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)