From crispen@INTERNIC.NET Wed Sep 10 23:01:46 1997
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 1997 12:46:05 -0400
From: crispen@INTERNIC.NET
Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject: TOURBUS -- 4 SEPTEMBER 1997 -- WHO KNOWS?!
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TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC(S): WHO KNOWS?!
TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP(S): http://www.royal.gov.uk/vbk/index.htm
http://www.fco.gov.uk/feedback/
http://www.moonpie.com/
Howdy, y'all! :)
Since my birthday is coming up this weekend (Sunday, September 7th -- "a
date which will live in infamy"), I'm going to have a little fun with
today's TOURBUS post. To celebrate my impending oldness, today's voyage of
our little bus of Internet happiness is totally devoid of both ads and any
understandable outline.
In other words, welcome to TOURBUS' first (and hopefully last) "stream of
consciousness" posting! :)
Actually, I do have one bit of serious of business that I want to take care
of. In Tuesday's TOURBUS post, Dr. Bob Rankin told you that children aged
11 to 16 could sign up for a phone focus group to help the American Medical
Association re-design their adolescent health website. Well, another Bob
(Bob Novick, the guy responsible for setting up this focus group) recently
informed me that
Unfortunately, Webcom (email services), where our signup form is
posted, was down for several hours Monday night and Tuesday
morning. As a result, some of your readers may have gone to the
site, signed up, been shown a message that their response was
received and that we would contact them soon.
However, all form-submitted data was lost during the outage. We
have no way of knowing who signed up or how to contact them. This
may lead to some disgruntled TOURBUS readers who will eventually
write to us (I hope) or to you. If they write to us we'll
explain and ask them to return to the website and fill out the
form again. Would you please do the same with anyone who writes
to you?
The website is: http://www.cyberpulse.com/ama/
My apologies. The e-mail outage occurred at exactly the worst
possible time for this project and for some TOURBUS readers.
If you are between 11 and 16 years of age, and if you tried to access the
cyberpulse web site on Monday or Tuesday, please go back to cyberpulse and
resubmit your information. If you haven't visited cyberpulse yet, however,
you've sort of missed the bus (no pun intended). According to Bob Novick,
We have room for only a limited number of respondents and I'm
sure we'll get enough from the one posting [this past Tuesday].
TOURBUS is a very effective medium for us.
Next topic. The British Monarchy has created an online condolence book for
Diana, Princess of Wales, at
http://www.royal.gov.uk/vbk/index.htm
Don't count on being able to access this page anytime soon, though. With
millions of people around the world expressing their condolences after this
weekend's accident, the speed of this Web page can best be described as
glacial.
You might want to bypass this page altogether and instead send your
condolences through the British Foreign Consulate Office at
http://www.fco.gov.uk/feedback/
Not many people know about this site -- yet -- but according to the British
Foreign Consulate Office
[M]essages of condolence upon the death of Diana, Princess of
Wales may now be sent via [this page]. All messages are being
forwarded automatically to the main Book of Condolence . . .
Next topic. From time to time I mention "Moon Pies" ("the original
marshmallow sandwich") in these posts. Fellow TOURBUS rider Lee Coursey
of HOT-lanta, Gawjuh, recently wrote that
In the interest of furthering global culture, you owe it to
the various Yankees and other confectionerily-deprived foreigners
in your audience to route the BUS to the Official Moon Pie web
site:
http://www.moonpie.com/
This site is the home of the ORIGINAL Moon Pie, still made in
Chattanooga, Tennessee. Here you can learn all kinds of
interesting facts about Moon Pies, including: The complete
history of the Moon Pie (developed in 1917), How Moon Pies are
made (lots of pictures from inside the factory), and Moon Pie
recipes (such as Strawberry Moon Pie Shortcake.)
The site has lots of cool pictures and great information about
what is truly a Southern Treasure.
Now for the funny stuff. Another alert TOURBUS rider, this time from
Uruguay, forwarded the following message to me:
La pequena Jessica Mydek tiene siete anos y sufre un caso agudo y
muy raro de carcinoma cerebral. Esta condicion le causa tumores
cerebrales malignos muy severos, ademas de ser una enfermedad
terminal. Los doctores le han dado 6 meses de vida.
If your Spanish isn't all that good, here is a rough translation:
Little Jessica Mydek is seven years old and is suffering from an
acute and very rare case of cerebral carcinoma. This condition
causes sever malignant brain tumors and is a terminal illness.
The doctors have given her six months to live.
Yes, folks, the Jessica hoax (which we debunked back on July 3rd) has gone
international. However, I think I have finally discovered how our
fictional little Jessica got sick in the first place. Several alert
TOURBUS riders sent me the following story (which, coincidentally, appeared
in InfoBeat, which we talked about in our last TOURBUS post)
U.S. doctors are studying a possible link between eating squirrel
brains and catching the human variant of mad cow disease. Joseph
Berger, a neurologist at the University of Kentucky, said in a
letter to the Lancet medical journal that more research was
needed but cautioned against eating squirrels or similar rodents.
Berger said he had been conducting research into the fatal
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) when he noticed that one patient,
a Kentucky native, had a history of eating squirrel brains. See
full story at
http://www.infobeat.com/stories/cgi/story.cgi?id=4668304-30a
I think it is pretty obvious what is going on . . . Jessica Mydek has MAD
SQUIRREL DISEASE! :)
With that, I think I'll bring today's post to an end. Have a safe and
happy weekend, and watch out for them squirrels!
TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC(S): WHO KNOWS?!
TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP(S): http://www.royal.gov.uk/vbk/index.htm
http://www.fco.gov.uk/feedback/
http://www.moonpie.com/
--------------------------------
TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE DAY
--------------------------------
GRUDGE (noun): a structure associated with automobiles
Usage: "Ju park yur truck in the grudge?"
(Special thanks to an anonymous TOURBUS rider for today's wurd)
YOU CAN FIND ALL OF THE OLD SOUTHERN WORDS OF THE DAY ON THE SOUTHERN WORD
HOMEPAGE AT http://ua1ix.ua.edu/~crispen/word.html
[By the way ... that's "you-ay-won-eye-ex"]
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(\__/) .' ) )) Patrick Douglas Crispen
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'---..{____} Warning: squirrels.
