/// Another Moronic, Inane and Gratuitous Article
    ---------------------------------------------
    by Chad Freeman
    (cjfst4+@pitt.edu or cjfst4@cislabs.pitt.edu -- Internet)
    (cfreeman -- BIX)


     Hi there folks!  Well, last week I left you with a sort of un-
intentional cliff-hanger, since the crummy zmodem program on the UNIX box I
send this to was hungry and ate half of my article.  Unfortunately,
I hadn't saved the article on my Amiga, being in relative haste to get it
in slightly later than on-time.  Since I can't find our friend Oswald, I've
decided to make this...

    *======================================================*
    !------------------------------------------------------!
    !THE FIRST AND PROBABLY LAST EVER A.M.I.G.A. CONTEST!!!!
    !------------------------------------------------------!
    *======================================================*

     'Wow!' you say.  'Gee!' you say.  'Stop with the "you say's"' you say!
 'Quit using weird quotation groupings!' you say.  Well, shut up and let me
tell you about the contest, ok?

     The FAPLEAMIGAC (pronounced 'bleh') contest is thus:  you write a
suitably funny ending to Oswald's AMIGA PARK story, and _I_ will print YOUR
NAME and YOUR STORY in MY COLUMN!  How's that for the deal of the century??
Yes, I know, you're saying 'big whoop.'  Well, if you're bored one night,
jot down a hundred words or something and mail it in to one of my INTERNET
addresses. If you mail it in before Wednesday, July 14th, and I arbitrarily
pick it as the winning article, you'll know by that Friday when AR comes
out, or whenever you read it, whichever comes later.  Oh, and if you're
simply an egomaniac wanting your name in lights and will go around killing
people if you don't win, don't bother.


     Well, now I'm feeling really good, because I've slacked off on another
week's work by setting up this contest, plus eaten up some precious article
space this week.  So on with the article.

     Y'know, recently there has been a lot of bad press about Commodore.
They're firing people left and right, is what it comes down to.  But while
many people see this as a bad thing, I, in my twisted way, don't (boy I use
a lot of commas).  See, the way I see it, all of these firings ought to
INCREASE productivity.  I mean, after all, now the remaining staff can
knock out the walls in their cramped offices and have some elbow room.
Also, Commodore now has tons of free warehouse space so they won't have to
maintain or rent a large building to hold their stock.  And to top it all
off, the money they save from recycling all of those office-door nameplates
should save them a bundle.  So don't worry about Commodore, they'll do just
fine.  In fact, the only time I'll worry about the old seaman is when a
certain unnamed individual on the Usenet newsgroups starts having good
things to say about the company (but then the Earth will end so I won't
have to worry about it).

     And speaking of Usenet and the Internet; some people are calling it
the prototype for a global information highway.  Doesn't this scare anyone
else?  Internet is one thing and one thing only, ladies and gentlemen: mass
chaos incarnate.  It's been a gazillion years since the first Internet
mailing programs showed up and they still can't get rid of the 20k or
whatever limit on messages, folks!  Every piece of mail you read has 2000
lines of junk at the beginning, and a 100 line signature at the end, with
500 lines of useless text quoted in the middle.  In fact, I think sending
your mail out in space and waiting to see if it follows a circular path and
ends up back on Earth would be better than the current system.  No, I think
we should ditch the Internet and hire NewTek to do the job of designing and
implementing a global network, because 1) it'd use Amigas and 2) it'd have a
cool name like Telecom Coffee Maker or something.  Just think, you'd get a
'mail bean' from your buddy in Kalamazoo and you could use your own editor
to write a reply.  Just save it to the 'roaster' and out it goes. Of course
a mail processing program could only be called the 'grinder.'  And
multimedia extensions to mail?  Why, 'cream and sugar' of course!

     Well, now that I've 'pun'ished you for the week, its time for me to
file this under 'T' for terminally warped.  Remember, get those FAPLEAMIGAC
submissions ready!  I leave you, dear friends, with this little tidbit, the
joke of the week.

     Q. How many Bill Gates does it take to screw in a light bulb?
     A. One, but you need to add 4 megs memory and an 80 meg hard drive.

     Tune in next week for another exciting episode of A.M.I.G.A., the only
column with new added whitening ingredients to get your teeth sparkly
clean!