--Fons Taddic

The paper got out in time, and all was fine and dandy as regarded my job, which today consisted of attending a concert in camp and scribbling down several downright catty remarks about the performer, none of which are ever going to see print in my camp paper. After which I counted out copies of this week's edition and brought them to the various division heads for distribution.

And then I went back to my apartment, where I stayed all weekend.

I have come to the conclusion that it is a lot easier to use Windoze if you are using a mouse.

In the meantime... in the wake of the Kennedy saga, I found myself pulled to a certain newsgroup. The newsgroup I checked out a little while after Princess Diana died. The newsgroup I went to after TWA Flight 800 crashed, not far from me.

Yes, in times of pain and sorrow, tasteless jokes are never far behind. I may have had the world's largest collection of Space Shuttle jokes after Challenger blew up, back when I was in eighth grade. And this wasn't because I didn't care about it; I'd been following the space program with quite a bit of interest and excitement for years. I saw the first flights of Columbia and Challenger, and had had a large space shuttle poster in my room for some time.

I still remember where I was when I heard the news. I was in what was quite possibly my sister's room at the time (I do know which room it was, but aren't certain whose territory it was at that point), listening to "Rambling With Gambling" on the radio, while sick with the flu. Which is why I didn't find out until the morning after; my mother had tried to tell me earlier, but I was too out of it to understand what she was getting at.

(As a complete aside, it was during this same bout with the flu that I discovered and read The Robots of Dawn, by Isaac Asimov, which taught me several new terms and concepts, and was generally quite educational to this innocent 12-year-old. But I digress.)

None of this kept me from pointing out that NASA stood for Need Another Seven Astronauts; that the next shuttle launch was scheduled for July 4th; that the official drink of Mission Control was 7-Up; that Christa McAullife had been a Social Studies teacher, but now she was History; and that the last thing to go through Dick Scobee's mind was, in fact, the engine. Among a great many more such observations.

And so, in times of trouble, it's nice to know you can count on alt.tasteless.jokes to remain a veritable oasis of, well, tasteless jokes.

This is how I found out that the movie based on JFK Jr.'s death is going to be called Three Funerals and a Wedding. And that it's been suggested that some birds in John-John's flight path might have been sufficient to bring the plane down, and that while there has been much speculation about what sort of bird -- and how many -- would have been required to cause such a crash, the poster in question favored the "single pullet" theory.

Nobody's perfect.