The Hegemon Calls!
Here it is, Christmas Day, and I've done half the driving that I'll
have to do. I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays and I wish every
one a Happy New Year! I especially want to throw out a Merry Christmas
to all the poor ducks out there with no family during this season.
The first leg of my drive for the holidays was to go from Austin to
my home town of Shreveport, LA. This trip takes you (on the fastest
route) from Austin to Waco along I-35, the Waco to Tyler along state
highway 31, and then I-20 in to Louisiana. The 90 minutes to Waco
was uneventful (now that the Davidians are dying out, it's almost
always uneventful in Waco), but as I was leaving Waco, just outside
the town border, my eyes welled up and joy lept into my throat as my
sight was filled with the beauty of:
+-----------+
| |
| S P E E D |
| |
| L I M I T |
| |
| 7777 000 |
| 7 0 0|
| 7 0 0|
| 7 000 |
| |
+-----------+
I'm not much of a Republican fan, but I send the my warm Holiday
Greetings along with a big THANK YOU for getting me to my desti-
nation 30 minutes faster!
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[ From KMc, Kelly.McCollum@chronicle.com, comes a wake up ]
[ call for all you Black-sploitation fans. ]
Ooooh, Sweetback!
I had the opportunity this weekend to see the Mack-daddy of black
exploitation films, "Sweet Sweetback's Badasss Song," written,
produced, directed, edited by, and starring Melvin Van Peebles,
father of blaction-film star Mario Van Peebles.
"Sweetback" is the story of a brother who's on the run after beating
two white cops to death for pulling a Rodney King on Mumu, a black
militant. In fact, a good portion of the movie's screen time consists
of "sasquatch sighting" quality footage of Sweetback in his
crushed-velvet leisure suit running along railroad tracks, through
sewers and across the desert trying to get to Mexico.
Despite the fugitive lifestyle, Sweetback seems to have no trouble
getting laid. It pains me to admit it, but I think John Shaft
himself might have trouble competing with Sweetback for the title of
"sex machine with all the chicks."
The movie has that mod 60's wackyness, with plenty of blurry shots,
random images fading in and out, shaky cameras, and mood lighting.
It's obvious that Melvin was handling the entire thing by himself,
but that's probably why it got made in the first place. There weren't
many instances of black gigolos killing white cops in pre-1971
hollywood movies. This is the movie that made black heroes possible.
In the TV-movie-pitchman qualitative analysis scheme, I give this one
a "The Search for Animal Chen"-meets-the video for "Sabotage" -meets-
John Holmes. Rent it if you can find it, if for no other reason than
to see a 12 year-old Mario Van Peebles with a really big afro.
The show was part of a Blaxploitation fest on this month at one of
our friendly-neighborhood art houses, so I'm hoping to get in a
viewing of Superfly this week, and if time allows, maybe Cleopatra
Jones and my first-ever big-screen viewing of Shaft! Wish me luck,
Baby.
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[ From WU subscriber, Sandi_Mathews@us.dell.com, is some humor ]
[ along my lines. ]
SOME CUTE HI-TECH HUMOR FOR THOSE OF US IN THE OH-SO TECHNICAL FIELDS.
- Buy a Pentium 586/90 so you can reboot faster.
- 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
- Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.
- Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
- My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.
- C:\WINDOWS C:\WINDOWS\GO C:\PC\CRAWL
- C:\DOS C:\DOS\RUN RUN\DOS\RUN
- <-------- The information went data way --------
- Best file compression around: "DEL *.*" = 100% compression
- The Definition of an Upgrade: Take old bugs out, put new ones in.
- BREAKFAST.COM Halted...Cereal Port Not Responding
- The name is Baud......, James Baud.
- BUFFERS=20 FILES=15 2nd down, 4th quarter, 5 yards to go!
- Access denied--nah nah na nah nah!
- C:\ Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner.
- Bad command. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaay..
- Why doesn't DOS ever say "EXCELLENT command or filename!"
- As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.
- Southern DOS: Y'all reckon? (Yep/Nope)
- Backups? We don' *NEED* no steenking backups.
- E Pluribus Modem
- ... File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)
- Ethernet (n): something used to catch the etherbunny
- A mainframe: The biggest PC peripheral available.
- An error? Impossible! My modem is error correcting.
- CONGRESS.SYS Corrupted: Re-boot Washington D.C (Y/n)?
- Does fuzzy logic tickle?
- A computer's attention span is as long as it's power cord.
- 11th commandment - Covet not thy neighbor's Pentium.
- 24 hours in a day...24 beers in a case...coincidence?
- Disinformation is not as good as datinformation.
- Windows: Just another pane in the glass.
- SENILE.COM found . . . Out Of Memory . . .
- Who's General Failure & why's he reading my disk?
- Ultimate office automation: networked coffee.
- RAM disk is *not* an installation procedure.
- Shell to DOS...Come in DOS, do you copy? Shell to DOS...
- All computers wait at the same speed.
- DEFINITION: Computer - A device designed to speed and automate errors.
- Press