff for camouflage so people would just think it was part of the building or something. Nobody's going to pay much attention to a bicycle-shaped piece of wall. Then after the hullabaloo about the victim being missing died down they moved the bike to the junk area. Maybe somebody connected to building management is a serial killer. Well, maybe not that particular building, but somebody managing some big apartment complex somewhere. Anyway, every so often this person, who had keys to all the apartments in the building, would sneak into one of the three-bedroom apartments in the dead of night. He would cut off the occupant's heads, drink their blood, then put the bodies in the closet of the smallest bedroom and wall it up. Then he would re-rent the unit as furnished. Some prospective tenants grumped a bit because the smallest bedroom didn't have a closet, but the rental market was such that people rented the units anyway. Eventually none of the three-bedroom apartments had closets in their smallest bedroom any more because they had all been walled up to hide the bodies of murder victims. He took a break from being a serial killer for a few weeks, then started in again. This time he put the bodies in the smallest bedroom, walled that up, and re-rented the unit as a furnished two-bedroom apartment. This worked for a while, until he ran out of three-bedroom apartments. So he took another break, and then started in again, this time stashing his victims in the closet of the smaller bedroom in the two-bedroom apartments. When he ran out of bedroom closets he started using the bedroom itself. So eventually the whole building was one-bedroom apartments because all the second and third bedrooms had been walled up to hide the bodies of murder victims. After a round in which he walled his victims up in the hall closet he started using the remaining bedroom. So eventually the whole building was studio apartments because all the bedrooms had been walled up to hide the bodies of murder victims. Then things started to fall apart. The serial killer started walling up his victims in the bathrooms. This meant the apartment didn't have a bathroom, so the occupants would have to bathe and do their other bathroom business in the kitchen sink. Doing bathroom stuff in the kitchen sink didn't go over too well. People would go "EWWWwwww! What is this, some third-world country or something?" and would look elsewhere for a place to live. He tried putting portable toilets in the hallways, but people still didn't want to live there. Offering deep discounts on the rent didn't work either. So now the building was starting to lose money. Remember, the serial killer who had been walling up all those murder victims was only the manager. The owner had better things to do and hadn't been paying much attention as long as the building was making a profit, but now that it was losing money he decided to come and take a look around. When the owner saw how people were refusing to rent apartments because they didn't want to do their bathroom business in the kitchen sink or use a portable toilet out in the hallway, he agreed that there didn't seem to be much that could be done about it. People nowadays were awfully fussy about their living quarters. He would just have to make do until the economy picked up again and people were once again flocking to Silicon Valley and were desperate for a place to live. But as he thought about it over the next few days something didn't feel right. He seemed to recall that many years ago when he had bought the complex the apartments had all had their own bathrooms. And many of them had had bedrooms as well. He got out the plans for the building and started looking through them. Sure enough, the plans showed bathrooms and bedrooms galore. So where were the bathrooms and bedrooms? He called the police and reported them stolen. So police detectives looked at the plans and searched the building and climbed up the fire escapes and looked in the windows and eventually found the missing bedrooms and bathrooms that had been walled up with murder victims inside. They also found a whole bunch of blood-stained knives and axes and chain saws and such in a closet in the building's rental office. These all had the manager's fingerprints on the handles, while DNA from the blood stains matched the murder victims. So they arrested the manager for being a serial killer. They also opened up all the walled-up rooms and took the bodies to the morgue. So now that the apartments had bathrooms and bedrooms and closets again people were willing to live in them. The building was making a profit again, and everybody except the serial killer and his victims lived happily ever after. ********************* There was another serial killer who had a somewhat simpler M.O. Back in the days of the California Gold Rush, before dynamite was invented, miners used nitroglycerin for blasting. This particular serial killer would sneak into mining camps, find the nitroglycerin supply, and stick SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING labels on the bottles. If a miner was unfortunate enough to come upon a labeled bottle first thing in the morning before he'd had his coffee, he might well comply without really thinking the matter through. Ka-BOOM! ********************* I'm reminded that when I first heard the term "M.O." used on Dragnet, or possibly some other radio or TV drama involving cops, I thought it stood for "Method of Operation". Only later did I learn that it "officially" stood for a Latin phrase that translates to something like "Method of Operation." There's something similar with the "R. I. P." often seen on tombstones and in obituaries. I used to think that "R. I. P." stands for "Rest In Peace". But "officially" it doesn't. It stands for "Requiescat In Pace," which translates to "Rest in peace." But what of cases where the person ordering the tombstone doesn't know this rather subtle distinction? Does that mean that the "R. I. P." on that particular tombstone stands for "Rest In Peace" even if it stands for "Requiescat In Pace" on others? And in a few cases it might stand for something completely different, such as "Revel in Paradise" or "Rot in Perdition". There's no way to tell just by looking at a particular instance. Assuming no footnotes or the like, you have to know the people involved. And if, as is often the case, they leave out the periods and just put "RIP", it could be the word "rip". Perhaps there is a sect somewhere that believes that Heaven is outside the space-time continuum, and the soul of a deceased person has to tear itself free of the physical world to get there. So in that sect tombstones are engraved with the word "RIP", in ALL CAPS for emphasis, to encourage the soul to rip asunder the bonds that hold it to our physical plane and fly away to Paradise. Their funerals often culminate with the assembled multitude chanting "Rip, Rip, Rip ..." over and over, gradually increasing in volume, until a grand climax of psychic energy is achieved. This is their way of sending the departed off to Heaven. But again, unless you see it, or someone who knows has told you, you have no way of telling just by looking at their tombstone that they aren't being told just to rest in peace, either in Latin or English. ********************* A thought came up at a recent lunch get-together: Sending vampires and/or other undead on manned space missions. The idea is that certain kinds of undeath support may be cheaper and easier to do than life support. For example, do vampires need oxygen? Since they sometimes spend long periods in closed coffins it seems likely that they do not, or if they do, they need much less than living people do. Likewise, they "live" much longer than ordinary mortals, which can make them useful on missions to the outer planets or even to other solar systems. Few religious leaders are aware of this proposal. Those who are familiar with it are divided. Some don't want to have any dealings with what they see as creatures of the Devil, while others would be happy to send them far away from Earth as long as they weren't expected to return. NASA is keeping quiet about all this, at least for now. Perhaps we will hear more about it after the elections? ********************* I don't think it's on the market for this Christmas, but what with new kinds of electronic stuff that can be woven into cloth, it should soon be possible to build a GPS unit into a towel. Then your towel will always know where it is, even if you don't. Then if it also has the proper Net connectivity, any time you need to know where your towel is you just ask it. Or better yet, follow it on Twitter. ********************* A friend recently got a black belt in some martial art or something. So I asked him if he can do the slow-motion stuff like in the movies. No, he hasn't gotten into that yet. And he says it has a downside: If you go into slow-motion but your opponent doesn't, that gives the opponent an unfair advantage. And many of the people a martial arts hero has to fight in real life are unethical enough to take that advantage. So he doesn't plan to take up slow-motion fighting any time soon. ********************* Speaking of stuff like weather not following the forecasts: Everybody Talks About It But ... Tuesday before last they were predicting a Thursday-- My club meeting night. But when I awoke in the morning It was dull, gray, depressing, dreary, Blue Monday. I was almost mad enough to complain But normally wouldn't bother, Except I needed something to write about And I knew somebody who worked there So I went. The forecaster tried to explain it with a map: "We were expecting this area of Wednesday/Thursday here To stabilize and spread But a long lazy Sunday afternoon That had been quietly hanging there for three days Finally broke up and flowed west So we got Monday." I asked if it was true the days used to be more settled. They say that years ago they went Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Regular as clockwork. You could almost set your watch by 'em. He'd heard that too, But that was before they kept records So he really didn't know. I told him my father's story About how when he was little They once had a month straight Of Monday. He'd heard of that: "It was really bad-- A month of Monday morning blahs And a water shortage from all that Monday washday laundry And with no Fridays, nobody was getting their paychecks. They finally had to declare an emergency and martial law and everything And when the churches tried to organize prayers for relief-- No Sundays. Churches like having lots of Sundays." Interesting conversation, But finally time to go. "Any Thursdays coming up? That's my club meeting And we haven't had one for quite a while." "Sorry, but no. No Thursdays in sight." But sure enough, You guessed it. For the next three days, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. Thomas G. Digby written 0035 hr 2/26/77 entered 0005 hr 2/09/92 formatting 12:40 12/22/2001 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section in the copy you received. 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