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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!mcnc!duke!phs!paul
From: paul@phs.UUCP (Paul C. Dolber)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: The Emerald City and net.rigmarole
Message-ID: <1032@phs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 26-Jun-85 20:42:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: phs.1032
Posted: Wed Jun 26 20:42:46 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Jun-85 01:38:41 EDT
Organization: Dept. Physiol., DUMC
Lines: 69

Abridged from "The Emerald City of Oz," by L.F. Baum:

Wizard: "Is this Rigmarole Town?"

Boy: "Sir, if you have traveled very much you will have noticed
that every town differs from every other town in one way or another
and so by observing the methods of the people and the way they live
as well as the style of their dwelling places it ought not to be a
difficult thing to make up your mind without the trouble of asking
questions whether the town bears the appearance of the one you
intended to visit or whether perhaps having taken a different road
from the one you should have taken you have made an error in your
way and arrived at some point where --"

Uncle Henry: "He might have said `yes' or `no' and settled the question."

Omby Amby: "Not here.  I don't believe the Rigmaroles know what `yes'
or `no' means."

Woman: "It is the easiest thing in the world for a person to say `yes'
or `no' when a question is asked for the purpose of gaining information
or satisfying the curiosity of the one who has given expression to the
inquiry has attracted the attention of an individual who may be
competent either from personal experience or the experience of others
to answer it with more or less correctness or at least attempt to
satisfy the desire for information on the part of the one who has made
the inquiry by --"

Wizard: "I'm quite sure that if we waited long enough and listened
carefully, some of these people might be able to tell us something,
in time."

Omby Amby: "If those people wrote books, it would take a whole library
just to say the cow jumped over the moon."

Wizard: "Perhaps some of 'em do write books.  I've read a few
rigmaroles that might have come from this very town."

Shaggy Man: "It seems to be the Land of Oz is a little ahead of the
United States in some of its laws.  For here, if one can't talk
clearly, and straight to the point, they send him to Rigmarole
Town; while Uncle Sam lets him roam around wild and free, to
torture innocent people."

---------------------------------------

Shall we fall behind the Land of Oz or shall we form net.rigmarole to
which certain forms of address to the net such as those of excessive
length or those found by means presently known or unknown to have an
excessively low signal-to-noise ratio or to which articles from certain
known abusers of the net who regularly send out articles of very low
signal-to-noise ratio might be redirected from their intended posting
sites (probably especially net.religion, net.philosophy, net.politics,
and net.abortion though it is certain that other newsgroups suffer from
the same problem) even though this might entail impinging on the free
will (if such there be which is a difficult question to answer even
after consulting many and diverse dictionaries and encyclopedias) of
the authors of the re-routed news articles and result in the presently
unknown implementers of this scheme to be characterized as Nazis or
Commies or steatopygious hermaphrodites who should have been aborted
since after all what is life anyway and why should we go on living
when it's all just a bunch of damned chemicals which may or may not
follow the second law of thermodynamics though certainly looking at
this sentence and at the character of the net lately one would be hard
pressed not to conclude that we could assume that the second law does
hold for net communication at the least?

Regards, Paul Dolber (...duke!phs!paul).