-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HOW TO TELL WHEN YOUR FOOD IS SPOILED ======================================= Whether you are a mom who cooks for many, a bachelor who cooks on rare occasions for himself, or a new college student who for the first time has his or her own refrigerator -- you will eventually all open the fridge one day and say to yourself, Can I eat this or will it kill me? Well here are some guidelines to help you get through the crisis, so you will know what to eat and what to toss. THE GAG TEST ------------ Anything that makes you gag is spoiled (except for leftovers from what you cooked for yourself last night). EGGS ---- When something starts pecking its way out of the shell, the egg is probably past its prime. DAIRY PRODUCTS --------------- Milk is spoiled when it starts to look like yogurt. Yogurt is spoiled when it starts to look like cottage cheese. Cottage cheese is spoiled when it starts to look like regular cheese. Regular cheese is nothing but spoiled milk anyway and can't get any more spoiled than it is already. Cheddar cheese is spoiled when you think it is blue cheese but you realize you've never purchased that kind. MAYONNAISE ----------- If it makes you violently ill after you eat it, the mayonnaise is spoiled. FROZEN FOODS ------------- Frozen foods that have become an integral part of the defrosting problem in your freezer compartment will probably be spoiled - (or wrecked anyway) by the time you pry them out with a kitchen knife. EXPIRATION DATES ---------------- This is NOT a marketing ploy to encourage you to throw away perfectly good food so that you'll spend more on groceries.Perhaps you'd benefit by having a calendar in your kitchen. MEAT ---- If opening the refrigerator door causes stray animals from a three-block radius to congregate outside your house, the meat is spoiled. BREAD ----- Sesame seeds and Poppy seeds are the only officially acceptable "spots" that should be seen on the surface of any loaf of bread. Fuzzy and hairy looking white or green growth areas are a good indication that your bread has turned into a pharmaceutical laboratory experiment. FLOUR ----- Flour is spoiled when it wiggles. LETTUCE ------- Bibb lettuce is spoiled when you can't get it off the bottom of the vegetable crisper without Comet. Romaine lettuce is spoiled when it turns liquid. (We didn't think you needed guidance with this one) CANNED GOODS -------------- Any canned goods that have become the size or shape of a softball should be disposed of. Carefully. CARROTS ------- A carrot that you can tie a clove hitch in is not fresh. RAISINS -------- Raisins should not be harder than your teeth. POTATOES -------- If it looks like it is ready for planting, toss it. CHIP DIP -------- If you can take it out of its container and bounce it on the floor, it has gone bad. EMPTY CONTAINERS ----------------- Putting empty containers back into the refrigerator is an old trick, but it only works if you live with someone or have a maid. UNMARKED ITEMS: -------------- You know it is well beyond prime when you're tempted to discard the Tupperware along with the food. Generally speaking, Tupperware containers should not burp when you open them. GENERAL RULE OF THUMB: ----------------------- Most food cannot be kept longer than the average life span of a hamster. Keep a hamster in or nearby your refrigerator to gauge this. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevie Wonder and Jack Nicklaus are in a bar. Nicklaus turns to Wonder and says, "How is the singing career going?" Stevie Wonder says, "Not too bad, the latest album has gone into the top 10, so all in all I think it is pretty good. By the way how is the golf going ?" Nicklaus replies: "Not too bad, I am not winning as much as I used to but I'm still making a bit of money. I had some problems with my swing, but I think I've got that right now." "I always find that when my swing goes wrong I need to stop playing for a while and think about it, then the next time I play it seems to be all right," says Stevie. "You play golf!?" asks Jack. Stevie says, "Yes, I have been playing for years." "But you are blind; how can you play golf if you are blind?" Jack asks. " I get my caddie to stand in the middle of the fairway and he calls to me. I listen for the sound of his voice and play the ball towards him, then when I get to where the ball lands the caddie moves to the green, or further down the fairway, and again I play the ball towards his voice," explains Stevie. "But how do you putt?" Nicklaus wondered. "Well," says Stevie, "I get my caddie to lean down in front of the hole and call to me with his head on the ground, and I just play the ball to the sound of his voice." Nicklaus says, "What is your handicap?" "Well, I play off scratch," Stevie assures Jack. Nicklaus is incredulous and says to Stevie, "We must play a game sometime." Wonder replies, "Well, people don't take me seriously, so I only play play for money, and I never play for less than $10,000 a hole." Nicklaus thinks it over and says, "OK, I'm up for that. When would you like to play?" "I don't care.... any night next week is OK with me." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Two computer people discussing those old stories about Bill Gates' name adding up to 666 in ASCII: "I hear that if you play the NT 4.0 CD backwards, you get a Satanic message." "--That's nothing. If you play it forward, it installs NT 4.0!" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just out of the seminary, Father McLaughlin was assigned to a parish in Chicago. Three weeks after he arrived, Father McLaughlin walked into the church and stopped dead in his tracks. Kneeling at the altar, praying, was Jesus Christ. The young priest rushed into his superior's office. "Father Murphy," he exclaimed. "Come quick! Our Savior is in our church!" The two clerics rushed back into the church and sure enough, there was Christ praying at the Altar. "What should we do?" whispered young Father McLaughlin. "Look busy!" answered the older priest. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You thought you had a bad day at the office.... A true story... A professional scuba diver's letter to his sister... April, 1998 Hi Sue, Just another note from your bottom dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wetsuit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of shit sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temp. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a damn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is I take the hose and stuff it down the back of my neck. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my ass started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my ass started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened to me. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. This is even worse than the poison ivy you once had under a cast. Now I had that hose down my back. I don't have any hair on my back, so the jellyfish couldn't get stuck to my back. My ass crack was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into my ass. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the comms. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he along with 5 other divers were laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make 3 agonizing water stops totaling 35 minutes before I could come to the surface. I got to the surface wearing nothing but my brass helmet. My suit and gear were tied to the bell. When I got on board the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to shove it up my ass when I get in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't shit for two days because my asshole was swollen shut. I later found out that this could easily have been prevented if the suction hose was placed on the leeward side of the ship. Anyway, the next time you have a bad day at the office, think of me. I hope you have no bad days at the office. But if you do, I hope that thought will make it a little more tolerable. Take care, and I hope to hear from you soon. Love, Brian -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As most of you know, the new Tech Museum (www.thetech.org) just opened in San Jose and it's a pretty cool place, but if they REALLY wanted to capture life in Silicon Valley, they should have included some of the following: 1. The Unreasonable Expectation Work Week Simulator: Ever wonder what it's like to work 80 hours a week? You can now experience blurry vision, diminished reaction time, the health effects of eating nothing but Doritos, and the heart-racing excitement of Jolt Cola addiction with the Unreasonable Expectation Work Week Simulator! Hey, who are those strangers claiming to be your family? They're just part of the mysteries you'll experience at the Tech Museum! 2. The "Find Help At Fry's" Cyber-Challenge: Don your Virtual Reality goggles and take a tour in the Valley's favorite electronics chain! Your challenge: find someone who can help you. It's not as easy as it sounds, though. If you do find someone, you still have to somehow get them to make eye contact! And once you get help, the challenge isn't over! You still have to avoid the "Let me get my manager" monster, endure the perpetual "Humans as Cattle" cash register corral, and make it past the paranoid door Nazi without getting a body cavity search! Youch! 3. The Valley Fair Mall Parking Space Scavenger Hunt: Your mission: get in our car simulator and find parking at the Valley's most congested mall! Extra points for finding a space within a one-mile radius of the mall itself. Next year we hope to make this scavenger hunt even more challenging when we violate the laws of conservation of mass with the addition of the Town and Country Monument to Bad City Management! 4. "Sell or Die"!: Kids will learn valuable lessons playing this interactive game designing and marketing superior, technically-advanced products that fill a niche and meet a need. But wait! The fun is just starting! It's time to play "Sell or Die"! Kids get to choose whether they will let themselves be bought out by the "innovative" Microsoft, or whether they will resist the urge and have their products undersold by Microsoft's inferior competing products! The fun is in seeing how long you can last in the face of unfair marketing practices. The last player to go bankrupt paying their legal bills wins! Extra points for kids who survive long enough to testify in front of the Justice Department! 5. Mr. Jobs' Wild Ride: Get in your Apple Stock Rocket and experience the wildest roller coaster ride of your life! Just when you think the Rocket is about to hit a wall, swerve wildly and unexpectedly to one side and avoid certain death (for now)! And the best part is, your fate is completely in the hands of one all-powerful and unpredictable hippy-turned-power-player-turned-exile-turned-interim-CEO-for-life! And look out! The Larry Ellison Hot Wind Machine will try to blow you off course! You'll lose your lunch on abrupt policy changes, and scream your lungs out as you freefall on the final Mac Clone Maker Betrayal Drop of Death! Riders can then regain their composure looking at the: 6. San Jose Mercury News Wall of Premature Apple Obituaries: Get up close and personal with Valley history by reading over 15 years of stories lamenting the imminent death of everyone's favorite fruit company! With all that circling, don't buzzards ever get dizzy? 7. The Silicon Valley Virtual Commute Race Course: You have two hours to go 15 miles! Think you can do it? Well, buckle yourself into our simulator and give it a try! The Tech Museum offers several race courses to choose from: Try the "880 Endurance Course"! Hey! You finally made it past the Winchester Mystery Puddle at The Alameda on-ramp, and you're finally up to 25 mph! You'll make Brokaw Road in no time. But look out! 101 merges into 880 AND the freeway goes down to two lanes AT THE SAME TIME! Who designed this nutty course? Or try the "17 Face Off of Doom"! You're behind one truck in the right lane going 21 mph. The truck in the left lane is going 20.5 mph! Calculate how many hours it will be before you can pass both trucks! Or try the 680 "Trail of Tears"! You've got to make it from Pleasanton to Fremont with only one full tank of gas! Sound easy? Don't forget the inept Caltrans contractors who block off lanes for no reason at all! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A secretary, out with appendicitis, was being visited by a co-worker in the hospital. "How are things at the office going, Claudia ?" she asked from the bed. "Well, they're all sharing your work: Jody is making the coffee, Louise is reading all your magazines, and Sharon is making it with the Boss." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WASHINGTON, D.C.- The Institute for the Investigation of Irregular Internet Phenomena announced today that many Internet users are becoming infected by a new virus that causes them to believe without question every groundless story, legend, and dire warning that shows up in their Inbox or on their browser. The Gullibility Virus, as it is called, apparently makes people believe and forward copies of silly hoaxes relating to cookie recipes, e-mail viruses, taxes on modems, and get-rich-quick schemes. "These are not just readers of tabloids or people who buy lottery tickets based on fortune cookie numbers," a spokesman said. "Most are otherwise normal people, who would laugh at the same stories if told to them by a stranger on a street corner." However, once these same people become infected with the Gullibility Virus, they believe anything they read on the Internet. "My immunity to tall tales and bizarre claims is all gone," reported one weeping victim. "I believe every warning message and sick child story my friends forward to me, even though most of the messages are anonymous." Another victim, now in remission, added, "When I first heard about 'Good Times,' I just accepted it without question. After all, there were dozens of other recipients on the mail header, so I thought the virus must be true." It was a long time, the victim said, before she could stand up at a Hoaxes Anonymous meeting and state, "My name is Jane, and I've been hoaxed." Now, however, she is spreading the word. "Challenge and check whatever you read," she says. Internet users are urged to examine themselves for symptoms of the virus, which include the following: * The willingness to believe improbable stories without thinking * The urge to forward multiple copies of such stories to others * A lack of desire to take three minutes to check to see if a story is true T. C. is an example of someone recently infected. He told one reporter, "I read on the Net that the major ingredient in almost all shampoos makes your hair fall out, so I've stopped using shampoo." When told about the Gullibility Virus, T . C. said he would stop reading e-mail, so that he would not become infected. Anyone with symptoms like these is urged to seek help immediately. Experts recommend that at the first feelings of gullibility, Internet users rush to their favorite search engine and look up the item tempting them to thoughtless credence. Most hoaxes, legends, and tall tales have been widely discussed and exposed by the Internet community. Courses in critical thinking are also widely available, and there is online help from many sources, including * Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability at http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html * Symantec Anti Virus Research Center at http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/index.html * The Urban Legends Web Site at http://www.urbanlegends.com/ * Urban Legends Reference Pages at http://www.snopes.com/ * Datafellows Hoax Warnings at http://www.Europe.Datafellows.com/news/hoax.htm Lastly, as a public service, Internet users can help stamp out the Gullibility Virus by sending copies of this message to anyone who forwards them a hoax. ********************************************************************* Forward this message to all your friends right away! Don't think about it! This is not a chain letter! This story is true! Don't check it out! This story is so timely, there is no date on it! This story is so important, we're using lots of exclamation points!!! For every message you forward to some unsuspecting person, the Home for the Hopelessly Gullible will donate ten cents to itself. (If you wonder how the Home will know you are forwarding these messages all over creation, you're obviously thinking too much.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tonight's television listings FOX 8:00 Real Humans in Real Pain 8:30 Feral Dingoes Eating Children on Tape 9:00 Jiggle It Beach 9:30 LA Chicks 10:00 Beverly Hills 90210: The 90,210th Episode UPN 8:00 The Unwatchables 8:30 Voyage To The Bottom Of The Ratings 9:00 Theoretically Existing Show 9:30 Praying For Syndication 10:00 The Last Thing You'd Ever Want To Sit Through WB 8:00 Where My Wife At? 8:30 Gittin' Yo Freak On 9:00 Me & My Psychic 9:30 Kids Suck The Darndest Things 10:00 Dawson's Clothes ANIMAL PLANET 8:00 Incontinent Rhinos 9:00 Dan Taylor: Mongoose Optometrist 10:00 STAY! 10:30 The Best of STAY! E! 8:00 Andy Gibb: A Nightmare Descent Into Booze & Pills 9:00 Margot Kidder: A Nightmare Descent Into Booze & Pills 10:00 Boy George: A Nightmare Descent Into Booze & Pills ESPN2 8:00 Finland's Brutalest Men 8:30 Being Hit By A Trolley Regional Semifinals 9:00 60 Minutes Of Joe Theismann's Leg Breaking 10:00 Co-Ed Spread-Eagled Weight-Training From Maui SCI-FI 8:00 Space: 1972 9:00 The Bermuda Triangle: Myth Or Fiction? 10:00 Mid-Budget Galaxy LIFETIME 8:00 How Can I Choose Between My Daughters? 9:00 The Abused Wife Who Didn't Mean To Kill Her Policeman Husband In Self-Defense 10:00 The Boy Whose Mommy Watched Far Too Much Television TNN 8:00 Well, I'll Be Dipped In Pigshit! 9:00 You Hush Up, Wanda Mae 9:30 Sheeeeeeee-It! 10:00 Hold 'Er Down While I Get The Rifle From The Truck TELEMUNDO 8:00 Roberto Amorosa En Agua Caliente! 9:00 Whoomp! Donde Esta? 9:30 Goooooooooooooal! 10:00 Ai! Ai! Ai! Ai! Ai! 10:30 La Hora De Goya PUBLIC ACCESS 8:00 Blurry Steve 8:30 Inaudible City Council Meeting 9:00 Do We Have A Caller On The Line? Hello? 9:30 The Best Of Lunch Menus 10:00 My Friend Made This Short Film 10:30 Men With Braids Speak Out CINEMAX 8:00 Bare Ambition (Tanya Roberts) 8:30 Naked Exposition (Traci Lords) 9:00 Body Of Nudity (Dana Plato) 10:00 Unclothed Anguish (Joyce DeWitt) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The Five Commercials Aired During The Lewinsky / Walters Interview" (and yes, these really did air during the interview) 5. Victoria's Secret lingerie. 4. Burger King - featuring the song "It's My Party, and I'll Cry if I Want To." 3. Oral-B Deluxe. 2. A promo for the TV movie "Cleopatra," with the following voice-over: "When she was only 20, she seduced the most powerful leader in the world." 1. Maytag's Neptune washing machine - "It actually has the power to remove stains!" Anyway, it's something to think about. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "That wife of mine is a liar," said the angry husband to a sympathetic pal seated next to him in the bar. "How do you know?" the friend asked. "She didn't come home last night and when I asked her where she'd been, she said she had spent the night with her sister, Shirley." "So?" "So she's a liar. I spent the night with her sister, Shirley." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Recently a Ft. Lauderdale advertising agency launched a billboard campaign (including the inside and outside of buses) that included 17 different messages .... from God. This non-denominational campaign started in September sponsored by an anonymous client. 1. "Let's Meet At My House Sunday Before the Game " - God 2. "C'mon Over And Bring The Kids " - God 3. "What Part of "Thou Shalt Not..." Didn't You Understand?" - God 4. "We Need To Talk" - God 5. "Keep Using My Name in Vain And I'll Make Rush Hour Longer" - God 6. "Loved The Wedding, Invite Me To The Marriage" - God 7. "That "Love Thy Neighbor" Thing, I Meant It." - God 8. "I Love You...I Love You...I Love You..." - God 9. "Will The Road You're On Get You To My Place?" - God 10. "Follow Me." - God 11. "Big Bang Theory, You've Got To Be Kidding." - God 12. "My Way Is The Highway." - God 13. "Need Directions?" - God 14. "You Think It's Hot Here?" - God 15. "Tell The Kids I Love Them." - God 16. "Need a Marriage Counselor? I'm Available." - God 17. "Have You Read My #1 Best Seller? There Will Be A Test." - God -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SERIALISM EXPOSED! Composer Webern was Double Agent for Nazis By Heinrich Kincaid BERLIN, GERMANY (AP) - Recent admissions by an ex-Nazi official living in Argentina have confirmed what some musicologists have suspected for years: that early twentieth century German composer Anton Webern and his colleagues devised the so-called "serial" technique of music to encrypt messages to Nazi spies living in the United States and Britain. In what can surely be considered the most brazen instance of Art Imitating Espionage to date, avant garde composers of the Hitler years working in conjunction with designers of the Nazi Enigma code were bamboozling unsuspecting audiences with their atonal thunderings while at the same time passing critical scientific data back and forth between nations. "This calls into question the entire Second Viennese School of music," announced minimalist composer John Adams from his home in the Adirondack Mountains. "Ever since I first encountered compositions by Arnold Schoenberg I wondered what the hell anyone ever heard in it. Now I know." Gunned down by an American soldier in occupied Berlin, 62 year old Anton Webern's death was until now considered a tragic loss to the musical world. At the time the us Army reported that the killing was "a mistake", and that in stepping onto the street at night to smoke a cigarette Webern was violating a strict curfew rule. It is now known that Webern was using music to shuttle Werner Heisenberg's discoveries in atomic energy to German spy Klaus Fuchs working on the Manhattan atom bomb project in New Mexico. Due to the secret nature of the project, which was still underway after the invasion of Berlin, Army officials at the time were unable to describe the true reason for Webern's murder. Hans Scherbius, a Nazi party official who worked with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, admitted at age eighty-seven that the Nazis secretly were behind the twelve-tone technique of composition, which was officially reviled to give it the outlaw status it needed to remain outside of the larger public purview. "These pieces were nothing more than cipher for encoding messages," he chuckled during an interview on his balcony in Buenos Aires. "It was only because it was 'naughty' and difficult that elite audiences accepted it, even championed it." Physicist Edward Teller, who kept a 9-foot Steinway piano in his apartment at the Los Alamos laboratory, was the unwitting deliverer of Heisenberg's data to Fuchs, who eagerly attended parties thrown by Teller, an enthusiastic booster of Webern's music. Arnold Schoenberg, the older musician who first devised the serial technique at the request of the Weimar government of Germany, composed in America to deliver bomb data stolen by Fuchs back to the Nazis, who worked feverishly to design their own atomic weapons. As an example, Scherbius showed Associated Press reporters the score of Webern's Opus 30 "Variations for Orchestra" overlayed with a cardboard template. The notes formed a mathematical grid that deciphered into German a comparison between the neutron release cross-sections of uranium isotopes 235 and 238. Schoenberg responded with a collection of songs for soprano and woodwinds that encrypted the chemical makeup of the polonium-beryllium initiator at the core of the Trinity explosion. And in Japan, Toru Takemitsu took time out from his own neo-romanticism to transmit data via music of his nation's progress with the atom. "The most curious thing about it," says composer Philip Glass in New York City, "is that musicians continued to write twelve-tone music after the war, even though they had no idea why it was really invented. Indeed, there are guys who are churning out serialism to this day." Unlike the diatonic music, which is based on scales that have been agreed upon by listeners throughout the world for all of history, twelve-tone music treats each note of the chromatic scale with equal importance, and contains a built-in mathematical refusal to form chords that are pleasing by traditional standards. Known also as serialism, the style has never been accepted outside of an elite cadre of musicians, who believe it is the only fresh and valid direction for post-Wagnerian classical music to go. "Even if this is really true," states conductor Pierre Boulez, a composer who continues to utilize serial techniques, "the music has been vindicated by music critics for decades now. I see no reason to suddenly invalidate an art form just because of some funny business at its inception." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- An Annapolis cadet recently wrote on a literature exam, "Sancho Panza always rode on a burrow." To this his instructor responded, "A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a future officer, you are expected to know the difference." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hamlet's Cat To go outside, and there perchance to stay Or to remain within: that is the question: Whether 'tis better for a cat to suffer The cuffs and buffets of inclement weather That Nature rains on those who roam abroad, Or take a nap upon a scrap of carpet, And so by dozing melt the solid hours That clog the clock's bright gears with sullen time And stall the dinner bell. To sit, to stare Outdoors, and by a stare to seem to state A wish to venture forth without delay, Then when the portal's opened up, to stand As if transfixed by doubt. To prowl; to sleep; To choose not knowing when we may once more Our readmittance gain: aye, there's the hairball; For if a paw were shaped to turn a knob, Or work a lock or slip a window-catch, And going out and coming in were made As simple as the breaking of a bowl, What cat would bear the household's petty plagues, The cook's well-practiced kicks, the butler's broom, The infant's careless pokes, the tickled ears, The trampled tail, and all the daily shocks That fur is heir to, when, of his own free will, He might his exodus or entrance make With a mere mitten? Who would spaniels fear, Or strays trespassing from a neighbor's yard, But that the dread of our unheeded cries And scratches at a barricaded door No claw can open up, dispels our nerve And makes us rather bear our humans' faults Than run away to unguessed miseries? Thus caution doth make house cats of us all; And thus the bristling hair of resolution Is softened up with the pale brush of thought, And since our choices hinge on weighty things, We pause upon the threshold of decision.