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From: tbsc@volcano.tbsc.ORG (talk.bizarre Steering Committee)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre,news.answers
Subject: Welcome to talk.bizarre!  (Monthly Posting)
Message-ID: <28Jan92119d2jjj@tbsc.org>
Date: 27 Jan 92 07:55:38 GMT
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Reply-To: mjd@saul.cis.upenn.edu (Seth the Lard)
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X-Mr-Attribution: Seth the Lard

Archive-name: talk-bizarre

    Greetings, miserable Newbie earth vermin and others.

    We are the members of the talk.bizarre steering
committee.  We are taking time this month to tell you the
sad story of talk.bizarre, and what it is here for and why
it is here and how it got heren.  Listen closely and don't
interrupt.

    Humans, as you know, share a race conciousness, and
hold all their most fundamental and primitive memories in
common.

    This collective unconscious you have turns out to be
very useful to us.  This is why: Once you are familliar with
the general flow of human conversation, you can always
identify an impostor in the midst of a group of humans.
How?  It's simple: All humans talk about the same things.
Ad nauseam.

    Thirty-four percent of all humans will, at the slightest
provocation, talk about Star Trek.  

    Eighty-seven percent of all humans quote Monty Python.
Seventy-four percent quote Douglas Adams.  Sixty-nine
percent quote both.  Of this sixty-nine percent, ninety-six
percent will quote in a bad accent.  (The remaining four
percent actually dwell in Great Britain.)  

    Humans argue about the morals of abortion.  Humans argue
about the civil rights of homosexuals.  Humans argue about
Robert Heinlein, or whoever else is the instantiation of
that particular archetype in whatever place and time.

    Humans discuss copyright law from a position of
ignorance.  You can't even translate the phrase ``I'm not a
lawyer, but...''  into most of the languages of the
Civilized Universe.

    We've seen it all.  We have on record a case of two
fellows coming to blows during the reign of Emperor Tiberius
over whether or not the grooves in their abacuses should
have crosshatches or not.  All humans argue over whose
computing hardware is better than whose.

    There are many more obscure topics and half-formed ideas
and memes that infest your collective unconscious, but
really it's much too depressing to go into at greater
length.

    The rest of us just don't share your interests, I'm
afraid, and that's why most of us avoid you all like the
plague.  Oh, certainly, you do interest each other, but it's
because you all have so much in common, I suppose.

    About two billion years ago, a boat carrying our Grand
Vizopterix and a party of wits, eccentrics, sarcastics, and
other nobles and ambassadors from around the universe set
down on the rather pretty and unspoiled planet of Newb.  The
sky was blue, the beaches sandy, and the green scum in the
ocean was a particularly lovely, poignant reminder of life's
eternal upward struggle.

    This holiday party, the cream of cosmic society, had a
bit of vehicle trouble, and never took off again.  They were
adaptable and creative, however, and some of their
descendants live on among you.  Eventually, their distress
signal made its way back to the civilized parts of the
universe.  A rescue convoy was assembled and dispatched.

    Now, if you peek into talk.bizarre for a few weeks,
you'll see that you can divide the sentients posting there
into two groups: The members of one group, which contains
most of the people there, are all posting the same things as
one another, and in fact are posting the same things as the
rest of the net.  An endless stream of drivel and rhyming
keywords and `When I woke up the sheets were wet' and `IS IT
JUST ME OR IS IT GETTING HOT IN HERE?' and soforth.

    The members of the other group, though fewer, are not
posting the same things as anyone else at all, including
each other.

    The conclusion?  The small group contains only
descendants of the original landing party.  The large group
contains mostly Newbies.  Need I add that Planet Newb is
your own planet Earth, and its tedious and repetitive
inhabitants none other than the `humans' you know and love
so well?

    talk.bizarre is the natural solution to our problem of
finding the aliens among you.  We had to accelerate your
technology enormously to support talk.bizarre, and we didn't
always do quite the right thing at the right time, but on
the whole we think that the usenet is a success, and we're
looking forward to the day when it blankets the entire
planet Newb, to the day when every descendant of the
original holiday party has posted to talk.bizarre, to the
day when we know exactly whom to rescue and whom to leave
behind, to the day when we can finally return home.

    On that day, we'll leave talk.bizarre and the usenet to
the rest of you, and you can talk about Monty Python to your
heart's content.

    Think of it!  You might be one of the long-lost
descendants of that long-lost party of diplomats.  If so,
get yourself into talk.bizarre right away---we wouldn't want
to leave you behind.  But be sure to read the group for a
few months first.  Even the best of us pick up bad habits
from our neighbors, and we wouldn't want to leave you behind
by mistake.  If you read the group for a few months, and
you're one of us and not one of them, it'll be clear what to
post and what not to post.  Once you see it it's obvious.
You'll post some astonishing thing, some thought that no
newbie (pardon me---`human') has ever thought, and it'll
stand out in the group like a beacon.  We'll see it and add
you to our list of Those to be Taken away.  It'll be a grand
day when that happens, I can tell you that.  The whole
civilized universe is just waiting to kill the fatted calf
for you.

    Do we understand each other? [yn]

        y

    How delightful.  Now, FUCK OFF. (tm)