Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/faqs/alt/answers/joel-furr/faq

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From: [e-mail] (Jay Furr)
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Subject: Joel Furr FAQ
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Archive-name: joel-furr/faq
Alt-fan-joel-furr-archive-name: faq
Alt-bonehead-joel-furr-archive-name: faq
Last-modified: 1997/2/23
Version: 4.6


This is the Joel Furr FAQ.

It is not provided out of a sense of personal vanity but rather for the
purpose its name states: to answer some of the Frequently Asked Questions
about me, such as "how'd he get three newsgroups named after him" and such.

Many of these questions are sent to me in electronic mail, usually as a
result of someone looking for the answers to their questions in
alt.fan.joel-furr and not finding them. It would be a good idea to read this
FAQ before posting to alt.fan.joel-furr.

-- Jay Furr

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Frequently Asked Questions

(1) Who is Joel Furr?

(2) Why does he have three newsgroups named after him?

(3) Who appointed Joel Furr ruler of alt.*?

(4) What is it about Joel and lemurs?

(5) Was Joel really elected Kibo, or is that just a myth?

(6) What happened between Joel and those "Green Card" lawyers in Arizona?

(7) What newsgroups is Joel Furr a moderator of?

(8) Does Joel Furr sell t-shirts and stuff?

(9) Does Joel spend all his time logged in, or what?

(10) Is Joel likely to reply if I write to him?

(11) What does Joel look like?

(12) What's the deal with those funny black floor lamps that point up at the
ceiling with the little knobs on the side about halfway up that you turn
back and forth to adjust the brightness? Everyone seems to have them these
days.

(13) Hey, where are the seatbelts?

(14) What's the 'soup du jour' today?

(15) Is cotton candy a solid or liquid or crystal or what?

(16) What's the 800 number for the North Carolina ferry system?

(17) Where is Paradise?

(18) Hey, what about those French?

(19) Is it true that if I jump up off the ground, I'm technically in low
earth orbit for as long as I'm in the air?

(20) Who's in charge of the weather?

(21) What is it with cats? How do they make their legs disappear when they
perch on the arm of a sofa, looking content?

(22) Does Joel Furr like fish?

(23) How 'bout them Dawgs?

(24) Is Joel a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or what?

(25) What's in those bottles in the back of Joel Furr's refrigerator?

(26) Where do bad people go when they die?

(27) When's the best time to go to an amusement park?

(28) What's wrong with Joel Furr's blood?

(29) What is that thing at the bottom of that big glass jar full of water?

(30) Will seagulls eat small chunks of pork barbecue?

(31) St. Patrick's Day is a festive, cheery holiday wherein we celebrate our
Irish heritage, affecting bad Irish accents and wearing green. How does Joel
Furr celebrate the holiday?

(32) Is it true that Joel Furr's car has a guardian spirit?

(33) Hey, isn't that song "YMCA" that they play at baseball games really
cool?

(34) What's that chunk of powdery concrete atop Joel Furr's bookcase?

(35) Does Joel have a girlfriend?

(36) What's the greatest cinematographic achievement of all time?

(37) What is a Hokie?

(38) What instrument did Joel Furr play in the Blacksburg High School band?

(39) What does Joel typically say when someone asks him, rhetorically, how
he is?

(40) What's the best sort of implement to use when eating ice cream?

(41) What clubs and organizations does Joel Furr belong to?

(42) What's Joel Furr's ethnic and socioeconomic background?

(43) Define "good eatins."

(44) Joel Furr visited Las Vegas in July 1995 for the better part of a day.
How much money did he gamble? How much did he lose?

(45) What were the schools in Blacksburg, Virginia like when Joel Furr was
growing up there?

(46) Where does Carole, Joel Furr's girlfriend, come from?

(47) Who is the Official Stooge of alt.fan.joel-furr?

(48) What exactly is "hungus?"

(49) What is the name of the night manager at the International House of
Pancakes franchise on Baxter Street in Athens, Georgia?

(50) What is Joel Furr's best category in Trivial Pursuit?

(51) Who is Wally?

(52) Where can you go in Durham, North Carolina, to get "spaghetti and
salmon cakes?"

(53) What is Joel Furr's favorite soft drink?

(54) How many fingers am I holding up?

(55) Do we need more plastic cups?

(56) What color should mayonnaise be?

(57) What is Joel Furr's astrological sign?

(58) What is Joel Furr's Myers-Briggs type?

(59) Where are your videos?

(60) How is "Furr" pronounced?

(61) What is the law?

(62) Where do the keys go?

(63) What are some of the nicknames that Joel Furr has gone by over the
years?

(64) What happens when you put a real, formerly alive, ocean-bred sponge
back in water?

(65) What kind of underwear does Joel Furr wear?

(66) Who is the greatest cat of all time?

(67) How can I embarrass myself in front of eight thousand people?

(68) Why does Joel Furr have so many strange and pointless pictures of
himself and his friends on his Web page?

(69) What's special about the Duke University parking deck at the corner of
Fulton and NC 147 in Durham, North Carolina?

(70) What fortune cookie does Joel Furr always get?

(71) What is "The Mother of All Rivers?"

(72) So, what was it like attending Georgia Tech?

(73) What book is Joel Furr currently working on?

(74) Who the hell is "Yalin Ekici?"

(75) What is the ultimate slow dancing song?

(76) Who was President of Joel Furr's high school Science Club?

(77) What is the secret of making great Bisquick pancakes?

(78) Why didn't Joel Furr wind up in the military?

(79) What was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to Joel Furr?

(80) When did Joel Furr learn to read?

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The Frequently Questioned Answers

(1) Who is Joel Furr?

Joel Furr is a writer and trainer who lives in Durham, North Carolina.

He was born in Roanoke, Virginia on September 20, 1967 and grew up in the
nearby college town of Blacksburg, where his father was an engineering
professor at Virginia Tech. After graduating from high school in 1985, he
attended the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia from 1985 to 1988,
earning a bachelor of arts degree in English.

Inasmuch as an English degree from a notorious football school hardly
qualified him for rapid advancement through the ranks of the American
industrial elite, Joel went on to graduate school at Virginia Tech, where he
earned a Master of Public Administrati on degree in about a year and a half
and then wasted the next two and a half years pursuing a Ph.D. in the same
subject before finally quitting, utterly burned out, in the fall of 1992.

During his graduate school years, he spent a lot of time goofing around on
Usenet and a few MUD systems, since his graduate assistantship position with
the Virginia Tech Department of Public Safety, Health, and Transportation
wasn't exactly demanding of h is time and since he was expected to spend at
least four hours per day in his office -- which happened to have a fast net
connection. After dropping out of his Ph.D. program in Public Administration
at the end of 1992, he tried and failed to find meanin gful work in western
Virginia, an economically depressed area with few good-paying jobs.

In late 1993, he gave up looking for work in Virginia and moved to Durham,
North Carolina, where he had friends and a few relatives. In fairly short
order, he got work, got an apartment, and resumed fooling around on the
Internet.

Since that time, he has worked in the pharmaceutical industry, in medical
research, and in higher education. At this time, he is employed as a
computer software trainer and works on the side as a freelance writer.

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(2) Why does he have three newsgroups named after him?

The newsgroups, alt.fan.joel-furr, alt.bonehead.joel-furr, and alt.joel-
furr.die.die.die, were not created by Joel Furr or by anyone acting on his
behalf. Each was created as an act of satire and/or criticism by people who
did not like Furr.

Alt.fan.joel-furr exists because Joel Furr once created a newsgroup called
alt.fan.serdar-argic, angering the infamous Ahmet Cosar, a.k.a. "Serdar
Argic." Cosar's infamous alter-ego was responsible for ruining many
history-related and culture-related new sgroups such as soc.history and
soc.culture.turkish; Cosar liked to post lengthy rants about one of his pet
delusions, namely, that in 1914, Armenians had killed all the Turks in
northeastern Turkey and in Russian Armenia. This is, of course, the direct
opposite of what actually happened, but Cosar, an apologist for the Turkish
genocide, was certain that he could convince the world otherwise if he
posted megabyte-long rants to dozens of newsgroups per day, lowering the
signal-to-noise ratio so far that m any posters would desert the newsgroups
and leave the field to Cosar and his allies. Furr created
alt.fan.serdar-argic to give people who were sick of Cosar's childish pranks
a place to comment and discuss what to do about Cosar. Within 24 hours,
Cosar h ad newgrouped alt.fan.joel-furr.

Oddly enough, and no doubt to the immense surprise of Cosar, the newsgroup
has actually seen considerable use from time to time. (See also question
#74, "Who the hell is 'Yalin Ekici?'")

Alt.bonehead.joel-furr exists for a similar reason. A user named Paul Hendry
once spent a solid two months posting hundreds of messages to alt.config
trying to convince the alt.config regulars that the world of Usenet direly
needed a newsgroup for fans of lampreys (jawless parasitical fish) to chat.
However, he failed utterly because a simple grep of the newsspool showed
that the only lamprey-related traffic in existence was on alt.config itself.
Hendry, as it turned out later, had been trying to trick alt.config's
regulars into rubber-stamping an unnecessary newsgroup. Why he thought this
would be amusing is anyone's guess. Hendry finally exhausted Joel Furr's
patience, and Furr newgrouped alt.bonehead.paul-hendry. Hendry, in a
masturbatory act of excess, then turned around and newgrouped
alt.animals.lampreys, alt.animals.paul-hendry, and alt.bonehead.joel-furr.
None of the four newsgroups gets any traffic to speak of. Both sides in the
affair, in the final analysis, acted childishly.

The third group, alt.joel-furr.die.die.die, is not carried much of anywhere
and isn't really considered a real newsgroup. It was created by a
pseudonymous Netcom user without any evident provocation -- it just "showed
up" one day without any obvious just ification. Fewer than 10% of sites
carry the newsgroup on their system, and the sites that do are generally
those sites which have their newgrouping and rmgrouping set on "autopilot,"
accepting all newsgroups that are created anywhere by anyone.

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(3) Who appointed Joel Furr ruler of alt.*?

No one. In fact, references to "King Joel of alt.*" are showing up a lot
less frequently because Joel no longer gives much of a damn what happens in
alt.* - so many garbage newsgroups have been created that the alt.*
namespace is a hopeless mess and the re's nothing that can be done about it.
He used to spend a half hour to an hour each day trying to explain to the
endless legions of clueless newbies why we didn't need to have sixteen
newsgroups on the same subject, or why a newsgroup with a confusing,
meaningless name would get zero traffic. It never made a dent in the hordes
of stupid-ass bozos who showed up day after day begging for newsgroups only
they cared about, so Joel eventually found better uses for his time.

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(4) What is it about Joel and lemurs?

Joel and some friends started telling each other jokes about lemurs on one
of the bulletin board systems (the late, lamented vtcosy.cns.vt.edu
conferencing system) at Virginia Tech back in 1991. Neither Joel nor his
friends knew anything about lemurs exc ept that they were from Madagascar
and had big eyes. When Joel and company found out there was a research
center dedicated to lemurs just a few hours away in Durham, North Carolina,
they promptly went down and visited. The Duke University Primate Center
turned out to be a really cool place with woods full of lemurs on the hoof
and Joel fell in love with the furry little varmints, especially since they
were (and still are) gravely endangered in their native habitat and needed
help so badly. Joel started campaigning online for donations to DUPC and
continued this activity when he moved down to Durham.

If you would like to know more about lemurs, you can visit the DUPC home
page at http://www.duke.edu/web/primate/index.html and/or discuss lemurs
with fellow lemur fans on the Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.lemurs.

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(5) Was Joel really elected Kibo, or is that just a myth?

In January of 1994, James "Kibo" Parry disappeared from Usenet for a long
time, over a month. No one knew where he had gone or what he was up to. Some
people cared, some people didn't. Finally, Andrew Bulhak, an Australian
net.user, called for an elect ion to replace Parry in the role of Kibo.
Bulhak accepted any nomination that came his way, then published a list of
candidates and held an open vote via e-mail. When the voting period was up,
Joel Furr had won with a solid plurality and almost a majori ty, with 81
votes; the nearest runner up was Parry himself, with around 30 votes. Parry
had returned from whatever it was he'd been off doing halfway through the
voting period, but had known better than to denounce the vote for fear of
inspiring people t o gleefully vote against him.

However, once the vote was over, Parry started whining very loudly about it
and actually threatened Joel Furr with legal action over Joel's frivolous
use of the title "Kibo" in a few Usenet posts. According to Parry, his
nickname "Kibo" had actually won him a few endorsement contracts in Boston
(primarily for computer stores, apparently with tongue lodged solidly in
cheek) and if someone else were also using the term, it would damage his
marketability.

Inasmuch as Joel had only signed two or three messages with "Kibo," having
had better things to do than engage in the sort of idiocy practiced
regularly on alt.religion.kibology, he had little use for Parry's whining.
It was not as though Joel had actual ly set out to replace Parry as Kibo in
the minds of Internet users - nor would Joel have had the slightest interest
in attaining Kibo-like notoriety, since being Kibo is sort of like being the
biggest rat in the garbage heap. Nonetheless, Parry was so wh iny about it
that Joel stopped using the nickname in disgust.

As Joel said at the time, "It's ironic that Usenet's biggest jokester cannot
take a joke himself."

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(6) What happened between Joel and those "Green Card" lawyers in Arizona?

In 1994, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, the so-called "Green Card
Lawyers," were probably the most disliked people on Usenet. Their actions --
spamming repeatedly and then managing to convince the mainstream media that
they were the wronged parties w hen their messages were erased -- made them
extremely unpopular. Consequently, Joel Furr was asked by many people to
make a t-shirt satirizing them. (Furr had previously made and sold about 150
copies of a t-shirt satirizing Ahmet "Serdar Argic" Cosar.) When he designed
and began taking orders for a "Green Card Lawyers: Spamming the Globe" t-
shirt, Canter and Siegel got wind of it and threatened Joel with "severe"
legal action unless he removed the term "Green Card Lawyers" from the
shirts.

Canter and Siegel based their threats on two claims, both legally without a
shred of foundation:

Claim #1: They had exclusive trademark over the term "Green Card
Lawyers," a
term they had never used in trade and which in fact they had no rights to
whatsoever. Legally, if you want to be able to assert a common-law trademark
over a term, you must have used that term in trade. Canter and Siegel had
never used that term as part of their business, so they had no rights to it
whatsoever.

Claim #2: They had exclusive rights to produce or license the rights to
produce a t-shirt based on their exploits, and that "several large
companies" were already interested in marketing C&S-based shirts. Needless
to say, no companies ever produced such a shirt - and in any case, they
certainly had no right to prevent someone else from exercising their freedom
of speech by producing t-shirts satirizing them.

During an exchange of email over the matter, Canter and Siegel betrayed a
complete lack of knowledge of the law - or, if you want to ascribe to malice
what others ascribed to stupidity, were engaged in barratry, the use of
legal threats for harassment rea sons. Canter and Siegel said that the
concept of "public figures" being considered legally vulnerable to satire
was complete nonsense, and they repeatedly asserted their trademark claim
over a term they had never filed for trademark over and which they c ouldn't
even claim common law trademark over since they had never used the term in
trade. It was easy to see, after a short round of discussions with them, why
they'd had to sue to be permitted to resign from the Florida Bar several
years ago in a n effort to avoid actual disbarment.

Furr was panicked after receiving their threats, because although he knew
that their claims were absolute garbage, he also knew that he didn't have
the financial resources to deal with a lawsuit brought by two lawyers in a
state two thousand miles from hi s home. He considered taking the term
"Green Card Lawyers" off the shirts, but first, asked for suggestions and
comments from the readers of newsgroups like comp.org.eff.talk and
misc.legal.

Two days of absolute pandemonium followed. Joel began getting hundreds of
offers of free legal help and donations to a Joel Furr Defense Fund.
Thankfully, Mike Godwin, Chief Legal Counsel of the Electronic Frontiers
Foundation, also heard of the matter a nd offered the EFF's services in the
case to defend Furr in any legal matters that did develop. Heartened, Joel
publicly said "To hell with the lawyers, the shirts are going forward with
the original design, let them sue."

Canter and Siegel promptly began claiming that they had never made any
threats whatsoever and that it was all a fiction invented by Joel Furr. In
later months, after the "Green Card Lawyers" shirts had sold like hotcakes
(the result of Canter and Siegel's effort to prevent their sale altogether),
Canter and Siegel went around claiming that Furr had actually contacted them
first and asked for permission to make the shirts and that they'd just told
him to go away and not talked to him again. Since F urr had kept all the
email they'd sent him and had it handy to show anyone who asked, this absurd
claim was easily disproven.

Canter and Siegel went on to publish a book about the Internet entitled "How
To Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway" which, from all accounts,
was a pedestrian and rather lame ghost-written Net guide with a sad little
chapter or two at the end declaring the authors champions of spamming. They
then tried to run a spam-for-hire service which collapsed when no one would
sell them net access, and after a few notable fiascoes which introduced the
Net to the concept of "disposable accounts" (dial-up shell accounts used for
spamming with the full knowledge that the provider would angrily delete the
account once the spamming had taken place), Canter and Siegel more or less
vanished from sight.

What a pity.

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(7) What newsgroups is Joel Furr a moderator of?

As few as possible. In the past, he was sole moderator or co-moderator of
the following newsgroups: comp.society.folklore, alt.folklore.suburban,
alt.humor.best-of-usenet, triangle.singles.announce, and
soc.history.war.world-war-ii. Due to a lack of free time at various points
in his life, he has relinquished his duties for the above-listed groups
and only serves at present as a co-moderator of one newsgroup:
news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins.

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(8) Does Joel Furr sell t-shirts and stuff?

Yes and no. He used to do that a lot, but has more or less stopped now that
he has a salaried job that requires a commute and now that he has a steady
girlfriend.

Joel designs various shirts and mugs and stuff and gets a local screen
printing firm to make them for him once he's accumulated orders from various
people around the world. People read about the shirts and stuff on the
Internet, mainly on http://www.dang er.com/netstuff.html, and send orders
and payment via ordinary postal mail. Joel collects the orders, deposits the
checks, and then orders the shirts in the requested sizes and colors from
the screen printer. This sometimes takes a few months from the t ime orders
are first collected to the time the last shirt is in someone's hands --
sometimes it takes quite a while to generate enough orders to make ordering
a particular shirt cost-effective, and other times, so many orders come in
(for example, for the Perl/RSA t-shirt) that it takes a hell of a long time
to open and enter all the orders in a spreadsheet so the actual shirts can
be ordered.

Joel does not charge a profit on the shirts; he prefers that the shirt
business remain more or less a hobby and not an actual business. If he were
to charge a profit, people would expect a lot prompter service and it'd
probably stop being fun. Besides, if a profit is charged, he cannot post
notices in related Usenet newsgroups (people resent advertising for profit
in discussion- based newsgroups) and sometimes, a few notices to a few
newsgroups are necessary to get the ball rolling.

However, all that is mostly academic now that Joel has largely retired from
doing shirts.

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(9) Does Joel spend all his time logged in, or what?

No. Despite the insults from losers who, when losing an argument in a Usenet
newsgroup, say "Hey, get out from in front of your monitor once in a while,
bub!" Joel actually spends little time logged in.

Having a steady girlfriend will do that for you.

Joel does have a real life, a life that consists of spending time with his
girlfriend, reading, going to minor league baseball games, driving,
traveling, going to movies, hanging out with friends, and working on his
writing. He used to spend a lot of time logged in, back when he was in
graduate school (he had a do-nothing graduate assistant position), so people
assume this is still the case.

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(10) Is Joel likely to reply if I write to him?

If you write to him and ask stupid, clueless questions like "how do I set up
my newsreader? I'm on a Mac," he'll cheerfully ignore you. If you have half
a clue and need help, or just want to talk, he can usually find time. If you
like talking about map s, travel in the USA, the South, minor league
baseball, non-fiction books, and so forth, please write. He's often up late
at night and may be around, but idle, when you send email. His preferred
email address is [e-mail], but [e-mail] also works.

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(11) What does Joel look like?

Joel Furr is a 6'2", 200-pound Caucasian male with dark brown hair and brown
eyes. He has a very faint Y-shaped scar on his left cheek from a childhood
accident. He typically does not have much of a tan because he spends most of
his time indoors.

When he's not at work, he tends to wear t-shirts or polo shirts, corduroy
shorts, and sneakers. He prefers dark colors, such as navy or purple, but
rarely wears black shirts because he doesn't want people to come up and
start talking to him about "cyber space."

He tends to wear his hair in what's called a "professional haircut" -- not
too short, but definitely not very long. He prefers to wear his hair fairly
short because he tends to perspire heavily in summertime and that makes long
hair impractical.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(12) What's the deal with those funny black floor lamps that point up at the
ceiling with the little knobs on the side about halfway up that you turn
back and forth to adjust the brightness? Everyone seems to have them these
days.

They like it if you have one. In fact, They like it if you have more than
one. (If you don't know who we mean by They, sorry; we can't tell you more
than we already have.)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(13) Hey, where are the seatbelts?

There aren't any seatbelts on this ride.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(14) What's the 'soup du jour' today?

Cream of broccoli.

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(15) Is cotton candy a solid or liquid or crystal or what?

Cotton candy is, technically, one big molecule -- one very long-chain
molecule, nonetheless, but one molecule. If you unraveled a cotton candy
molecule of typical size and stretched it out straight, it'd stretch from
Durham, North Carolina to Atlanta, Ge orgia.

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(16) What's the 800 number for the North Carolina ferry system?

1-800-BY-FERRY.

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(17) Where is Paradise?

Paradise can be found in the men's room of the Mardi Gras Bowling Lanes,
located on NC 54 between Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(18) Hey, what about those French?

For the purposes of the game, the French are goobers.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(19) Is it true that if I jump up off the ground, I'm technically in low
earth orbit for as long as I'm in the air?

Yes. Technically, anytime you leave the surface of the Earth, you're in low
earth orbit and the Earth will rotate slightly underneath you. The distance
the Earth travels beneath you while you're in the air is too slight to be
noticed, but there is a smal l but calculable orbital effect.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(20) Who's in charge of the weather?

The current Planetary Weather Supervisor is Mr. James L. Cambias of New
Orleans, Louisiana (currently dwelling in Durham, North Carolina).

You can complain to him when it rains all day with no end in sight, but he
rarely acts in a responsive fashion. He has his own agenda and until his
demands are met (he insists that the residents of Chapel Hill learn to drive
like sane people), he's not g oing to do anything about the weather.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(21) What is it with cats? How do they make their legs disappear when they
perch on the arm of a sofa, looking content?

They've got little tubes up inside their body that their legs retract into.
No one's figured out exactly why they evolved this trait, but the best guess
anyone's come up with is that they did it so they could look cool when they
perch on the arm of a sofa .

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(22) Does Joel Furr like fish?

No. He hates fish.

When he was a kid, he used to eat Fish Filet sandwiches from McDonald's with
great satisfaction. This all changed when he had two bad encounters with
fish which forever traumatized him.

First, at the age of six or so, he happened one summer to be at the house of
relatives in Florida who served up a big batch of fried mullet for dinner
one night. It looked fairly nasty -- big platters of fried fish with bones
and stuff sticking out -- an d smelled worse. Joel didn't want to eat any,
but nothing else had been cooked for dinner. Squeamishly, Joel ate a few
bites, then decided hunger was preferable to eating mullet.

Unfortunately, even the few bites he ate were a few bites too many. Joel
developed debilitating nausea and a king-hell case of the hives which lasted
for a week or so, the result of massive and previously unknown food
allergies to mullet. It turn ed him off on eating fish in general.

Second, while visiting relatives in North Carolina a year or two later, he
went fishing with an uncle and promptly caught a little orange sunfish,
which, in its gasping and wriggling and bulging of eyes and so forth so
shocked and startled the young Furr that he dropped his pole and sprinted
off, leaving his uncle to release the fish from the hook and put it back
into the water.

For some reason, this encounter left Furr with a lifelong aversion to fish
-- he's not afraid of them but can't stand the thought of touching them,
much less eating them -- and the allergy to mullet helps justify his dislike
of fish to people who, annoyin gly, insist that he'd really like fish if he
just tried it.

It's a phobia. No, it doesn't make sense. That's what makes it a phobia.

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(23) How 'bout them Dawgs?

Gooooooooooooo Dawgs! Sic 'em! Woof woof woof woof woof!

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(24) Is Joel a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or what?

Joel is a registered Democrat; this is not to say that he's of a particul
arly liberal bent, but rather, that he supports the broad goals of the
Democratic Party and opposes the morals-based legislative agenda of the
Republicans.

Joel was 13 in 1981 when President Reagan took office. He spent his high
school years watching Reagan's insane lies and deranged, senile babblings on
the news each night during dinner and, as a result, developed a lifelong
antipathy to the twisted Newspe ak of the Republican Party.

He's not real fond of the Libertarians either, though, because most
Libertarians he's known have been so selfish and "it's MY money why
should I
pay ONE RED CENT to help the POOR"-oriented that he's learned to ignore
them.

Furr worked for a little over two years in a public library and learned the
importance of basic governmental services such as libraries. Libertarians
would have you believe that we should ban such services and let for-profit
libraries come into being -- n ever mind the fact that a lot of residents of
Furr's hometown in Appalachia couldn't afford basic telephone service much
less "luxuries" like a for-profit library. What would happen to the poor in
a world where the Libertarian Party has closed dow n all the libraries
(i.e., the creation of an illiterate, ignorant underclass) does not seem to
matter to the Libertarians.

As someone put it recently, you don't see a lot of poor Libertarians. People
only become Libertarians when they decide "hmm, okay, I've made a lot of
money, it's time to change the rules so I don't have to share it with anyone
or pay for any government s ervices."

But anyway, in the end Furr is like many other people in this day and age in
that he tends to vote against candidates rather than for them. The
Republicans being such odious walking piles of garbage and the Libertarians
being so completely out in left fie ld, this means that he typically votes
Democratic.

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(25) What's in those bottles in the back of Joel Furr's refrigerator?

The Coca-Cola bottle and the Cobb Mountain Natural Spring Water bottle are
full of salt water from the Pacific Ocean off San Francisco, California,
collected from the surf near Seal Rock during Joel's vacation to California
in July of 1995.

The bottle marked "Cuzcatlan" which appears to contain cloudy, stagnant
water is actually a bottle of Cuzcatlan "soursop" soda which Joel picked up
at a Mexican grocery in Durham out of curiosity and which he decided he
might be better off not drinking wh en he noticed that the ingredients
consisted solely of "water, propylene glycol, vegetable gum, and glyceryl
abietate."

The bottle of Shasta tonic water with about one gin-and-tonic's worth of
tonic missing is just that, a partially consumed bottle of Shasta tonic
water. It dates from the summer of 1988 and has been with Joel through five
apartments.

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(26) Where do bad people go when they die?

Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

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(27) When's the best time to go to an amusement park?

Well, if you ask in terms of when will you find short lines and so forth,
experience shows that it's best to go during a full-fledged tropical storm.

One day in 1995, Joel Furr went to the "Carowinds" amusement park in
Charlotte, North Carolina on a day when Tropical Storm Jerry was approaching
and torrential rains were already falling. Joel had come to town to see
Warren Zevon in concert that night an d had decided to drive down early to
visit Carowinds as well. It was raining when the park opened at 10:00 a.m.,
it rained hard most of the day, and it was still raining when Joel left at
8:00 p.m. The park stayed open throughout the day and the re were actually
some minor lines around 1 p.m., but most of the day, the lines on the
coasters were so short that you could just stay on the coasters and ride
continuously for hours. Joel went on something like 30 or 40 coaster rides
in one day, then lef t, soaking wet and chafed all over, to see Warren
Zevon.

It was not until the next day that Joel and friends (who'd driven down and
met him at the concert) read in the newspaper about how Tropical Storm Jerry
had brought extensive property damage, flooding, and a few drowning deaths
to the Charlotte vicinity.

"Oh," Joel said. "That explains why it was raining all day."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(28) What's wrong with Joel Furr's blood?

Joel has a rare blood trait known as "thalassemia trait" (or, in some
references, "thalassemia minor" or "beta thalassemia"), an asymptomatic
condition marked primarily by smaller, less mature red blood cells and a
different type of hemoglobin from that of normal blood. It is theorized that
this condition in some way aids survival in malarial regions, inasmuch as
the trait is found primarily in people who live in or trace their ancestry
to southern Europe (Italy, Greece, Cyprus, etc.) and south Asia, as well as
certain other warm regions plagued by malaria. The trait is only dangerous
to those whose parents both had it -- a child whose parents both had
thalassemia trait would have a 50% chance of having thalassemia major, a
condition that is usually fatal within the first few years of life. Note:
this is not the same thing as sickle cell anemia.

Joel's father, brother, and sister all have this trait -- but were
misdiagnosed for years as having a similar trait known as "hemoglobin C."
Medical science of the period 1950-1980 didn't know to look for thalassemia
minor unless you specifically told them to, evidently, because Joel, his
father, and his sister were all misdiagnosed. The unfortunate side of this
is that Joel was treated as a child with iron supplements, which won't do a
single thing to help with thalassemia minor, until someone finally noticed
they weren't changing anything... and worse, that for years he was told that
he wasn't permitted to donate blood. Given the zealous manner in which many
blood drive volunteers waylay passersby and demand a contribution to the
cause, it made life annoying at times to carry a rare blood trait which was
on the American Red Cross's banned list.

When Joel finally found out, in the mid-1990's, that he did not in fact have
hemoglobin C and instead had thalassemia minor, he checked with the Red
Cross and was told "yeah, we can accept donors with that condition." Joel
has wasted little time since this news -- he's given blood twice so far,
once a few days before Christmas in 1996 and once on Valentine's Day weekend
in February of 1997. Joel plans to make up for lost time.

Interestingly, it turns out that Joel's blood, for all that it has small and
slightly different red blood cells, is nonetheless quite desirable to the
blood bank people. When Joel got his first donor card in the mail, his blood
type was printed on it as well -- and to Joel's surprise, his blood type was
the most desirable of all: O Negative... the so-called "Universal Donor"
type.

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(29) What is that thing at the bottom of that big glass jar full of water?

A small plastic rubber octopus. It likes it there.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(30) Will seagulls eat small chunks of pork barbecue?

Apparently not.

They ate everything else Joel threw to them, up to and including gravel, but
they spit out the pork barbecue.

Ingrates.

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(31) St. Patrick's Day is a festive, cheery holiday wherein we celebrate our
Irish heritage, affecting bad Irish accents and wearing green. How does Joel
Furr celebrate the holiday?

He wears orange. Every year, without fail. Orange.

To hell with the Irish. If anyone has an explanation for why one ethnic
group has managed to wangle themselves what amounts to a national holiday
for their patron saint, celebrating alcoholism and leading zillions of
idiots without a drop of Irish blood i n their body to wander around saying
"Aye and begorra" one day each year, Joel would like to hear it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(32) Is it true that Joel Furr's car has a guardian spirit?

Actually, yes. A small lemur statue, "Bondo" by name, sits on his dashboard
and theoretically keeps the car and all its passengers safe from harm.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(33) Hey, isn't that song "YMCA" that they play at baseball games really
cool?

Or, to put it another way, isn't it really cool the way minor league
baseball teams have taken to playing "YMCA" over the public-address system
at every game, leading thousands of idiots who wouldn't know a fielder's
choice or a suicide squeeze if it came along and bit them to turn out in
large numbers night after night for no other reason than to stand up in the
sixth inning and sing a lousy, annoying song that should have been left in
the 1970's, in a stomach-turning display of human futility tha t rivals
Catholic family planning efforts for utter stupidity?

The answer: "Um, well, no. But at least it does help us identify those
who'll be first in line for the public executions when the revolution
comes."

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(34) What's that chunk of powdery concrete atop Joel Furr's bookcase?

It's a big piece of the Berlin Wall that Julia Youngman, one of Joel Furr's
older sisters, chopped out of the Wall in November or December of 1989
during the big feeding frenzy as the Wall fell.

At least, that's what Julia says it is. She came back from Army duty in
Europe with a suitcase full of concrete, but for all any of the recipients
know, she chipped those chunks off a concourse pillar at Dulles
International on her arrival in the USA.

No Communists have shown up asking for the chunk back yet, but you never
know.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(35) Does Joel have a girlfriend?

Fortunately, yes. Her name is Carole and he met her in real life at a
convention of sorts in suburban Maryland around the end of October 1995,
then spent a solid month and a half exchanging email with her before they
decided to arrange another meeting to determine whether or not relationship
potential was present. Joel visited Carole at her home in northern Virginia
in mid-December and spent part of a cold, windy Sunday afternoon strolling
around the Mall in Washington, DC. As Carole and Joel were strol ling past
the Washington Monument, they were accosted by an ABC-TV news crew which was
there interviewing tourists about the federal budget crisis which had caused
all the monuments to be closed to the public that day. Carole and Joel were
happy to mutte r darkly about Congressional Republicans for the camera and
then went on their merry way, not really expecting to make the evening news
that night or anything like that.

Wrong-o. Carole and Joel did make "World News Tonight" that night - one of
only two tourist interviews from that afternoon that made it onto the air
(the other, which came immediately before Carole and Joel's interview, was
of a cranky old guy who likewi se blamed the idiots in Congress as being
responsible for the shutdown). Fifteen seconds of irritated grumbling, tops,
but how many other couples can truthfully claim that their first date wound
up being nationally televised?

Joel and Carole are now engaged to be married, having gotten up the nerve in
November of 1996. For more information, check out
http://www.danger.com/marriage.html.

If you want to see what she looks like, there are some photos of Carole at
http://www.danger.com/photos/album.html. If you're some sicko who likes
downloading pictures of strangers and ma sturbating while looking at them,
Joel doesn't want to hear about it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(36) What's the greatest cinematographic achievement of all time?

That would be "Repo Man," starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton.
The life of a repo man is always intense.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(37) What is a Hokie?

The term "Hokie" has been applied for over a hundred years to members of the
athletics teams at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University, located in the mountains of southwest Virginia), informally for
much of that time and forma lly since the mid-1980's.

Virginia Tech, a former military school, originally played under the name
"Cadets" and then, later on, switched to the nickname "Fighting Gobblers"
because, believe it or not, the members of the football team tended to have
prodigious appetites. "Fightin g Gobblers" is not exactly the sort of team
nickname which strikes fear into the hearts of opponents, so "Hokies" was
often used as an informal substitute. In the mid-1980's, under the tenure of
head football coach and athletic director Bill Dooley, "Hoki es" became the
official team name, replacing "Fighting Gobblers," which nonetheless
remained plastered across the outside of Lane Stadium ("HOME OF THE FIGHTING
GOBBLERS").

Which brings us once again to the question, "What is a Hokie?" We now
understand that the term refers to a Virginia Tech athlete, but we have yet
to determine where the term came from.

It's simple: it's a nonsense word which a student in the 1890's, one O.M.
Stull, included in a cheer he submitted to a contest which was being held to
pick a new school cheer. Said cheer went something like this:

"Hokie, Hokie, Hokie, Hi
Tech, Tech, VPI
Solarex, solarah
Polytech Virginia
Ray, rah, VPI,
TEAM TEAM TEAM"

Okay, so it's a fairly lame cheer, but in the old days, things like that
were all the rage. "Hokie" didn't mean anything -- it was simply filler to
stretch out the first line so it could end in a word that would rhyme with
the "I" in "VPI."

Now, Wahoos (the hopeless, hapless denizens of the University of
Virginia, a
sort of technical and vocational school located in Charlottesville,
Virginia) will tell you that "Hokie" means "a castrated turkey." Since you
can't castrate turkeys, you'd thin k the Wahoos would realize that their
retroactive definition makes no sense, but sadly, asking a Wahoo to make
sense is asking for more intellectual capacity than he or she has got.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(38) What instrument did Joel Furr play in the Blacksburg High School band?

Alto saxophone. And damned badly, too.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(39) What does Joel typically say when someone asks him, rhetorically, how
he is?

"Paralyzed by fear. You?"

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(40) What's the best sort of implement to use when eating ice cream?

Tiny little wooden spoons, the sort that look like they were cut en masse
out of some thin piece of wood. You can get them in large quantities at
Francesca's on Ninth Street in Durham. They re fun to eat ice cream with and
they're environmentally friendly.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(41) What clubs and organizations does Joel Furr belong to?

Joel has never been much of a joiner in the sense of signing up for clubs
and organizations; he prefers to have his free time to himself rather than
having to head out to some meeting each night of the week. He belonged to
the Demosthenian Society when h e was a student at the University of Georgia
and belonged briefly to two professional associations when he was in
graduate school but never attended any events or conferences. Joel dislikes
the petty politics that plague many organizations and prefers to remain
aloof from the madding crowds who use their officership in various
organizations as some sort of ego fix.

That being said, he has belonged to Toastmasters International, the world's
largest public-speaking education organization, since July 1, 1989, and has
served in several District Officer positions, including two terms as a
Division Governor and one partia l term as Lieutenant Governor Marketing in
District 66 (central, eastern, and western Virginia) and one term as Public
Relations Officer for District 37 (North Carolina). He earned his DTM
(Distinguished Toastmaster) award in 1993 after four years of mem bership
and has also received the ATM (Able Toastmaster) Bronze speaking
certification. Joel has served as a sponsor for three new Toastmasters clubs
(CELCO Toastmasters, #8108-66, ISE Toastmasters, #8976-66, and Bull City
Toastmasters, #9891-37) and has served two terms as a Club President (one
term with Christiansburg Toastmasters, #3715-66 and one term with Bull City
Toastmasters, #9891-37). Toastmasters is the only organization he's ever
taken very seriously and that was mainly the result of boredom and ennui
during graduate school -- serving as a Toastmasters officer gave him
something to do that brought him into contact with people. The organization
is worthwhile and has helped many people become better communicators but,
sadly, the organization a t the state level is often plagued by the same
sort of petty politics and infighting that Joel prefers to avoid at all
costs. Joel is relatively inactive in Toastmasters these days.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(42) What's Joel Furr's ethnic and socioeconomic background?

Joel is, to be blunt, highly educated white trash -- the scion of
generations of poor crackers in rural North Carolina and Florida. He does
not come from any clear-cut European ancestral background -- he's your basic
American mongrel, not precisely what you'd call Anglo-Saxon and not
precisely derived from the British Isles. At least one great-grandmother was
still speaking Dutch most of her life and he does have a blood trait which
is predominantly found in peoples of Mediterranean descent. His family , on
both sides, has been resident in the rural South for so many years that the
country of origin of any branch of the family is mostly guesswork. His
earliest known ancestor, one Henry Furr (or, perhaps, Heinrich Furrer), is
recorded as having arrived in the Carolinas in 1742, having come from Zurich
in Switzerland. However, there are currently no Furrs listed in the Swiss
telephone directory so it's anyone's guess as to whether Henry Furr was
actually Swiss or whether he had just traveled there from e lsewhere before
journeying onward to America.

In any case, Furr's ancestors, once they reached America, made their homes
in the South and generally avoided those states north of the Potomac and
Ohio. Furr has, as far as anyone can determine, exactly zero blood relatives
who originate north of the Ma son-Dixon line.

His mother and father grew up in the Depression-era South: his father's
father was a textile mill foreman in rural North Carolina and his mother's
father was a mostly-unemployed jack-of-all-trades and farmer in a rural area
on Florida's Gulf Coast. Both p arents came from families where no one had
ever gone to college yet both parents not only strove and toiled and studied
and made it to college, but did so well that they each received master's
degrees (father, in nuclear physics; mother, in botany). Both parents went
on to Duke University to work on doctorates -- and that's where they met, in
a required language class the morning after Furr's father had put in an all-
night shift working on the campus Van de Graaf generator. His father asked
his mother, a total stranger at the time, if she wanted to get a cup of
coffee, she followed him out of class, and when he got done being confused
at the fact that she'd actually followed him, a relationship was born.

Unfortunately, only Furr's father finished his Ph.D -- his mother worked on
hers for years but stopped just short. Furr's father earned his doctorate in
nuclear physics from Duke and was offered a tenure-track position at
Virginia Tech, but Tech made it c lear that their anti-nepotism policy would
prevent them from offering Furr's mother any position at all even if she
finished her Ph.D. in plant physiology. Lacking the motivation to finish a
Ph.D. that she would not get to use in any meaningful way, Furr' s mother
never finished her studies.

Furr's father, a full professor, worked for many years at the nuclear
reactor at Virginia Tech and, when that program was slated for downscaling
and eventual closure, moved to the new Safety department to head up Virginia
Tech's occupational safety effort s. Furr's mother, on the other hand, spent
several years as a bored housewife, taking part in university events as a
professor's wife until children finally started to arrive in the mid-1960's.
After years spent raising kids and being a housewife, she fi nally took a
job at the local public library -- and, by the mid-1980's, was running the
place. Furr's parents both retired in 1995. They did all right for ignorant
crackers from the rural South.

Furr was born in September 1967 in Roanoke, Virginia (Blacksburg, home of
Virginia Tech, had no hospital at the time), but grew up in the college town
of Blacksburg, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia.

Blacksburg is home to Virginia's largest university but is surrounded by
extremely rural parts of Appalachia to the north, south, and west -- the
sort of places that have only one stoplight in the entire county. Montgomery
County, where Blacksburg is loc ated, was only somewhat less rural, and that
was entirely the result of Virginia Tech. You can still go a few miles north
or south from Virginia Tech and be right in the midst of darkest Appalachia.

Furr does not speak with much of an accent despite growing up in Appalachia,
a relatively accent-laden part of the country. This was largely the result
of the averaging effect a college town has on the accents the students,
faculty, and staff bring with them. With so many competing accents, everyone
tends to wind up speaking Standard American before too long. On the other
hand, when he wants to, when he's especially tired, or when he's talking to
someone with an Appalachian or Southern accent, a muted but nonetheless bona
fide cornball Suth'n accent does sneak out.

Furr is very proud of growing up in Appalachia in much the same way that
residents of Hell's Kitchen have convinced themselves that it's a fine thing
to have grown up surrounded by squalor and ignorance.

Furr's parents were well-to-do and Furr had ready access to all the books he
wanted so he wasn't exactly wading in squalor or ignorance, but he saw both
every time he drove out of Blacksburg and into the surrounding countryside.
Even so, there are worse places to grow up in than the Appalachian
Mountains. The countryside around Blacksburg is rolling and mountainous and
beautiful and the Jefferson National Forest starts only two miles or so
north of town. Furr feels awkward and out of sorts when he's vi siting any
part of the country that's especially flat and that doesn't have lots of
trees. Trees are important.

So in conclusion, it's fairly hard to say what Joel's ethnic group is or say
"Joel's a ________." "White trash from Appalachia" is as good a term as any
to describe him. He's not a WASP by any means: he's white, but not precisely
Anglo-Saxon (though many of his forebears did come from England and
Scotland), and he's never been a member of any church congregation at all,
much less a practicing Protestant. Thus, he's never invited to join the good
country clubs or included on the right mailing lists.

C'est la vie.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(43) Define "good eatins."

"Good eatins" is a term often used in the South to refer to especially
tasty, filling food: "Man, them's good eatins" or "Good eatins on that there
hog." Good eatins can refer to a tasty cauldron of Brunswick stew, an
expertly-barbecued pig, a fried chic ken dinner with all the trimmings, or
even so prosaic a meal as a bowl of pinto beans with onion on top and a
piece of cornbread on the side.

One thing that Southerners understand is that food need not be heavily
seasoned or cost a lot to be filling and worthy of the term "good eatins."
Simple food is often the best kind of food.

Joel Furr traveled to the mountain town of Galax, Virginia to attend the
Galax Old Fiddlers' Convention one August when he was in graduate school,
not being a fiddler himself but mainly just wanting to listen to an
evening's worth of bluegrass and mountai n music. Some friends from graduate
school, all Utahns or otherwise Mormons who didn't know much about
Appalachia, came along as well. Upon arriving at Felt Park in Galax, the
traveling party from Blacksburg hit the midway for food. The Mormons cringed
at some of the things being passed off as food by the locals and settled on
"fajitas" -- which turned out to be ground beef and Cheez Whiz served hot in
a pita pocket -- while Joel Furr instinctively headed for the "Beans" stand.
This stand had the long est line at the midway and every man jack in that
line was there to get a bowl of pinto beans with diced onion sprinkled on
top and a piece of cornbread on the side. Joel toddled away from the stand
when he'd received his food and immediately came in for astounded looks of
confusion from his friends who could not conceive of anyone waiting in line
for a bowl of beans with cornbread.

"Them's good eatins," Joel explained, gesturing at the beans with his piece
of cornbread.

"Uh huh," his friends said, disbelievingly.

Joel shrugged and tucked into his beans, enjoying his meal and feeling happy
and content when done -- while his friends ate their "fajitas," faces
wrinkled with disgust. Bright yellow cheese goo on ground beef, apparently,
was not quite the haute cuisine that his friends had expected it to be --
while beans are pretty damned hard to mess up.

Evidently, the concept of "good eatins" is unknown among the Latter-Day
Saints -- while the rednecks from Appalachia know a good thing when they see
it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(44) Joel Furr visited Las Vegas in July 1995 for the better part of a day.
How much money did he gamble? How much did he lose?

Not one red cent. Knowing that the odds were overwhelmingly in favor of his
losing and that it's hard to stop after just one slot machine pull, Joel
cleverly left the slot machines and gaming tables completely alone.

His time in Las Vegas was spent wandering around the Strip eyeing the other
tourists, looking at the lights, sipping a giant Margarita, and finally,
going to see a Rockettes show at the Flamingo.

Sadly, the 200-foot-tall video screen at the Circus-Circus which Hunter S.
Thompson made famous in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was not there
anymore. The Flamingo didn't have Neutrogena soap in the rooms either.
Apparently Thompson got it all 25 years ago and they never restocked.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(45) What were the schools in Blacksburg, Virginia like when Joel Furr was
growing up there?

Montgomery County, Virginia is a very rural county in the sticks of
Appalachia which, for reasons best explained elsewhere, happens to be home
to Virginia's largest university, Virginia Tech.

The local schools, therefore, had a very split personality. Most of the
schools in the county were geared toward the kids of the locals, few of whom
had any plans at all to attend college and who wanted vocational and
business classes and lots of 'em. T he schools in Blacksburg proper, on the
other hand, had student bodies that were about half locals and half kids of
the Virginia Tech professors, with a small additional population of the kids
of the local orthodontists and doctors stuck in the middle and usually
identifying with the professors' kids.

You might think that the local school system, faced with a large minority
population of very bright children, would take some steps to make sure that
all the kids got good educations, making sure that each child was presented
with challenges and material appropriate for his intellectual level. You
might even think that they'd try to put all the really bright kids in some
sort of gifted and talented program. You'd be wrong, though -- because
Montgomery County intentionally tried to slow the bright kids d own so they
couldn't be accused of elitism (gifted and talented programs being
considered elitist, you see) and so the teachers could teach at the level of
the lowest common denominator.

To cite but one example, Joel Furr was reading at a second grade level
before he entered kindergarten and had advanced so far by the time he
entered first grade that he read his entire "Your First Reader" -- which had
been intended to last him all year -- on the first day of school. The
teachers and administrators at his school, not wanting to have to deal with
a child who was four or five grade levels beyond what they were trying to
teach the other kids, simply stuck Joel off in a second-grade reading gr oup
in order to "challenge" him. Joel's parents were pleased that their son had
been moved up to a second grade reading group, but what they didn't know was
that the group in question was actually made up of the kids who were
considered so stupid and un teachable that they didn't actually do any
reading during the reading period but instead were taken down to the
gymnasium to play dodgeball (which the local kids called "bombardment") for
two hours each day. Joel, not knowing any better, simply played do dgeball
some days and other days snuck off to the school library and read on his
own.

By the time Joel Furr reached high school, the school system had developed
three "tracks" for the kids in grades 9-12. You could be in the "vocational"
track, the "college-bound" track, or the "honors" track.

The college-bound and honors tracks were a lot alike except that the kids in
the honors classes were actually presented with less work in an apparent
attempt, once again, to slow them down. It came as a surprise to the honors
students to find that the co llege-bound English classes were reading more
books and writing more papers than they were. Joel Furr took all the honors
classes Blacksburg High School offered -- social studies and English
classes, mainly -- and even though he was so painfully bored by school that
he rarely if ever took homework seriously (assuming he did it at all), he
was always stuck in the honors classes again the next year.

Why, you ask, was he placed in the honors classes year after year if he had
lousy grades?

Simple: to keep him away from the "normal" kids in the college-bound track.
That's why all the bright kids were in the honors program -- to keep them
from disrupting the "college-bound" classes. At least, that's the conclusion
all the bright kids tended to come to, especially after they found out that
the "college-bound" classes were in many ways tougher. The honors students
tended to get classes where the teacher discussed "fire imagery" in Arthur
Miller's The Crucible for days on end. Wh eee!

In addition to creating the so-called "Honors ghetto," the schools also
created a Gifted and Talented program by the early 1980's -- and Joel Furr
was, of course, in said program. This meant that he was bused along with all
the other bright kids to the h igh school in the county seat,
Christiansburg, one day per year to be shown a day's worth of art films,
short films, and films like "The Wizard of Speed and Time."

That was it. That was the "Gifted and Talented" program.

Uh huh. Gifted and Talented program, my ass.

Quite a few of Joel's peers did get decent educations despite the school
system and made it into universities like Brown and Duke and the University
of Chicago, but Joel simply hadn't cared enough to jump through the hoops
necessary to get decent grades. Classwork had been so utterly boring and
full of busy-work assignments that he spent most of high school with his
nose in a book. He wound up attending the University of Georgia. Thank
Heaven for high SAT scores -- with his grades alone, he would have been
lucky to get into a community college.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(46) Where does Carole, Joel Furr's girlfriend, come from?

Carole claims to have been born on the coast of California, near Monterey,
in the town of Pebble Beach. After moving from the town of Pacific Grove at
age 5, she spent the rest of her childhood just outside Dayton, Ohio, in a
town called Oakwood. Since graduating from high school, she has lived in
Cambridge Massachusetts), Baltimore, and northern Virginia. She now lives in
Durham, North Carolina.

This is the version of events made available for public consumption, however
- the real truth is far stranger yet.

In actuality, Carole is a California sea otter in human form. Her people
(the otters), curious about the game of golf which was regularly played by
the humans in Pebble Beach, selected her to be sent among the humans to
learn this strange game and bring back its secrets. She was left, clutching
a putter in her tiny little otter paw, on the thirteenth green at the Pebble
Beach golf course in hopes that golfers would discover her and take her
among them to learn the secrets of golf.

Unfortunately, two humans who were simply touring the golf course happened
to stumble upon the little otter girl and took her back to live with them.
Over time, she came to resemble the humans she lived with more and more
until you can hardly tell by loo king at her that she's a sea otter at all.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(47) Who is the Official Stooge of alt.fan.joel-furr?

That would be Joe Littrell of Mount Vernon, Illinois. When Joel Furr was
courting Carole, his girlfriend-to-be, he wanted to send her an East
Carolina University sweatshirt anonymously to try to hint to her that she
should consider moving to North Caroli na. Joel asked for a stooge on
alt.fan.joel- furr; Joe Littrell volunteered; Joel sent the shirt to Joe to
send to Carole and Joe graciously complied. Unfortunately, when Carole got
the package, she instantly guessed who the true sender of the shirt was and
never even looked at the return address or postmark until after she'd told
Joel "thanks for the sweatshirt" and got asked "didn't the postmark fool
you?"

Sigh.

Okay, so it didn't exactly come off as planned, but Joe Littrell nonetheless
earned the title of "Official Stooge." All hail the Stooge; long may he
reign.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(48) What exactly is "hungus?"

No one knows.

At least one theory exists that it has to do with the substances crusted on
and life forms found growing on Joe Cochrane's bathroom floor, but since all
scientists who have attempted to analyze said substances and life forms have
gone instantly mad, it se ems doubtful that a descriptive term having to do
with said substances and life forms would have entered the scientific
jargon.

At present, therefore, "hungus" must remain undefined.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(49) What is the name of the night manager at the International House of
Pancakes franchise on Baxter Street in Athens, Georgia?

Hector.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(50) What is Joel Furr's best category in Trivial Pursuit?

Geography.

Joel's a serious map junkie; he loves to pore over maps for hours and hours.

One of his favorite hobbies is asking people where they're from and then,
regardless of what they answer, somehow managing to ask a question that
implies extreme familiarity with the locale cited. Given that he's managed
to, purely by accident, to absorb the names and general locations of
hundreds if not thousands of towns and localities around the world as a
result of his map- poring-over, he can often startle people with this trick.

It's not really a trick, though -- he really does know a lot about places
around the globe and especially about the United States of America. It just
seems like a trick to some people who tell him they're from, oh, Brooklyn,
and then get as ked "Which neighborhood? Flatbush?" The normal assumption is
that Joel has been to said locality and knows it well -- when in fact, he
generally only knows a few things about each locality and certainly hasn't
been to every city in the USA and eve ry country on the planet.

Yet.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(51) Who is Wally?

Wally is a small gopherlike being who lives under Joel Furr's bed.

Neither Joel nor his girlfriend Carole is entirely sure how Wally came to
dwell under the bed. Joel and Carole were doing some shopping for home
furnishings in January of 1996 and happened to be at K-Mart loading up on
paper goods, shelving, various chem icals, and so forth, when it occurred to
them that what the apartment really needed was a small gopherlike being.
Unfortunately, none of the employees of that particular K-Mart admitted
knowing where the "Small Gopherlike Beings" section might be found. Joel and
Carole were forced to return home, lacking the small gopherlike being they'd
set their hearts on.

As it happened, however, a small gopherlike being was found living under the
bed a couple of days later, sitting in a small (gopher-sized) La-Z Boy
armchair reading a copy of "No Exit" by Jean-Paul Sartre and chuckling to
itself. This being answers to the name of Wally and seems hell-bent on
gathering all the shoes in the apartment together under the bed where they
can be used for purposes unknown.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(52) Where can you go in Durham, North Carolina, to get "spaghetti and
salmon cakes?"

That would be the Pan-Pan Diner, located just off I-85 at the Hillandale
Road exit.

For reasons unknown, virtually every category of food on the Pan-Pan Diner's
menu offers the option of salmon cakes on the side. The menu lists, for
example, "pancakes and sausage," "pancakes and bacon," and "pancakes and
salmon cakes." Salmon cakes are available as an option on dozens of items,
up to and including "spaghetti and salmon cakes."

No one knows why.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(53) What is Joel Furr's favorite soft drink?

Coca-Cola.

He always preferred Coca-Cola to Pepsi-Cola when he was a child -- partly
because he preferred the taste of Coke to Pepsi and partially because
Pepsi's negative attack ads (which attempted to convince people that only
squares and idiots drank Coca-Cola) i rritated the living hell out of him.

This preference for Coca-Cola was reinforced when he was in college at the
University of Georgia. Coke machines were everywhere on campus and there
wasn't a Pepsi machine to be seen anywhere. Coca-Cola's stockholders and
founders and such had been very good to the University over the years and
accordingly, no one at the university had much inclination to supplant Coke
with a competing soda. The Athens community at large seemed to share this
sentiment -- it was not unusual to walk into a convenience stor e and see
two- liter jugs of Coca-Cola, stored at room temperature in the middle of
the floor, outselling refrigerated two-liter jugs of Pepsi on sale at half
the price. The Coca-Cola would usually sell out entirely before any great
dents would be made i n the Pepsi supply.

Things reached the point of ultimate absurdity when, in 1986 or 1987, the
Coca-Cola company celebrated its centennial and, to remind us all which side
our bread was buttered on, sponsored a special halftime celebration at a UGA
football game which feature d dancing Coca-Cola cans.

Parenthetically, one of the dancing cans of Coca-Cola deflated spontaneously
during the show and the person inside went on dancing merrily, apparently
unable to tell that the inflated cylinder he or she was wearing was now
hanging on him or her like a bri ght red shroud.

Joel finished college a confirmed Coca-Cola addict, sadly, and only through
great effort was able to switch to drinking Diet Coke in graduate school.
Had he not succeeded in this effort, his two-liter-per-day Coke habit would
probably have caused him to balloon to 300 pounds. Thank God for Diet Coke
-- Joel remains a healthy 6'2" 200-pounder.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(54) How many fingers am I holding up?

Six.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(55) Do we need more plastic cups?

You bet.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(56) What color should mayonnaise be?

Yellow.

Real mayonnaise, e.g. Duke's Mayonnaise, is yellow.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(57) What is Joel Furr's astrological sign?

If you believe in astrology, Joel Furr would be a Virgo, as he was born on
September 20, 1967 at about 4:30 in the afternoon.

If you have half a clue, however, you'll know that astrology is a bunch of
utter bunkum, a pseudoscience not worthy of the billions of column-inches
dedicated to it in magazines and newspapers each year.

For one thing, the astrological tables developed millennia ago (to make it
possible to generate horoscopes even on cloudy nights) contained errors
which, over time, have accumulated to the point that the calculations of
which planet is in which constellat ion are totally off. Evidently, actually
going outside and looking at the sky to demonstrate that Venus is not in
Aries at the current moment, despite what your friendly local astrologer
might say, is too complicated for most people.

Furthermore, a moment's consideration of the laws of physics should make it
obvious that the obstetrician or midwife has a greater gravitational
influence on a newborn child than any planet other than Earth.

Finally, actually looking at horoscopes in the newspaper or the more
detailed horoscopes you can purchase at supermarket checkout counters will
make it obvious that the horoscopes are recycled from month to month and
can't possibly begin to predict what w ill happen to 1/12 of the world's
population on any given day.

Needless to say, those who are ardent believers in astrology will
retroactively interpret the way events actually take place to the benefit of
the astrologers: "Well, my horoscope said I would meet a tall dark stranger
who would bring me good fortune, and there was that guy who pulled up behind
me at the light at the corner of Smyth Avenue and Winderly Street... and if
he hadn't come to a stop behind me, he'd have totalled my car, so I guess he
brought me good fortune. Wow, my horoscope was right!!!!"

Uh huh.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(58) What is Joel Furr's Myers-Briggs type?

The last time he took the test, he got an ESTP result.

The first time he took the test, he got an ENFP result.

The E and the P are pretty certain: E for Extroversion and P for Perceiving
(how one uses time, etc.), but the other two are indefinite.

If you go by the actual personality descriptions in the various books that
explain the Myers- Briggs test, the ESTP sounds more like Joel than does the
ENFP. If you're not familiar with the test or the books that explain it,
look in your local college li brary. Books include "Type Talk" and "Please
Understand Me" but more may have come out since Joel was in graduate school
and routinely being subjected to the scrutiny of Myers-Briggs aficionados.

Joel can see that the Myers-Briggs has some validity, but still dislikes the
emphasis some employers and administrators place on it. Dividing the human
race up into sixteen basic personality types smacks of astrological mumbo-
jumbo, even if there's some what more of a scientific basis to the
Myers-Briggs than to astrology.

Joel once worked for a man who was so into the Myers-Briggs that he had
posted his own Myers-Briggs personality type on an engraved plastic sign on
his office door: "You Are Now Entering 'INTJ' Zone." The "INTJ" was in big
letters.

Really.

Once Joel grudgingly informed his boss what his Myers-Briggs type was, it
was brought up over and over again for the rest of the two years that Joel
worked for that office. A lot of the assignments Joel was given were
prefaced by "You're an ESTP, so you'll love this." If an assignment turned
out to be something Joel hated to do, he was told, with a big, cheerful
smile, "No, you just don't understand it yet. This is exactly the sort of
work you ESTP's love to do."

Of course, this same boss once turned out all the lights in his office, sat
in the dark wearing a hardhat, and muttered darkly to himself about all the
North Vietnamese he had napalmed when he was a fighter pilot in Vietnam.

Apparently INTJ's are good at napalming people, but they don't like it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(59) Where are your videos?

Glassy smile. "I'm sorry, sir. We don't have any videos."

Okay, okay, an explanation: when Joel Furr worked for the Montgomery-Floyd
Regional Library system in southwestern Virginia, his job was to work the
circulation desk, check books out and in, and answer reference questions
that patrons brought to the desk or phoned in.

Sadly, the clientele of the library were not exactly a bunch of rocket
scientists and Joel and his co-workers wound up accumulating a lengthy list
of utterly stupid questions that were asked over and over again by various
of the local white trash.

The most annoying of these was "Where are your videos?"

For some strange reason, many of the patrons of the library had gotten the
odd idea that a library was supposed to double as a video store and came up
to the desk on occasion to ask where the videotapes were kept.

You might be thinking "Well, sure, some libraries have educational
videotapes and nature videotapes, so what's the big deal?" The big deal was
that people weren't asking for educational videotapes or nature videotapes
-- they were asking for recen t-run movies that had only just come out on
videotape in the stores, and when they were told "We don't have any videos,"
they'd gawk disbelievingly and then ask again to make sure they hadn't heard
the librarians wrong.

To be completely truthful, the library did in fact have two videos, both
training videos the local Cub Scout troops had prevailed on the library
system to keep under the desk for any Cub leaders who came by, but other
than that, the place had no videos an d had no plans to acquire any.

With a limited budget, dollars had to be allotted between the bestseller
books everyone wanted to read, children's books, books on tape, magazines,
newspapers, and then general collection development. There was no money left
over for luxuries such as vid eotapes, much less an extensive collection
such as most of the patrons seemed to take for granted that the library must
have hidden somewhere.

On more than one occasion, conversations similar to this took place at the
circulation desk:

Patron: "Hi"

Librarian: "Hi. Can I help you?"

Patron: "Yes, where are your videotapes?"

Librarian: "I'm sorry, we don't have any videotapes."

Patron: "Oh, so you just have donated videotapes, educational tapes, nature
tapes, and stuff like that?"

Librarian: "No, we don't have any videotapes at all."

Patron: "Oh, right. Well, could you show me where the instructional videos
are kept?"

Librarian: "We don't have any. We don't have any videotapes at all."

Patron: "You mean you don't have any videotapes?"

Librarian: "That's right, sir. We don't have any."

Patron: "And you call yourself a library?"

Grrrrr.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(60) How is "Furr" pronounced?

Some people pronounce "Furr" as though it was spelled "Fyure" or ""Foor" or
even more unlikely pronunciations. The name is actually pronounced exactly
as though it had only one "r" -- in other words, like the word "fur" which
we English speakers use to r efer to the pelt of an animal.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(61) What is the law?

Not to spill blood. Are we not men?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(62) Where do the keys go?

The keys go under the sofa. Silly humans!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(63) What are some of the nicknames that Joel Furr has gone by over the
years?

For some reason, Joel Furr has never had a great deal of luck getting people
to call him by various nicknames. Joel has managed to get the people at his
office to call him "Jay" (which, for some odd reason, sometimes means that
he gets called "Jaybird") but none of his friends seem able to make the
switch from Joel to Jay. To his family and friends, "Joel" it is and "Joel"
it appears it will always be.

The only exceptions to this general rule came while Joel worked at the
Hardee's on South Main Street in Blacksburg, Virginia from 1984 to 1985
during his senior year of high school and the summer that came after.

Having found where the manager of the store kept the label-maker that made
the label tape that went on the "Hardee's" nametags all the employees wore,
Joel made himself a nametag that said "FLUFFY" and, when that one got old,
another that said "STRUDEL." No one to speak of ever noticed, though he wore
them for months.

Joel is trying to get people to call him "Jay" and is having slow success.
You can call him whatever you like; he'll answer to either version of his
name.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(64) What happens when you put a real, formerly alive, ocean-bred sponge
back in water?

It comes back to life and devours you. Be warned.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(65) What kind of underwear does Joel Furr wear?

Until recently, Joel had been wearing plain white briefs -- had been wearing
this style of undergarment his whole life, in fact -- but someone whom he
feels is worth listening to has convinced him to begin wearing colored
Jockey briefs. Any guesses who this might be?

His new habiliments have resulted in occasional startled yelps ("Yah!") when
he steps up to a bathroom fixture and sees crimson-colored fabric within
when he opens his fly.

Overcoming the habits of 28 years is not something that can be done
overnight.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(66) Who is the greatest cat of all time?

The greatest cat of all time is Nubbins the Cat, a.k.a. Miss Kitty, Maximum
Cat, Cuddles, Cat Nubbins, etc. etc. ad infinitum.

Nubbins is a Jellicle cat and is therefore black and white in color. She is
a somewhat rascally cat, but she means well.

Nubbins is well-known among cats for her furriness, said furriness being of
extremely high quality. Furthermore, while many cats are furry, and in fact
cats in general are known for being furry, Nubbins takes furriness one step
further. She keeps some o f her furriness in reserve against the day when,
due to emergency conditions or shortages elsewhere, it may be needed.
Nubbins is a public-spirited cat.

Caution should be exercised when petting Nubbins the Cat. While Nubbins
loves everyone and is full of warmth and good cheer, she does at times
chastise those who presume too much and pet her when she is not in a
pettable mood. Such chastisement rarely l eaves permanent scars or crippling
injuries, however; Nubbins is a high quality cat.

Joel Furr assumes no responsibility for the activities of Nubbins the Cat.
Joel Furr accepts no liability for any property damage, personal injury,
and/or breaches of national security which may take place as a result of her
actions. Caution should be ta ken when approaching Nubbins the Cat when she
is aboard her flying saucer; said saucer is capable of speeds well in excess
of Mach 10, but Nubbins is at best an indifferent driver.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(67) How can I embarrass myself in front of eight thousand people?

If you attend a Durham Bulls baseball game, you can easily embarrass
yourself in front of eight thousand people!

During the sixth inning of each game, a lucky fan is selected and escorted
out onto the field to try to throw a baseball through a hole in a large
wooden target held up by two Bulls employees. The fan gets three tries. Most
fans miss all three times... the hole is not much larger than a softball,
say, and the target itself is held some distance away (usually about fifteen
feet). If you get one ball through, you get a free Coke. If you get two
balls through, you get a free Bulls cap. If you get all thr ee balls
through, you win a television or something. Rest assured that they don't
give out a lot of televisions.

Since you're actually on the playing surface, just to the right of the first
base line in the foul area, you're easily visible from every seat in the
ballpark -- and since the toss is done between half innings when the players
are off the field, you're th e main attraction for as long as it takes to
get it over with. The fans boo or groan loudly with each miss and the
contestant usually trots off the field, head hung low and feeling really
stupid, night after night.

If this sounds like something you would like to experience, it's easy to get
yourself chosen as the lucky fan. All you have to do is be the first fan
through the gates when the ballpark opens at six p.m. on game nights and go
straight up to the Bu lls employee selling scorecards and programs. The
program is the same night after night -- it's a big color tabloid called
"Bulls Illustrated." A new edition only comes out three times each season so
it's not exactly a hot seller for the average fan. < p> If you're the first
or one of the first fans in the gate, you'll be assured of first dibs at the
program stack that night -- and to make sure you're the lucky fan, all you
have to do is buy four copies of the program. They're a dollar each, so it
doesn't cost a lot. Smile broadly and walk away carrying your programs. When
you're out of sight of the program stand, flip through the programs and find
the signature of the Bulls' radio announcer, Steve Barnes, on the Mutual
Drug ad somewhere in the program. Since they want to make sure that they
have a "lucky fan" each night, they make sure and stick the signed copy
somewhere in the top of the stack, usually no lower than the fourth copy
down. By buying the top four copies in the stack, you've assured yours elf
of having the copy with Barnes' signature. This means that you are the
"lucky fan" and can sheepishly report to the Fan Assistance Center during
the middle of the fifth inning when they ask everyone to open their copies
of "Bulls Illustrated" and look on page X for the Mutual Drug ad.

The Bulls would probably be annoyed if you did this night after night, but
so far no one has abused the opportunity.

Anyone can be the "lucky fan" if you arrange things right. If you're going
with friends to a game, get there before they do, buy the necessary number
of copies of the program, toss all but two of the copies (the one with the
signature and one othe r), and when your friends arrive, say "I bought a
program but they gave me two by accident. Here, you can have the other copy"
and give the intended victim the signed copy. Wait with concealed glee for
the middle of the fifth inning when they ask everyone to pull out their
copies, look in yours with feigned innocence, and then clap your friend on
the back when he or she finds the signature in his or her copy.

Hours of family fun -- and it only costs the cost of a game ticket ($4.50)
plus $4.00 for your four programs.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(68) Why does Joel Furr have so many strange and pointless pictures of
himself and his friends on his Web page?

Because people LOOK at them, that's why. There's no picture too pointless
and boring that people won't look at it -- and besides, there actually are
people who wonder what Joel looks like.

The only people who complain are people who do web searches for "pictures,"
hoping to find pornography for viewing and downloading and instead find
pictures of Joel Furr riding rollercoasters and Joel Furr playing miniature
golf.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(69) What's special about the Duke University parking deck at the corner of
Fulton Street and NC 147 in Durham, North Carolina?

Due to its gargantuan size and excessive lighting, It's visible from orbit.
The wattage alone used to illuminate the structure each night would suffice
to power the Energizer Bunny for the next six and a half million years.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(70) What fortune cookie does Joel Furr always get?

"DO NOT LEAVE THIS RESTAURANT. PERIL AWAITS!"

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(71) What is "The Mother of All Rivers?"

Oddly, "The Mother of All Rivers" is a term that has come to be applied to
the James River of Virginia.

Joel Furr once took a Government Administration class in graduate school;
the class was mainly full of students from Furr's public administration
department but there were also two students from the forestry and wildlife
department, including one guy name d John Stanovic.

John had spent the previous summer working on some fisheries project on the
James River near its headwaters near the West Virginia border. Accordingly,
EVERY SINGLE TIME he was called upon to do a paper presenting some proposal,
it'd be based on fisheries management in the upper James headwaters. And
EVERY SINGLE TIME he mentioned the James in his classroom reports, he
wouldn't just say "the James."

He'd say "when I was working on the James..." pause for dramatic effect,
then continue, "the mother of ALL rivers," and then go on. Every single
freaking time. As far as any of the other students could tell, he barely
even noticed himself doing this.

Listening to this over and over again for the entire duration of a semester
will take a toll on you. Consequently, even to the present date, eight years
later, Joel Furr cannot help appending "the Mother of All Rivers" to any
mention of the James River.

John Stanovic, wherever you are, you're going to pay.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(72) So, what was it like attending Georgia Tech?

Joel Furr didn't attend Georgia Tech, you low-lives.

The University of Georgia is the large land-grant comprehensive university
located about an hour's drive northeast of Atlanta in the small city of
Athens. It's home to programs in liberal arts, sciences, agriculture, human
resources, business, law, veter inary medicine, and so on. It's probably
best known as the alma mater of Heisman Trophy running back Herschel Walker,
but it's also one of the oldest state universities and has a beautiful
campus and many distinguished alumni.

The University of Georgia is NOT the same institution as Georgia Tech
(a.k.a. "The Georgia Institute of Technology"). Georgia Tech, a.k.a.
"Calculator Maggot University," is a substantially inferior school located
in the middle of Atlanta, known mainly f or its engineering programs and for
being the site of the 1996 Olympics' athlete housing. Georgia Tech students
do not bathe, use utensils at meals, or speak in coherent English much of
the time.

While it is of course rude to mock and make sport of the many inadequacies
of Georgia Tech students, care should be taken to note the many ways in
which the average Georgia Tech student falls short of the physical, mental,
and social perfection exemplifie d by the average University of Georgia
student in order to better distinguish the two schools' students and alumni.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(73) What book is Joel Furr currently working on?

"The Big Book of Hellish Vengeance." It'll be a coffee-table book suitable
for holiday giving. Keep an eye out for it in your favorite bookstore.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(74) Who the hell is "Yalin Ekici?"

"Yalin Ekici," the loon who fills alt.fan.joel-furr with megabytes of drivel
about the so-called Armenian genocide of Turks in 1914, is believed by many
to be none other than Ahmet Cosar, the infamous "Serdar Argic" of
soc.history and soc.culture.turkish fame. Cosar lost his access at the
University of Minnesota in the spring of 1995 (apparently as a result of
failing to register for classes two semesters in a row) and was absent from
Usenet for a while. He returned with a vengeance later in the year un der a
new pseudonym, "Yalin Ekici," posting from [e-mail]. Since this
new userid makes frequent reference to "Dr. Argic" and is recycling the old
Argic library of propaganda, most people feel that this is none other than
our old friend Cosar, b ack to his usual tricks.

Netcom claims to have told "Ekici" to calm the hell down and stop spamming
dozens of newsgroups with his idiotic drivel about the evil Armenians, and
in fact, Cosar was quiet for a few days after Netcom said they'd reprimanded
him. However, the pe riod of quietude did not last long and Cosar returned
to posting his idiocy with a vengeance and Netcom has remained mute to all
requests for information on what, if anything, they are doing about the
situation. Not for nothing is Netcom considered by ma ny to be a less than
exemplary member of the Internet community.

In addition to posting under the pseudonym of "Yalin Ekici," Cosar also
posts under the pseudonyms of "Arif Kiziltug" and "Murat Kutan," apparently
in hopes of convincing the world at large that he's not a lone kook.

Important safety tip: if you feel compelled to flame him, don't reply to his
messages directly. The algorithm Cosar uses to locate articles to follow up
to apparently searches for references to the message-id's of his old
articles. In other words, he lo oks for responses to his articles and
follows up to these responses with random attacks out of his library of
inane propaganda.

It seems odd to many that Cosar would go to such incredible lengths for such
a bad cause. No one other than him, apparently, sincerely believes that
Armenians committed genocide against Turks in 1914. It seems to be a
continuing source of frustra tion to Cosar that, despite his best efforts,
we all still go around believing that it was the Turks who did their utmost
to wipe out every Armenian village they could find.

Even though Cosar's claims are roughly analogous to someone claiming that
Jews herded Germans by the millions into the gas chambers in 1939-1945, he
goes right on posting, secure in his sick delusions.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(75) What is the ultimate slow dancing song?

"Nights in White Satin," by the Moody Blues. The meaning of the song is
completely irrelevant -- the song was made to slow dance to.

"Wonderful Tonight" by Eric Clapton is also a fine slow dancing song, but
when you actually listen to the words, it's about a guy who gets drunk at a
party and has to be shoveled into bed by his wife -- hardly the stuff of
great romance.

Carole, beacon of Joel Furr's existence and the radiant star who guides him
through the day, feels that the ultimate slow dancing song is "Lady in Red,"
by Chris DeBurgh (better known as the guy who sang "Don't Pay the
Ferryman"). She may have a point.< p>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(76) Who was President of Joel Furr's high school Science Club?

Jimmy Page.

Yes, the Jimmy Page.

Joel Furr's high school, Blacksburg High School of Blacksburg, Virginia,
encouraged membership in the various school clubs by setting aside one
morning per month (or thereabouts) for club meetings to be held in lieu of
classes. Attendance at clubs was es sentially mandatory; if you didn't
choose some club to go to, you had to spend all morning being watched a like
a hawk in a study hall run by one of the more irritable teachers.
Consequently, everyone found at least one club they could endure and
attended its meetings each month. Those students who were either not
eligible for or not interested in membership in clubs like the Leo Club, the
Key Club, or the Fellowship of Christian Athletes had various clubs like the
Spanish Club, the French Club, or, yes, the Science Club available to them.
Since it was well-known that members of the Science Club got to see Dr.
Wightman set himself on fire one day each year, the Science Club was the
most popular club in the entire school most years and could count on raking
in the lion's share of those students who were not otherwise inclined toward
some of the more specialized clubs.

The Science Club could be counted on to accomplish precisely nothing all
year since each month's program consisted of someone's father (usually a
physics or chemistry or biology professor from Virginia Tech) speaking on
whatever it was he did for a living ... surface chemistry, nuclear physics,
iguanas, whatever. Sitting boredly in the back of the room while someone's
dad set himself on fire was as good a way as any to spend a morning but it
wasn't the sort of thing that led people to take the club and it s mission
to encourage the study of science very seriously. Needless to say, it was no
great honor to be elected President of the Blacksburg High School Science
Club.

That's how Jimmy Page got elected President of the Science Club. The first
meeting of the year was always the meeting at which club officers were
elected, and one year someone nominated Jimmy Page. Since the teacher who
was the official sponsor of the S cience Club didn't have a clue who Jimmy
Page was, she wrote the nomination on the board with all the others and,
after his nearly unanimous election, dutifully noted "James Page" down on
the officers form that she had to turn in to the school office afte r the
first meeting.

Page never seemed to make it to meetings, oddly, so the club vice president
always had to call meetings to order.

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(77) What is the secret of making great Bisquick pancakes?

Damned if Joel Furr, or for that matter, ANY of the Scouts of Boy Scout
Troop 44, could tell you.

Every single camping trip the Scouts of Troop 44 undertook during the years
Joel Furr was a Scout included in the box of camping supplies a big box of
Bisquick pancake mix. This was the case for two reasons. First, one of the
Troop's Assistant Scoutmaste rs was Arthur "Torchy" Walrath, author of the
official Boy Scout Cookbook. Torchy could do amazing things with Bisquick
and the Scouts always made sure to have the raw materials close at hand,
just in case Torchy came along on any given camping tr ip. Second, Bisquick
was sort of a last-ditch emergency ration, just in case all the other food
got eaten on the first day, as usually happened.

Without fail, something would happen to the bulk of the food -- often, the
reason was simple: it was all eaten on the first night in a fit of orgiastic
gluttony -- and by the final morning of the camping trip, the Scouts would
be reduced to eyeing the box of Bisquick hungrily.

Eventually, one would say "Well, this time we know what to do to get the
pancakes to come out right" and the Great Experiment would resume.

Bisquick, used by calm, sane cooks who are not crazed from smoke, cold, and
exhaustion, can be used to make tasty pancakes and biscuits and so forth. On
the other hand, the Scouts of Troop 44, indifferent cooks at best (the
freeze-dried food they took al ong was usually eaten cold and uncooked, with
a cup of two of water poured into the foil packets in a futile attempt at
effective re-hydration), hardly qualified as "sane" under the best of
circumstances and were usually so enervated by the exertions of t he trip
that they would double every measure called for on the back of the box and
halve the cooking time. If it was necessary to leave out the eggs or oil or
whatever because the Scouts didn't have any, then hey, so be it. Strict
adherence to instructi ons was not a skill the Troop 44 Scouts had much
familiarity with.

The inevitable result was something unworthy of the name of "pancake" --
which consequently became known among the Scouts as a "fritter." Your
average fritter weighed in at a pound and a half and was sufficiently dense
that fritters became widely feared a s weapons; a thrown fritter was dense
and solid enough to knock down most anything it struck -- AND keep its shape
after impact. Eating an entire fritter was out of the question -- it would
have been like trying to put yourself outside an entire sa ck of
Quikrete. A
few bites were enough to rid a boy of the pangs of hunger and leave him
feeling as though he'd mistaken a sandbag for a Pop-Tart.

It was little wonder that the Scouts of Troop 44 were invariably running
into each other at McDonald's immediately after returning to Blacksburg and
being picked up by their parents at the church; without doubt, the parents
of the troop knew without havin g to be told that their sons would go
through the refrigerator like a threshing machine if other food were not
found first.

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(78) Why didn't Joel Furr wind up in the military?

Joel wanted to enter the military after graduating from Blacksburg High
School in 1985; he even went so far as to apply for and interview for a
Naval ROTC scholarship, knowing full well that if he was accepted into the
program this would require hi m to complete a full term of military service
after graduation.

His older sister, Julia, had already entered Duke University on an Army ROTC
scholarship, so Joel was hardly ignorant of what the program required of
applicants or what the program would require Joel to do after graduation. It
seemed like an excellent op portunity: get his education paid for, graduate,
and get to see the world as a member of an honorable profession, serving the
United States.

Unfortunately, there was this problem...

It happened like this: In November of 1984, Joel went down to be interviewed
and evaluated by a Naval officer in Richmond, Virginia. The officer
interviewed Joel and evaluated whether or not he'd make a good Naval ROTC
cadet. Things were going pretty w ell during the interview -- well enough,
in fact, that Joel's father was told, after it was over, that he could 'bet
[your] paycheck on Joel getting a scholarship.' Evidently the interviewer
thought highly of Joel. Unfortunately, Mr. Furr was being told this as he
was half- helping, half-carrying Joel out to the car.

Joel had felt more or less okay during the drive down from Blacksburg but
had begun to feel feverish during lunch and had started feeling really bad
during the interview. About halfway through the scheduled length of the
interview, the room starte d to swim and Joel passed out. The interview was
cut short, needless to say, but the interviewer assured Mr. Furr that it
wouldn't negatively affect the report on Joel and that Joel was a sure thing
as far as a Navy ROTC scholarship went. When the Furrs made it back to
Blacksburg, three and a half hours away by car, Joel was running a high
fever and was babbling deliriously. He was diagnosed the next day with a
full-fledged case of pneumonia.

That's right, pneumonia. As diseases go, there may well be worse ones to
have, but Joel can't recommend lying on one's back for a solid month, too
weak to move, as an exciting laugh-fest. When he was X-rayed the next day at
the hospital, he was diagnose d as having one lung more or less entirely
full of green goo and the other lung about halfway full. His parents didn't
tell him until he was completely recovered that the doctors had thought
there was a decent chance that he'd die.

Joel recovered in a month or so, spending a solid four weeks in bed unable
to do much more than roll over now and then and occasionally swallow
whatever liquids his parents thrust at him. It wasn't fun.

When he did finally make it back onto his feet and make it back to school,
he wasn't exactly in good shape, muscle-wise. Consequently, when the time
came a month or so later to take the ROTC physical fitness test, Joel
performed somewhere around the fift h percentile of applicants. Spending a
month in bed without moving isn't exactly going to tone one's body up to the
levels desired by the United States military.

Let's put it this way: Joel did not get the scholarship. Good thing Mr. Furr
didn't bet his paycheck, eh?

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(79) What was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to Joel Furr?

People who know Joel well might think that the most embarrassing thing that
ever happened to him was the time he vomited his guts out on the Monument to
the Confederate War Dead in the middle of Athens, Georgia's main street,
Broad Street, at 5:00 p.m. on a bright, sunny Friday afternoon.

And admittedly, that was an embarrassing moment, but it fails to qualify as
the most embarrassing moment inasmuch as Joel felt far too ill at the time
of the incident to really care if he was embarrassing himself or not.
Drinking six beers and six shots of tequila in the space of about
seventy-five minutes will do that to you.

No, the single most embarrassing thing that ever happened to Joel Furr has
to be what happened early one summer morning during the summer of 1988.

Joel had graduated from the University of Georgia in June of 1988 and was
spending the summer in his home town of Blacksburg, Virginia waiting for his
graduate school classes to start up that fall. He tried to find a job that
summer but had little luck s ince no one much wanted to hire a recent
college graduate whose main skill was that he could write a ten page English
paper in about two hours on the day the paper was due, without having read
the book the paper was supposed to be about, and still get an A.

Accordingly, he spent the summer lounging about, not doing much of anything.
Some days he'd drive up into the Jefferson National Forest, just north of
Blacksburg, and float about on the calm and tranquil waters of eight-acre
Pandapas Pond, out in the woo ds of the Forest. He had a black-and-yellow
"two-man inflatable raft (not for life-saving purposes)" he'd picked up one
summer at Cape Hatteras that served fairly well for one man if that one man
happened to be six feet, two inches tall and was fond of l ying on his back
with a book held open on his chest.

Most days, no one much came to the Pond except to walk around the
circum-Pond trail and then leave again forty-five minutes later. Once in a
while, someone would arrive with a canoe on top of their Wagoneer and spend
a few hours paddling around the Pond w hile Furr floated on his back,
ignoring them and reading whatever book he happened to have along.

Then came the Day of the Girl Scouts. Joel was lying in the boat, half-
drowsing, about nine-thirty in the morning one weekday morning when he heard
a tumult from the parking lot and, a few minutes later, saw a platoon of
Girl Scouts, probably Juniors, w ith a harried troop leader in tow,
portaging silver canoes down to the Pond. The Scouts paired off and launched
their canoes, voyaging out over the still waters of the Pond and chattering
amiably as they paddled.

This was not exactly the sort of thing Joel had wanted or expected when he'd
decided to go down to the Pond that morning. It tended to break the mood
something fierce; imagine Thoreau feeling as he did about Walden Pond if
some idiots in canoes had routi nely showed up and paddled about on days he
was feeling philosophical.

Joel was not entirely awake, nor entirely in a good mood, and thus he can't
entirely be blamed for not foreseeing what happened next.

Joel decided he would stand up in his boat and count how many Girl Scouts
there were in all -- and if there were more than ten, he reasoned, the Pond
could be considered "too crowded" and he would have a legitimate excuse to
give up and go home. Standing up in the boat was no problem; the boat was
like a big oval doughnut with a flat bottom and Joel could actually stand up
in it fairly well and see around the Pond and count, "two, four, six, eight,
ten, twelve, thirteen, and one troop leader, yeah, time t o split." Just as
he was making this decision, the bottom of the boat came free of the side of
the boat and he plunged straight down, through the boat, and into the water
of the Pond.

From an observer's point of view, it must have looked as though Joel
suddenly vanished, sucked down into the Pond by something lurking underneath
the surface of the water. One moment, he was there; the next, he was gone.
His boat began a somewhat slower collapse, its hull integrity destroyed by
when the "deck" ripped free of the sides.

Joel doesn't like fish. Pandapas Pond has fish in it. With no warning at
all, Joel was down where the fish lived, and he didn't like it at all. Much
in the same fashion that cartoon characters run on thin air, Joel rose up
out of the water and moved li ke a Jet-Ski for the nearest land, which
happened to be the nearby Pandapas Pond island, smack in the middle of the
Pond.

"Ignominy" doesn't begin to describe it. Here was Joel, soaked from head to
toe, hunkered down on an island approximately the same size as a postage
stamp like some sort of primeval amphibian gazing darkly over the
Carboniferous swamps. There were the Girl Scouts, happily learning the ins
and outs of canoe navigation and peering curiously at the spectacle on the
island. What was Joel to do? Swim ashore and risk touching Pond fish? Sit
there and hope the Scouts or their leader would discreetly come o ver and
give him a lift to shore without asking too many embarrassing questions
about what he'd thought he was doing when he stood up in a cheap plastic
inflatable boat?

As it happened, his bacon was saved when the troop leader noticed his
dilemma and paddled the canoe she shared with one Scout over to the island
and asked him if he needed any help.

"Um," Joel said.

History does not record how Joel explained what had transpired nor the
manner in which he requested a lift to shore; presumably he managed somehow
because in due order he was delivered onto the shore, ruined boat and all,
and wished a good day by the over -cheery Girl Scouts.

Suffice it to say that when Joel purchased a replacement boat for future
nautical endeavors, he concluded that it would be best for all involved if
he remained safely seated or supine when aboard and left standing and
walking for when he had returned to d ry land.

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(80) When did Joel Furr learn to read?

Around age 3, or maybe a little earlier.

Joel's younger brother Robin was born in late July 1970, two years and ten
months after Joel's birth. Needless to say, the newborn required much care
and attention and Joel's parents did not have the time necessary to closely
supervise their other son. Consequently, they did anything they could to
keep him occupied -- reading him a book and then handing him the book to
page through while they attended to Robin. Joel would pore over the books
for hours, looking at the pictures -- and, as it turns out, th e words.

It caught them by surprise when they realized one day that Joel was studying
the pages with rather more concentration than one would expect of a child
not quite yet three years old who didn't know how to read. "Read that to
me," his mother ordered, point ing at a page. Joel did so. He read them the
whole book. He had figured out how to read all by himself, based on
comparisons between what his parents read to him and the corresponding marks
on the pages.

This caused Joel some problems later in life when he was light-years ahead
of the other kids in kindergarten and first grade -- especially in
kindergarten, where he'd already read all the books in the kindergarten
library and had very little interest in sitting through storytime just to
hear them read through again.

It led to some fairly immediate problems when Joel was still a pre-schooler
as well, though. Mrs. Furr did not always watch Joel closely when she was
tending to Robin, assuming that Joel would keep busy with one of the dozens
of easy-reading books in the house for a few minutes. Joel would read
quietly and stay out of trouble -- but, as it happened, there's such a thing
as too quiet. On occasion, when Mrs. Furr had heard nary a peep out of Joel
for some hours, a feeling of "uh-oh" would come over her and she'd go in
search.

On one occasion, she searched the house without spotting Joel until she
finally chanced to look down under the dining table and found that Joel had
used up an entire box of margarine sticks greasing the entire dining room
floor. He looked up at his flabb ergasted mother and patted the floor
proudly.

On another occasion, he was found standing with the refrigerator door open,
happily dropping one egg after another onto the floor. He had the last
surviving egg in his hand when Mrs. Furr discovered him standing above a
heap of eggshells and runny goo, b eaming happily at his work.

"Joel," she said cautiously, "Give me the egg."

Smiling agreeably, Joel hurled the egg in her general direction, missing by
a few feet. Scratch the remaining egg.

On still other occasions, Joel was found standing in front of an open
commode, flushing repeatedly and waving "bye-bye" at whatever he had flushed
down the toilet this time.

Is it any wonder his parents adopted a practice of shoving books under his
nose any time they saw him otherwise unoccupied?

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