Everything I want to listen to is sung by a pretty man in eyeliner, has loud guitars, and is mostly about how the pretty man in eyeliner loves me SO MUCH that he would die for me, or my indifference to his love is tormenting him.

Mm. Pretty men in eyeliner. I could go for watching a pretty man in eyeliner loving somebody else, and does anybody really need me to say what I mean by that?

...and ask David to make you some burns of his extensive and rare glam rock collection.

Ooh.

I want a Speak And Spell.

Those things always creeped me out. This is the robot voiced toy that spells out words, yes? I did, however, enjoy the See and Say with the little arrow you spin around to the picture and then you pull the string and the happy, nice voice says the name of the thing in the picture.

And although the conversation has moved on, I have to say that Halle Berry's "acting" makes the baby Jesus cry. I have to really think I'll love everything else about the movie to get over her. Also, Eddie Murphy since he started only making crappy family comedies like Daddy Day Care. Such a shame.

Let's pretend this would fit me: this needs to belong to me.

And this one has JZ written all over it.

Ooh.

Yeah, you were already on my list for that mix. I'll try to make certain that yours (a) rocks hard and (b) is thoroughly depraved.

Speaking of which, have you ever heard The Lee Harvey Oswald Band? 'Cuz I'm thinking you'd like songs like "Rocket 69" and "Morphodite." ("Gotta bomb in my britches and it's ready to blow / I'm not your morphodite, I'm not your silly ho.")

Let's pretend this would fit me: this needs to belong to me.

I know someone who could make a copy of that for you ...

I'm listening to a podcast of Morning Sedition where they are playing quotes from Senator Joe Liberman and the dad from the TV show ALF and asking people to tell which is which. It's really funny how long it's taking for the callers to figure out.

Ooh, Speak & Spells. I never had one, but ever since I saw Sonic Boom do a whole show with re-programmed S&S's I've been vaguely wanty.

I'll take this, too.

And this (not to be egotistical) would look spectacular on me.

Let's pretend this would fit me: this needs to belong to me.

I know someone who could make a copy of that for you ...

Temptress!

Geeksters, are you familiar with...

********

Unix conspiracy n.

According to a conspiracy theory long popular among ITS and TOPS-20 fans, Unix's growth is the result of a plot, hatched during the 1970s at Bell Labs, whose intent was to hobble AT&T's competitors by making them dependent upon a system whose future evolution was to be under AT&T's control. This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT&T). This theory was lent a substantial impetus in 1984 by the paper referenced in the back door entry.

In this view, Unix was designed to be one of the first computer viruses (see virus) -- but a virus spread to computers indirectly by people and market forces, rather than directly through disks and networks. Adherents of this `Unix virus' theory like to cite the fact that the well-known quotation "Unix is snake oil" was uttered by DEC president Kenneth Olsen shortly before DEC began actively promoting its own family of Unix workstations. (Olsen now claims to have been misquoted.)

[If there was ever such a conspiracy, it got thoroughly out of the plotters' control after 1990. AT&T sold its Unix operation to Novell around the same time Linux and other free-Unix distributions were beginning to make noise. --ESR]