Voyd of Course

"It's like the Onion, only skinnier!" --Milton Swift "Still worth the price of the paper it's not printed on." --Felicia DuBois "The unspeakable, spoken." --Malin Wuptke "More interesting than computer solitaire, though perhaps not so effective a distraction from the void." --Harlan J. Rippington "Satire today, history tomorrow." --Steven Wallace

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Location: Santa Fe, NM, United States

In 1966, I wrote a fake newspaper article under the headline "JACK CASS SETS WORLD SHOWERING RECORD." Mr. Yohans, my 9th grade English teacher, liked it so well that he read it aloud--to much not-quite-suppressed giggling, at the sound of which, Mr Yohans said, "What? What? Did I miss something here?" I spent the rest of the afternoon in Principal Leon Duff's outer office. When Mr. Duff, who was a busy man, decided he didn't have time to see me, his secretary sent me back to the classroom, where I was greeted like McMurphy returning from solitary. Emboldened by my de facto exoneration, my friends began work on their own fake news stories. I remember a spate of Russian names in the stories, including "Ivan Kutchikokoff" and "Ivan Jerkinov." Needless to say, our newly suspicious teacher sent both of my friends to Mr. Duff's office, where they were not as bureaucratically blessed as I had been. They sat detention for a week. This I took as a lesson in subtlety--and in how to start a commotion and slip from the room before the law comes down.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Business News

MICROSOFT REPLACES SEMI-COLON WITH SMILEY FACE ON 2006 KEYBOARDS

Seattle--After a recent survey showed that 98% of Americans had no idea how to deploy or read the semi-colon, Microsoft announced that it would remove the punctuation mark from its 2006 keyboards.

The semi-colon will be replaced by the smiley-face symbol. Nearly 99% of all Americans, the same survey reported, know that a smiley-face is used to signal a vague but wide-ranging feeling of good will and is correctly deployed on post-its and on brief notes, just before the signature.

Karl Lagerfeld, an inveterate semi-colon user, lamented that “certain subtle ways of thinking, of connecting closely-related, yet independent, thoughts would be lost should the semi-colon be removed from the keyboard.” Joe Simpson, a college student and Microsoft consultant responded, “No way. Nothing’s lost. Get over it. End of story.”

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