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Pastimes : Laughter is the Best Medicine - Tell us a joke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PMS Witch who wrote (10943)	8/6/1999 1:29:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 62549

PW, Carnival Cruise Lines is currently defending itself in court against literally hundreds of charges stemming from its employees sexually assaulting other employees and passengers on its cruise lines; it is further accused of knowing of the complaints for a rather long time (years) and taking no action whatsoever. Perhaps they considered this to be one of the perqs they offer??? Ian

To: PMS Witch who wrote (10943)	8/6/1999 2:04:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 62549

What you're missing is that Carnival Cruises is admitting that their employees have raped more passengers than they have previously acknowledged.

To: PMS Witch who wrote (10943)	8/6/1999 3:48:00 PM
From: Feathered Propeller	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 62549

Hamster dance entertaining, irritating millions on the web sun-sentinel.com By LONA O'CONNOR, Staff Writer Web-posted: 8:47 p.m. Aug. 5, 1999 Who'd have thought that hamsters might take over the world wide web? Two million hits and at least 260 copycat sites -- that's the popularity tally so far for www.hamsterdance.com, a screen full of booty-shaking cartoon hamsters who scat-sing a ditty that sounds like Roger Miller on helium. How could this happen? How could a pocket-sized nocturnal vegetarian fuzzball rated a distant sixth among American pets reach such heights? How could an undistinguished graphic and an irritating lyric grab the attention of web users all over the country? It all started on a dare. Last summer Deidre LaCarte, her sister and a friend had a contest to see who could create a web site that got the most hits. LaCarte, an art student and martial arts instructor from Nanaimo, British Columbia, chose to honor her pet hamster, Hampton. The first week she got 800 hits. "Four days later I checked the page and my jaw dropped. Thirty thousand people had visited the page," LaCarte wrote in an e-mail answer to a reporter's query. A web site company saw LaCarte's page and asked to sponsor it. With write-ups in such diverse publications as Entertainment Weekly and the Chronicle of Higher Education, the hamster dance rocketed up to two million hits. By comparison, one fan site for popular electronic pinup Carmen Electra had 450,000 hits. Inevitably, there is now dancing hamster merchandise: mugs, note pads, pencils, magnets, stuffed hamsters, T-shirts and stickers. College students needing a break from studying shout, "Hamster Dance!" and then perform the four-movement dance. LaCarte says she gets about 1,000 e-mails a week. She answers with a form letter. The hamster dance fad is a two-part phenomenon, said Phil Agre, a professor of information studies at UCLA. First, the wave of popularity. "It happens the same way as any fads and fashions happen, only more quickly," said Agre. "The Internet makes it easy to pass things around." Then, the copycats. A pull-down menu on most web browsers allows people to view the coding that makes up a web page. Substitute fish or cows for hamsters and voila! Your own dancing page. Knockoffs include Pokemon, Beanie Babies, vampires and Santa Claus. For the irreverent, there's even a dancing Jesus. "It takes five minutes to copy," said Agre. "You get a complicated and weird effect with a simple mechanism. That's why there are so many of them." There are even two web sites that document all the copycat sites. Of course, there is anti-hamster backlash. One site allows the viewer to explode a jeering cartoon hamster in a cartoon microwave. Another uses automatic weapons. One boss plaintively begged LaCarte in an e-mail, "Please take it off the net because all 60 of my employees are playing it at the same time and it is driving me crazy." LaCarte said the copycat sites are flattering, but she doesn't like it when they get pornographic sponsors or blow up hamsters. It is Roger Miller, by the way, electronically speeded up, singing a few notes from the 1973 Disney film "Robin Hood." So what does it all mean? "It makes people laugh," said LaCarte. A Harvard computer science student, Thomas Lotze, opined in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "The hamster dance came from the collective unconscious, from the minds and hopes and dreams of everyone. In a very real sense, the hamster dance came from you." Get a grip, said Professor Agre. "It's not profound. A lot of people have a lot of time on their hands."