Path: jfwhome!spdcc!mintaka!olivea!samsung!think.com!yale!cs.yale.edu!pekowsky-larne
From: pekowsky-larne@CS.YALE.EDU (larne pekowsky)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Trying to explain talk.bizarre
Message-ID: <29414@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 11 Mar 91 19:18:57 GMT


   I had finally gotten around to displaying the lovely piece of postScript
art which floated down the 'froup some time back.  Upon hearing that irritating
beep which xps insists on making whenever it hits a showpage, my officemate 
looked over.  He stared at it a while, then looked at me quizzically.

   "Talk.bizarre," I said, figuring that would clear everything up.

   It didn't.  "Talk._bizarre_?" he asked, even more confused.  "Is that
a real group?"

   "Absolutely"

   "Ah, I see," he said, not seeing.  "It's like one of those 'alt.x.y.y.y'
deals."

   "No, not at all," I said, and then by way of clarification added "although
it does in some sense subsume the best of them.  Also, talk.bizarre has
been around a lot longer, since the beginning of time really.  Or maybe
before."

   He pondered this for a while, but it didn't help.  "Do things actually
originate on talk.bizarre, or is just someplace to redirect threads that
have gotten too stupid?"

   "Some of the latter, but of course it also generates a fair amount of
original stupidity as well."

   "Uh..."

   "Look, it's like if you took all the odd things that happened in your
life, right?  All those peculiar moments you just didn't know what to
do with.  Some pleasant, some not so pleasant.  Then you perform some sort
of spacio-temporal transformation that turns these events into people.
Then you pump every mind-altering chemical you can find into these people, and
do another transformation that turns them into a newsgroup.  That's the ideal
that talk.bizarre strives for, although the rabbits frequently prevent this
from happening."

   "What?"

   At that point I gave up.  "Never mind," I said gently.  "Talk.bizarre
can't be explained in terms of anything other than itself."

   That seemed to satisfy him.

						- Larne