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Politics : Piffer Thread on Political Rantings and Ravings -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (12169)	1/15/2004 1:20:47 PM
From: X Y Zebra	Respond to of 14610

Dear Mr. Hargreaves, I have been thinking very carefully about my life. My angels have left. I can feel it in the core of my existence. All my life I have been looking for a great mystery to decipher. I felt that if I could just achieve one major triumph of insight, it would be profoundly satisfying. Something of truly lasting significance. But I have failed to do that. If it was going to happen, it would have happened by now. I'm already too old to make that transcendental leap. The window of opportunity has closed. I do hope, however, that my work will be a foundation for others. Tonight I will ingest a bottle of Dilaudid that I have been stockpiling from my sleeping prescription. I have rigged up a timed device to set the house on fire. I must tell you that the natural disasters we have been experiencing have been very unsettling to me. I have never been very religious, but these events seem to have a life of their own. The aftershocks are unbearable. I am on edge every second of the day. I am sick and depressed. I must also warn you that Dr. Wick is clinically insane. The constant stream of vituperation and invective that pours forth from him cannot be the product of a "normal" mind. He has been wearing me down. He has threatened to kill me a number of times. If he is indicted for my murder, you may use your own best judgment. You remember The Museum of Jurassic Technology that I told you about? As you leave, there is an exhibit detailing the pathogenic effect of the inhalation of a spore by a large West African ant. While foraging on the jungle floor, by chance the ant inhales a microscopic spore, which lodges in its brain and begins to replicate throughout its body and nervous system. For the first time in its life, the ant is driven to leave the floor of the jungle. It climbs high into the branches of lush green foliage, traveling to places it never would have gone under normal circumstances. Finally, as the spores begin to consume the ant's entire body and nervous system, the ant clamps its mandibles to a leaf. In the last stage, a large, fire-orange tusk, heavily laden with spores, grows from its head, then finally ruptures, raining the spores down all over the floor of the jungle. I am that ant. And I have planted a spore. I have introduced a virus into all the computer systems on our network. It is very subtle, virtually undetectable, and will produce minuscule cyclic errors in floating-point calculations on all of the workstations. These errors are not random. They follow a distribution that I derived, designed to slightly perturb the results of all the work being done on campus. The virus will inject a chaos factor into the research of the entire institution. I am convinced that in tracking down these errors, the faculty and students will be shaken out of their routines, which I'm hoping will have a positive effect. Each one will be forced to look at his or her data from a slightly new perspective. Forced to stop and ruminate. These are the spores that I have shed. Goodbye, Peter Jakab I take a big drink of red wine and watch the candle dance on the dark wood table. The waitress brings my pappardelle with Italian sausage. I feel slightly nauseated. It would be too much to ask that Wick be convicted for murder. And if he does go down, would I really be able to sit back and not say anything? But without Jakab, I have no ally against him. I'm back in the belly of the beast. Glass and chrome flash from the traffic out on University Avenue. I shuffle the pages of Peter's letter in my hands. Life on the cutting edge is dangerous. You can bleed. Michael Meloan (mdmeloan@aol.com) has published fiction in Buzz Magazine, LA Weekly, Chic, and Caffeine. He has also written for Joe Frank's National Public Radioshow. wired.com _______________________________________ [Read the entire story that led to the above letter, quite fun...]