From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!CAD:tektronix!teklabs!reed!reyn Newsgroups: net.jokes Title: Extraterrestrial Jokes Article-I.D.: reed.213 Posted: Wed Jan 12 01:20:17 1983 Received: Fri Jan 14 01:57:41 1983 This proposes, develops, and perhaps exhausts a genre: E.T., The Extraterrestrial (TM of Stephen Spielberg) jokes. Constraints are obvious from the following examples. 1. Radio Shack is marketing a telephone with the designation ET-378; they should call it the ET home phone. 2. E.T. learned that his broken use of spoken English had made an enemy for him in the person of the linguist Chomsky. He reported this cir- cumstance with the message ET foe Noam. 3. E.T. learned to play poker and, with truly unworldly skill, managed to win title to an Alaskan city, which he subsequently surrendered since he had no use for it. But he was pleased at the triumph, and told Elliot ET've own Nome. 4. E.T. was uncomfortable using terrestrial furniture and decided to fashion a settee more closely resembling his own physiology. He used an electric saw to cut some spongy padding to the proper shape for his contours, and as he was doing so, Eliot came in and asked "E.T., what in the world are you doing?" E.T. was at first puzzled, as he expected to be asked "What are you doing in the world?", but he finally understood, and replied ET hone foam. 5. The above-mentioned linguist Chomsky (see 2) collaborated with an AI type to try to produce a voice simulator which could handle pairs of sounds - not only diphthongs, but vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel combinations. Their only success, unfortunately, was a vowel-consonant sequence, the ET phoneme. Well, that's the idea. Whether it leads to a productive new era, a veritable ET phenom, remains to be seen. I can hear the grey matter rumbling all along the net and look forward to whatever. Somewhat afraid to sign my name, R.E. Reynolds teklabs!reed!reyn (more or less;this is a bit new)