Inquisition and Chess - In 1495 Pedro Arbues, Dominican member of the Inquisition, ordered victims of persecutions to stand in as figures in a game of living chess. The game was played by two blind monks. Each time the captured piece was taken, the person representing that piece was put to death.

Piece Renaming

Star Trek and Chess

Teeth and Chess

War or Chess?

Quotes

"Chess is the art of analysis." - Mikhail Botvinnik (1911-1995)

"Chess is a good mistress but a bad master." - Gerald Abrahams (1907-1980)

"Life is a kind of chess, with struggle, competition, good and ill events." - Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

History of Chess

Chess is believed to have originated in the Orient and India between the years of 531 and 578. It was during this time frame that the first mention of chess was found in ancient documents. These papers said that this game was brought to the Persian King Nushirwan from the Rajah of India, Kanuj.

These are supposedly actual quotes taken from around the world.

"The effects are fleeting and lingering..." - Overheard in a hallway

"In Managua, people are cheering in the streets, which are deserted." - CBS reporter during the solar eclipse

"A trucker called to thank all of the courteous Seattle drivers he had run across." - Announcer on KZOK radio

"He threw 110 pitches in six innings, and that's a mouthful!" - CBS baseball announcer

"An agreement is not an agreement until the parties to the agreement have reached an agreement." - Irish Politician on RTE radio

"This is the biggest pawn that Israel holds in the whole hostage equation." - BBC world service.

"We have two incredibly credible witnesses here." - Sen. Biden at Thomas hearings from Bob Ericson (Marlboro, MA, USA)

"He's going to step down 'til he's back on his feet." - Vermont Public Radio commentator on Jimmy Swaggart's latest sex scandal

These are supposedly actual quotes taken from around the world.

"That race was all about competition." - David Coleman, ITV

"And I can see the strong wind blowing the sun towards us." - Brian Johnson, BBC Radio 3

Mark Goodier: What's the name of the company you work for?

Listener: Mining and Engineering Services. Mark Goodier: So, what kind of work do they do; is it mining and

engineering services? - BBC Radio 1

"Marling - unbeaten in her three victories."

Peter O'Sullivan, BBC2 TV: "Both drivers are fundamentally wearing white helmets."

James Hunt, BBC2 TV: "A church spire nestling among the trees...there's probably a church there too." - Richie Benaud, BBC2 TV

These are supposedly actual quotes taken from around the world.

Newsreader, BBC Radio 4: "Working mothers are the backbone of the third half of the economy."

Glenda Jackson, Channel 4 TV: "There's nothing athletes like - or indeed hate - more than hanging around like this." - David Coleman, BBC 1 TV

"Not being in the Rumbelows Cup for those teams won't mean a row of beans, 'cos that's only small potatoes." - Ian St John, ITV

"Oldham are leading 1-0, a well deserved victory at this stage of the game." - Tommy Docherty, Picadilly Radio

Brian Johnson, BBC Radio 3: "We don't appear to have Jim Fish on the line at the moment."

"Are there any more great swimmers in the pipeline?" - Cliff Morgan, BBC Radio 4

"Andre Vandapole has four silver medals in cyclocross, and none of them gold." - Phil Liggott, Channel 4 TV

"Well, I shall remember that catch for many a dying day."

It is once again time to vote for-the Darwin Award nominees for 1997. As you may already know, the Darwin Awards are for those nominees who will not be contributing to the gene pool (thankfully).

The 1997 nominees are:

NOMINEE No.1: [San Jose Mercury News] An unidentified man, using a shotgun like a club to break a former girlfriend's windshield, accidentally shot himself to death when the gun discharged, blowing a hole in his gut.

NOMINEE No.2 [Kalamazoo Gazette] James Burns, 34, of Alamo,Mich., was killed in March as he was trying to repair what. police described as a "farm-type truck." Burns got a friend to drive the truck on a highway while Bums hung underneath so that he could asthe source of a troubling noise. Burns' clothes caught on something, however, and the other man found Burns "wrapped in the drive shaft."

NOMINEE No.3 [Hickory Daily Record] Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, N.C., when, awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grabbed instead a Smith & Wesson. 38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear.

NOMINEE No.4 [UIPI, Toronto] Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto Skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the building's windows to visiting law students. Hoy previously had conducted demonstrations of window strength according to police reports. Peter Lawyers, managing partner of the firm Holden Day Wilson, told the Toronto Sun newspaper that Hoy was "one of the best and brightest" members of the 200-man association.

NOMINEE No.5 [Bloomburg News Service] A terrible diet and room with no ventilation are being blamed for the death of a man who was killed by his own gas. There was no mark on his body but autopsy showed large amounts of methane gas in his system. His diet had consisted primarily of beans and cabbage(and a couple of other things). It was just the right combination of foods. It appears that the man died in his sleep from breathing the poisonous cloud that was hanging over his bed. Had he been outside or had his windows been opened, it wouldn't have been fatal. But the man was shut, up in his, near airtight bedroom. According to the article, "He was a big man with a huge capacity for creating "this deadly gas." Three of the rescuers got sick and one was hospitalized.

NOMINEE No..6 [The News of the Weird.] Michael Anderson Godwin made News of the Weird posthumously. He had spent several years awaiting South Carolina's electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison. Whilst sitting on a metal toilet in his cell and attempting to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.

NOMINEE NO.7["The. Indianapolis Star"] A cigarette lighter may have triggered fatal explosion - Dunkirk, Indiana. A Jay County man using a cigarette lighter to check the barrel of a muzzle loader was killed Monday night when the weapon discharged in his face, sheriffs investigators said. Gregory David Pryor, 19, died in his parents' rural Dunkirk home about 11:30 p.m. Investigators said Pryor was cleaning a 54-caliber muzzle loader that had not been firing properly. He was using the lighter to look into the barrel when the gunpowder ignited.

NOMINEE No.8 lAP, St. Louis] Robert Puelo, 32, was apparently being disorderly in a St. Louis market. When the clerk threatened to call police, Puelo grabbed a hot dog, shoved it in his mouth, and walked out without paying for it. Police found him unconscious in front of the store; paramedics removed the six-inch wiener from his throat, where it had choked him to death.

NOMINEE No.9 [Unknown] To poacher Marino Malerba, who shot a stag standing above him on an overhanging rock-and was killed instantly when it fell on him.

NOMINEE No.10 [Associated Press, Kincaid] Blasting Cap Explodes in Man's Mouth at Party. A man at a party popped a blasting cap into his mouth and bit down, triggering an explosion that blew off his lips, teeth, and tougue state police said Wednesday. Jerry Stromyer, 24, of Kincaid, bit the blasting cap as a prank during a party late Tuesday night, said Cpl. M.D.Payne. Another man had it in an aquarium hooked to a battery, and was trying to explode it," Payne said. "It wouldn't go off and this guy said, 'I'II show you how to set it off."

Yet Another Darwin award candidate - or pair of candidates -- this just might be the winner!

IDIOTS & RETAIL

I was signing the receipt for my credit card purchase when the clerk noticed that I had never signed my name on the back of the credit card. She informed me that she could not complete the transaction unless the card was signed. When I asked why, she explained that it was necessary to compare the signature on the credit card with the signature I just signed on the receipt. So I signed the credit card in front of her. She carefully compared that signature to the one I signed on the receipt. As luck would have it, they matched.

IDIOTS & GEOGRAPHY

After interviewing a particularly short-spoken job candidate, I described the person to my boss as rather monosyllabic. My boss said, "Really? Where is Monosyllabia?". Thinking that he was just kidding, I played along and said that it was just south of Elbonia. He replied, "Oh, you mean over by Croatia?"

ADVICE FOR IDIOTS

An actual tip from page 16 of the Hewlett Packard Environmental, Health & Safety Handbook for Employees: "Blink your eyelids periodically to lubricate your eyes."

IDIOTS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

I live in a semi-rural area. We recently had a new neighbor call the local township administrative office to request the removal of the Deer Crossing sign on our road. The reason: Many deer were being hit by cars and he no longer wanted them to cross there.

IDIOTS & COMPUTERS

My neighbor works in the operations department in the central office of a large bank. Employees in the field call him when they have problems with their computers. One night he got a call from a woman in one of the branch banks who had this question: "I've got smoke coming from the back of my terminal. Do you guys have a fire downtown?"

IDIOTS ARE EASY TO PLEASE

I was sitting in my science class, when the teacher commented that the next day would be the shortest day of the year. My lab partner became visibly excited, cheering and clapping. I explained to her that the amount of daylight changes, not the actual amount of time. Needless to say, she was very disappointed.

IDIOTS IN FOOD SERVICE

My daughter went to a local Taco Bell and ordered a taco. She asked the individual behind the counter for "minimal lettuce." He said he was sorry, but they only had iceberg.

AN IDIOT'S IDIOT

Police in Radnor, Pennsylvania, interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message "He's lying" was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the suspect wasn't telling the truth. Believing the "lie detector" was working, the suspect confessed.

A man buys a brand new Grand Cherokee for $30,000+, and has $400.00+ in monthly payments. He's pretty proud of this rig and gets ahold of his friend to do some male bonding with the new ride. They go duck hunting and of course all the lakes are frozen. These two Atomic Brains go to the lake with their guns, the dog, the beer and of course the new vehicle.

They drive out onto the ice. Now, they want to make some kind of a natural landing area to attract ducks - something the decoys will float on.

Remember it's all ice, and in order to make a hole large enough to interest a flock of ducks - a hole big enough to entice ducks to land, they needed to use a little more than an ice hole drill...

Sooo, out of the back of the brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee comes a stick of dynamite with a short 40-second fuse. Now to their credit, these two rocket scientists DID take into consideration that if they placed the stick of dynamite on the ice at a location far from where they (and the new Grand Cherokee) would be waiting and ran back quickly, they would risk slipping on the ice as they ran from the imminent explosion and could possibly go up in smoke with the resulting blast. After a little deliberation, they come up with lighting and THROWING the dynamite, which is what they end up doing.

Remember a couple of paragraphs back when I mentioned the vehicle, the beer, the guns AND THE DOG???? Yes, the dog. The driver's pet Black Lab (used for retrieving - especially things thrown by the owner). You guessed it, the dog takes off at a high rate of doggy speed on the ice, reaching the stick of dynamite with the burning 40-second fuse about the time it hits the ice - all to the woe of the two idiots which are now yelling, stomping, waving arms and wondering what the hell to do now...

The dog is happy and now heads back toward the "hunters" with the stick of dynamite. I think we all can picture the ever-increasing concern on the part of the brain trust, as the loyal Labrador Retriever approaches. The Bozos now are REALLY waving their arms - yelling even louder and generally feeling kinda panicked... Now finally one of the guys decides to think - something that neither had done before this moment, grabs a shotgun and shoots the dog. This sounds better than it really is, because the shotgun was loaded with #8 duck shot and hardly effective enough to stop a Black Lab. The dog DID stop for a moment, slightly confused, but then continued on. Another shot, and this time the dog - still standing, became REALLY confused & of course scared...

Thinking that these two Nobel Prize Winners have gone TOTALLY INSANE, the pooch takes off to find cover with a now extremely short fuse still burning on the stick of dynamite. The cover the dogs finds? Underneath the brand new Grand Cherokee worth 30-some thousand dollars the $400.00+ monthly payment vehicle that is sitting nearby on the lake ice.

BOOM! Dog dies, vehicle sinks to bottom of lake, and these two "Co-Leaders of the Known Universe" are left standing there with this "I can't EVEN believe this happened to me" look on their faces. Later, the owner of the vehicle calls his insurance company and is promptly informed that sinking a vehicle in a lake by illegal use of explosives is NOT covered on his policy...He had yet to make his first car payment.

GRAVITY KILLS

A 22-year-old Reston man was found dead yesterday after he tried to use accessory straps (the stretchy little ropes with hooks on each end) to bungee jump off a 70-foot railroad trestle, police said. Fairfax County police said Eric A. Barcia, a fast-food worker, taped a bunch of these straps together, wrapped an end around one foot, anchored the other end to the trestle at Lake Accotink Park, jumped ... and hit the pavement. Warren Carmichael, a police spokesman, said investigators think Barcia was alone because his car was found nearby. "The length of the cord that he had assembled was greater than the distance between the trestle and the ground." Police say the apparent cause of death was "major trauma". An autopsy is scheduled for later in the week.

LAUNCHED ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

Three young men in Oklahoma were enjoying the coming Fourth of July holiday and wanted to test fire some fireworks. The only real problem was, their launch pad and seating arrangements were atop a several hundred thousand gallon fuel distillation storage tank. Oddly enough, fumes were ignited, producing a fireball seen for miles. They were launched several hundred feet into the air and found dead some 250 yards from their respective seats.

DON'T ASK GOD TO PROVE HIMSELF, HE JUST MIGHT

A lawyer and two buddies were fishing on Caddo Lake in Texas when a lightning storm hit. Most of the other boats immediately headed for the shore, but not our friend the lawyer. Alone on the rear of his aluminum bass boat with his buddies, this individual stood up, spread his arms wide and shouted: "HERE I AM LORD, LET ME HAVE IT!" Needless to say, God delivered. The other two passengers on the boat survived the lightning strike with minor burns.

THE BOYS OF SUMMER

A man in Alabama died from rattlesnake bites. Big deal you may say, but there's a twist here that makes him a candidate. It seems he and a friend were playing catch with a rattlesnake. The friend (a future Darwin Awards candidate himself) was hospitalized.

THEY SAY THOSE THINGS WILL KILL YOU

Not much was given to me on this unlucky fellow, but he qualifies nonetheless. You see, there was a gentleman from Korea who was killed by his cell phone ... more or less. He was doing the usual "walking and talking" when he walked into a tree and managed to somehow break his neck. Keep that in mind the next time you decide to drive and dial at the same time.

GOT A LIGHT?

In a west Texas town, employees in a medium-sized warehouse noticed the smell of gas. Sensibly, management evacuated the building, extinguishing all potential sources of ignition -- lights, power, etc. After the building had been evacuated, two technicians from the gas company were dispatched. Upon entering the building, they found they had difficulty navigating in the dark. To their frustration, none of the lights worked.

Witnesses later described the scene of one of the technicians reaching into his pocket and retrieving an object that resembled a lighter. Upon operation of the lighter-like object, the gas in the warehouse exploded, sending pieces of it up to three miles away. Nothing was found of the technicians, but the lighter was virtually untouched by the explosion. The technician that was suspected of causing the explosion had never been thought of as "bright" by his peers.

Top honors for "Human Projectile of the Month" go to an as-of-yet unidentified dude who is also a serious contender for the annual "Darwin Award". That prestigious prize is given posthumously to the person who does the human gene pool the greatest service by removing himself from it in the most extraordinarily stupid fashion.

Troopers from the Arizona Highway Patrol got on to this gallant if not brainless form of ballistic research after motorists reported some mysterious scorched and blackened scars on a stretch of deserted highway.

The more officers found, the stranger the case got. Here is what they "pieced" together:

JATO units are basically huge canisters of solid rocket fuel used to achieve "Jet Assisted Take Off", typically lifting big transport planes into the air from short, rough ground runways, or shooting overloaded planes from the decks of aircraft carriers.

They were not, repeat NOT, designed to augment the inherent boost factor of a 1967 Chevy Impala. But it is guessed that -- let's call him "Zippy" ---- didn't know that when he hooked one up to his ride.

He apparently chose his runway carefully, selecting a nice long, lonely piece of straight highway in good repair. Not guessing that he might need a bit more than five miles of zoom surface, Zippy's test track had, that far down the track, a gentle rise on a sloping turn. He kicked the tire, lit the fire, ran his Chev up to top cruising speed, and hit the ignition. Investigators know exactly where this happened, judging from the extended patch of burned and melted asphalt.

The pocket calculator boys figure Zip reached maximum thrust within 5 seconds, punching the Chevy to "well in excess of 350 miles per hour" and continued at "full burn" for another 20 to 25 seconds. Early in that little sprint, at roughly 2.5 miles down the road, the Human Hydro Shock stood on the brakes, melting them completely, blowing the tires and rapidly reducing all four skins to liquefied trails on the pavement.

Remember that little rise on the turn? That's where Zippy concluded his land speed record attempt and went for airborne honors, ultimately reaching an altitude of 125 feet and still climbing when his flight was abruptly terminated. We'll never know how far or how high he might have gone. A cliff face of solid rock kind of got in his way, posing a serious reaffirmation of the law of physics vis-a-vis two chunks of matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time. He gave it hell though, blasting a 6-foot crater. The best modern forensic science could do was ID the car's make and model year. As for Zippy, only trace evidence of bone, teeth, and hair were found in the crater.

Two men were digging a ditch on a very hot day. One said to the other, "Why are we down in this hole digging a ditch when our boss is standing up there in the shade of a tree?" "I don't know," responded the other. "I'll ask him."

So he climbed out of the hole and went to his boss. "Why are we digging in the hot sun and you're standing in the shade?" "Intelligence," the boss said. "What do you mean, ?intelligence'?"

The boss said, "Well, I'll show you. I'll put my hand on this tree and I want you to hit it with your fist as hard as you can." The ditch digger took a mighty swing and tried to hit the boss' hand. The boss removed his hand and the ditch digger hit the tree. The boss said, "That's intelligence!"

The ditch digger went back to his hole. His friend asked, "What did he say?" "He said we are down here because of intelligence." "What's intelligence?" said the friend. The ditch digger put his hand on his face and said, "Take your shovel and hit my hand."

Any time you feel dumb, don't worry. Check out the following excerpts from a "Wall Street Journal" article by Jim Carlton. Lots of people are dumber than you.

1. Compaq is considering changing the command "Press Any Key" to "Press Return Key" because of the many calls asking where the "Any" key is.

2. AST technical support had a caller complaining that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on. The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.

3. Another Compaq technician received a call from a man complaining that the system wouldn't read word processing files from his old diskettes. After trouble-shooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the problem, it was found that the customer labeled the diskettes by rolling them into a typewriter to type on them.

4. Another AST customer was asked to send a copy of her defective diskettes. A few days later a letter arrived from the customer along with Xeroxed copies of the floppies.

5. A Dell technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive and close the door. The customer asked the tech to hold on, and was then heard putting the phone down, getting up and crossing the room to close the door to his room.

6. Another Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of trouble-shooting, the technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the "send" key.

7. Another Dell customer needed help setting up a new program, so a Dell tech suggested he go to the local Egghead. "Yeah, I got me a couple of friends," the customer replied. When told "Egghead" was a software store, the man said, "Oh, I thought you meant for me to find a couple of geeks."

8. Yet another Dell customer called to complain that his keyboard no longer worked. He had cleaned it by filling up his tub with soap and water and soaking the keyboard for a day, then removing all the keys and washing them individually.

9. A Dell technician received a call from a customer who was enraged because his computer had told him he was "bad and an invalid". The tech explained that the computer's "bad command" and "invalid" responses shouldn't be taken personally.

10. An exasperated caller to Dell Computer Tech Support couldn't get her new Dell Computer to turn on. After ensuring that the computer was plugged in, the technician asked her what happened when she pushed the power button. Her response, "I pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens." The "foot pedal" turned out to be the computer's mouse.

11. Another customer called Compaq tech support to say her brand-new computer wouldn't work. She said she unpacked the unit, plugged it in, and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked "What power switch?"

12. True story from a Novell NetWire SysOp: Caller: "Hello, is this Tech Support?"

Tech: "Yes, it is. How may I help you?" Caller: "The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?" Tech: "I'm sorry, but did you say a "cup holder"?" Caller: "Yes, it's attached to the front of my computer." Tech: "Please excuse me if I seem a bit stumped; it's because I am. Did you receive this as part of a promotion, like at a trade show? How did you get this cup holder? Does it have any trademark on it?" Caller: "It came with my computer, I don't know anything about a promotional. It just has '4X' on it."

At this point the Tech Rep had to mute the caller, because he couldn't stand it. The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder, and snapped it off the drive!

Another well-known one that I can add is the true tale of the user who called up complaining that the instructions said to load the four diskettes into "Drive A" but he couldn't possibly get more than two in.

MEGA MORON AWARDS

Tennessee: A man successfully broke into a bank after hours and stole the bank's video camera, while the camera was remotely recording. (That is, the videotape recorder was located elsewhere in the bank, so he didn't get the videotape of himself stealing the camera).

Louisiana: A man walked into a Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer? Fifteen dollars. [If someone points a gun at you and gives you money, was a crime committed?]

Arkansas: Seems this guy wanted some beer pretty badly. He decided that he'd just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head, knocking him unconscious. Seems the liquor store window was made of Plexi-Glass. The whole event was caught on videotape.

New York: As a female shopper exited a convenience store, a man grabbed her purse and ran. The clerk called 911 immediately and the woman was able to give them a detailed description of the snatcher. Within minutes, the police had apprehended the snatcher. They put him in the car and drove back to the store. The thief was then taken out of the car and told to stand there for a positive ID. To which he replied, "Yes Officer..that's her. That's the lady I stole the purse from."

Ann Arbor:The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan at 12:50am, flashed a gun and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn't open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren't available for breakfast. The man, frustrated, walked away.

Kentucky: Two men tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they pulled the bumper off their truck. Scared, they left the scene and drove home. With the chain still attached to the machine. With their bumper still attached to the chain. With their vehicle's license plate still attached to the bumper.

The incredibly dumb

AT&T fired President John Walter after nine months, saying he lacked intellectual leadership". He received a $26 million severance package. Perhaps it's not Walter who's lacking intelligence.

Police in Oakland, California spent two hours attempting to subdue a gunman who had barricaded himself inside his home. After firing ten tear gas canisters, officers discovered that the man was standing beside them, shouting please to come out and give himself up.

An Illinois man pretending to have a gun kidnapped a motorist and forced him to drive to two different automated teller machines. The kidnapper then proceeded to withdraw money from his own bank accounts.

A 9-year-old boy in Manassas, Virginia received a one-day suspension under his elementary school's drug policy last week - for Certs! Joey Hoeffer allegedly told a classmate that the mints would make him "jump higher."

A student in Belle, West Virginia was suspended for three days for giving a classmate a cough drop. School principal Forest Mann reiterated the school's "zero-tolerance" policy...not to be confused with the "zero-intelligence" policy.

Fire investigators on Maui have determined the cause of a blaze that destroyed a $127,000 home last month - a short in the homeowner's newly installed fire prevention alarm system. "This is even worse than last year," said the distraught homeowner, "when someone broke in and stole my new security system..."

A man walked in to a Topeka, Kansas Kwik Shop, and asked for all the money in the cash drawer. Apparently, the take was too small, so he tied up the store clerk and worked the counter himself for three hours until police showed up and grabbed him.

In Ohio, an unidentified man in his late twenties walked into a police station with a 9-inch wire protruding from his forehead and calmly asked officers to give him an X-ray to help him find his brain, which he claimed had been stolen. Police were shocked to learn that the man had drilled a 6-inch deep hole in his skull with a Black & Decker power drill and had stuck the wire in to try and find the missing brain.

In Medford, Oregon, a 27-year-old jobless man with an MBA blamed his college degree for his murder of three people. "There are too many business grads out there," he said. "If I had chosen another field, all this may not have happened."

Police in Los Angeles had good luck with a robbery suspect who just couldn't control himself during a lineup. When detectives asked each man in the lineup to repeat the words, "Give me all your money or I'll shoot," the man shouted, "That's not what I said!"

A bank robber in Virginia Beach got a nasty surprise when a dye pack designed to mark stolen money exploded in his Fruit-of-theLooms. The robber apparently stuffed the loot down the front of his pants as he was running out the door. "He was seen hopping and jumping around," said police spokesman Mike Carey, "with an explosion taking place inside his pants." Police have the man's charred trousers in custody.

A man spoke frantically into the phone, "My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart!" "Is this her first child?" the doctor asked. "No, you idiot!" the man shouted. "This is her husband!"

In Modesto, CA, Steven Richard King was arrested for trying to hold up a Bank of America branch without a weapon. King used a thumb and a finger to simulate a gun, but unfortunately, he failed to keep his hand in his pocket.

Really Stupid People

Police in Wichita, Kansas, arrested a 22-year-old man at an airport hotel after he tried to pass two (counterfeit) $16 bills.

A man in Johannesberg, South Africa, shot his 49-year-old friend in the face, seriously wounding him, while the two practiced shooting beer cans off each other's head.

A company trying to continue its five-year perfect safety record showed its workers a film aimed at encouraging the use of safety goggles on the job. According to Industrial Machinery News, the film's depiction of gory industrial accidents was so graphic that twenty-five workers suffered minor injuries in their rush to leave the screening room. Thirteen others fainted, and one man required seven stitches after he cut his head falling off a chair while watching the film.

The Chico, California, City Council enacted a ban on nuclear weapons, setting a $500 fine for anyone detonating one within city limits.

A bus carrying five passengers was hit by a car in St. Louis, but by the time police arrived on the scene, fourteen pedestrians had boarded the bus and had begun to complain of whiplash injuries and back pain.

Swedish business consultant Ulf af Trolle labored 13 years on a book about Swedish economic solutions. He took the 250-page manuscript to be copied, only to have it reduced to 50,000 strips of paper in seconds when a worker confused the copier with the shredder.

A convict broke out of jail in Washington D.C., then a few days later accompanied his girlfriend to her trial for robbery. At lunch, he went out for a sandwich. She needed to see him, and thus had him paged. Police officers recognized his name and arrested him as he returned to the courthouse in a car he had stolen over the lunch hour.

Police in Radnor, Pennsylvania, interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message "He's lying" was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the suspect wasn't telling the truth. Believing the "lie detector" was working, the suspect confessed.

When two service station attendants in Ionia, Michigan, refused to hand over the cash to an intoxicated robber, the man threatened to call the police. They still refused, so the robber called the police and was arrested.

A Los Angeles man who later said he was "tired of walking," stole a steamroller and led police on a 5 mph chase until an officer stepped aboard and brought the vehicle to a stop.

Saddam Hussein's stockpile is deadly. The smoke from his biological weapons could mix with sulfur from his chemical weapons and create an atmospheric condition known as Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Board of Education has OK'd a plan to equip school police cars with guns. The plan works on a tier system: Police at elementary schools will carry supersoakers, junior high patrols will carry paint guns, and shotguns will be used at high schools.

A severly disturbed geography teacher killed six people who did not know the capital of Scotland. Police say he's still on the loose and remind everyone that the capital of Scotland is Edinburgh. (Carlin)

AT&T announced last week it will lay off up to 8,000 employees. Ever conscious of its image, the company is promoting the layoffs as a new feature called job forwarding.

El Nino storms are affecting trade with Asian countries. A freighter bound for Long Beach Calif. with a cargo of yo-yos got caught in a particularly violent storm. It sank 65 times.

Charloote Hornets star Anthony Mason faces charges of statutory rape of two girls, ages 14 and 15. His attorney will use the Kennedy defense, which states that together they were 29.

Marcia Clark has signed with NBC to become a legal affairs commentator. In the job, she'll discuss ongoing court cases and then describe what she would do to lose them.

The inventor of the airplane borarding ramp has died at age 85. Funeral seating will begin half an hour before the service, with preferential treatment for immediate family members, followed by friends and relatives holding passes numbered 1 through 30.

Magic Johnson signed a deal with Starbucks to open new coffee shops in inner city neighborhoods. Just what the poor needed - a good $3 cup of coffee.

Michael Jackson's business partner has bought part of TWA, and now says he's going to have Michael redesign some of the planes. Michael says he wants the planes to be all white with smaller noses. (O'Brien)

A Canadian snowboarder got his gold medal back despite testing positive for marijuana. Olympic officials should have know better. Snowboarding was invented because a stoned snowboarder couldn't remember where he put his other ski.

More controversy in pairs skating when Boris and Natasha were awarded a gold medal by the Eastern Bloc countries, even though they were clearly beaten by Moose and Squirrel.

Did anyone see the luge? It's a 3 foot long little vehicle that has no room, has to be pushed to get started and only goes downhill. Here in America we call that a Hyundai. (Leno)

Newt Gingrich says that the major networks should give free air time to anti drug messages. For example, they should come on during your favorite show and talk about how drugs and alcohol are a dead end street... and now back to Nash Bridges starring Cheech Marin and Don Johnson. (Maher)

Scientists at Rutgers University have released a study identifying the three phases of love. They are: lust, attraction and subpoena.

Fortean Times reports that a British supermarket worker's underwear spontaneously combusted. Luckily it was edible underwear, so the clerk ended up with cherries jubilee.

And finally, with Bill Clinton in the White House, I finally understand why we celebrate Presidents Day with mattress sales. (Leno)

SIX DIE TRYING TO SAVE CHICKEN - August 1, 1995

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Six people drowned yesterday while trying to rescue a chicken that had fallen into a well in southern Egypt. An 18-year-old farmer was the first to descend into the 60-foot well. He drowned, apparently after an undercurrent in the water pulled him down, police said.

His sister and two brothers, none of whom could swim well, went in one by one to help him, but also drowned. Two elderly farmers then came to help, but they apparently were pulled down by the same undercurrent. The bodies of the six were later pulled out of the well in the village of Nazlat Imara, 240 miles south of Cairo. The chicken was also pulled out. It survived.

Man Killed Repairing Truck - April 1, 1995

Kalamazoo Gazette -- James Burns, 34, of Alamo, Mich., was killed in March as he was trying to repair what police described as a "farm-type dump truck. " Burns got a friend to drive the truck on a highway while Burns hung underneath so that he could asthe source of a troubling noise. Burns's clothes caught on something, however, and the other man found Burns "wrapped in the drive shaft."

The Darwin Awards

The long awaited 1999 Darwin "Natural Selection" Awards have been released! These awards are given each year to bestow upon (the remains of) that individual, who through single-minded self-sacrifice, has done the most to remove undesirable elements from the human gene pool. Ladies And Gentlemen... (drum roll... and envelope please)... We proudly present the 1999 "Natural Selection" awards:

5th runner-up: Goes to a San Anselmo, California man who died when he hit a lift tower at the Mammoth Mountain ski area while riding down the slope on a foam pad. The 22-year old David Hubal was pronounced dead at Central Mammoth Hospital. The accident occurred about 3 a.m., the Mono County Sheriff's Department said. Hubal and his friends apparently had hiked up a ski run called Stump Alley and undid some yellow foam protectors from lift towers, said Lt. Mike Donnelly of the Mammoth Lakes Police Department. The pads are used to protect skiers who might hit towers. The group apparently used the pads to slide down the ski slope and Hubal crashed into a tower. It has since been investigated and determined the tower he hit was the one with its pad removed.

4th Runner-up: Goes to Robert Puelo, 32, was apparently being disorderly in a St. Louis market. When the clerk threatened to call the police, Puelo grabbed a hot dog, shoved it into his mouth and walked out without paying. Police found him unconscious in front of the store. Paramedics removed the six-inch wiener from his throat where it had choked him to death.

3rd Runner-up: Goes to poacher Marino Malerba of Spain, who shot a stag standing above him on an overhanging rock and was killed instantly when it fell on him.

2nd Runner-up: "Man loses face at party". A man at a West Virginia party (probably related to the man in Arkansas who used a .22 bullet to replace the fuse in his pick-up truck) popped a blasting cap into his mouth and bit down, triggering an explosion that blew off his lips, teeth, and tongue.

Jerry Stromyer, 24, of Kincaid, bit the blasting cap as a prank during the party late Tuesday night, said Cpl. M.D. Payne. "Another man had it in an aquarium hooked to a battery and was trying to explode it", said Payne. "It wouldn't go off and this guy said I'll show you how to set it off."

"He put it into his mouth and bit down. It blew all his teeth out and his lips and tongue off", Payne said. Stromyer was listed in guarded condition Wednesday with extensive facial injuries, according to a spokesperson at Charleston Area Medical Division. "I just can't imagine anyone doing something like that" Payne said.

1st Runner-up: Doctors at Portland University Hospital said an Oregon man shot through the skull by a hunting arrow is lucky to be alive and will be released soon from the hospital. Tony Roberts, 25, lost his right eye last weekend during an initiation into a men's rafting club, Mountain Men Anonymous (probably known now as Stupid Mountain Men Anonymous) in Grant's Pass, Oregon.

A friend tried to shoot a beer can off his head, but the arrow entered Robert's right eye. Doctors said that had the arrow gone 1 millimeter to the left, a major blood vessel would have been cut and Roberts would have died instantly. Neurosurgeon Doctor Johnny Delashaw at the University Hospital in Portland said the arrow went through 8 to 10 inches of brain with the tip protruding at the rear of his skull, yet somehow managed to miss all major blood vessels. Delashaw also said that had Roberts tried to pull the arrow out on his own he surely would have killed himself. Roberts admitted afterwards he and his friends had been drinking that afternoon. Said Roberts, "I feel so dumb about this". No charges have been filed, but the Josephine County district attorney's office said the initiation stunt is unde investigation.

Now this year's winners:(The late) John Pernicky and his friend, (the late) Sal Hawkins, of the great state of Washington, decided to attend a local Metallica concert at the George Washington amphitheater. Having no tickets (but having had 18 beers between them), they thought it would be easy to "hop" over the nine foot fence and sneak into the show.

They pulled their pick-up truck over to the fence and the plan was for (the late) Mr. Pernicky, who was 100 pounds heavier than Mr. Hawkins) to hop the fence and then assist his friend over. Unfortunately for (the late) Mr. Pernicky, there was a 30 foot drop on the other side of the fence.

Having heaved himself over, he found himself crashing through a tree. His fall was abruptly halted (and broken, along with his arm, as it were) by a large branch that snagged him by his shorts. Dangling from the tree with a broken arm, he looked down and saw some bushes below him. (Possibly) figuring the bushes would break his fall, he removed his pocket knife and proceeded to cut away his shorts to free himself from the tree.

Finally free, (did I mention that he is THE LATE) Mr. Pernicky crashed into Holly bushes. The sharp leaves Scratched his ENTIRE body, without the protection of his shorts. To make matters worse (?!), on landing, his pocketknife penetrated his thigh 3 inches.

(The late) Mr. Hawkins, on seeing his friend in considerable pain and agony, decided to throw him a rope and pull him to safety by tying the rope to the pick-up truck and slowly driving away. However, in his drunken haste/state, he put the truck into reverse and crashed through the fence landing on his friend and killing him. Police arrived to find the crashed pick-up with its driver thrown 100 feet from the truck and dead at the scene from massive internal injuries.

Upon moving the truck, they found John under it, half-naked, scratches on his body, a knife in his thigh, and his shorts dangling from a tree branch 25 feet in the air.

WANTED FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER (actual AP headline) Linda Burnett, 23, a resident of San Diego, was visiting her inlaws, and while there, she went to a nearby supermarket to pick up some groceries.

Several people noticed her sitting in her car with the windows rolled up and with her eyes closed, with both hands behind the back of her head. One customer who had been at the store for a while became concerned and walked over to the car.

He noticed that Linda's eyes were now open, and she looked very strange. He asked her if she was okay, and Linda replied that she'd been shot in the back of the head, and had been holding her brains in for over an hour.

The man called the paramedics, who broke into the car because the doors were locked and Linda refused to remove her hands from her head. When they finally got in, they found that Linda had a wad of bread dough on the back of her head.

A Pillsbury biscuit canister had exploded from the heat, making a loud noise that sounded like a gunshot, and the wad of dough hit her in the back of her head. When she reached back to find out what it was, she felt the dough and thought it was her brains. She initially passed out, but quickly recovered and tried to hold her brains in for over an hour until someone noticed and came to her aid.

And, yes, Linda is a blonde.

One of my friends works in the customer service call center of a national pager company. He deals with the usual complaints regarding poor pager operation, as well as the occasional crank caller demanding to be paged less often, more often, or by more interesting people.

The best call came from a man who repeatedly complained that he keeps being paged by "Lucille." He was instructed that he would have to call her and tell her to stop paging him.

"She don't never leave no number, so I can't call her back," he said.

After three such calls, someone thought to ask how he knew it was Lucille if she didn't leave a number.

"She leaves her name," was the reply.

After establishing that the customer had a numericonly pager, the light bulb came on.

"How does she spell her name?" the service rep asked.

"L-O-W C-E-L-L"

Another problem solved.

The 2000 Darwin awards!

(15 July 1999, Alabama) A 25-year-old soldier died of injuries sustained from a 3-story fall, precipitated by his attempt to spit farther than his buddy. His plan was to hurl himself towards a metal guardrail while expectorating, in order to add momentum to his saliva. In a tragic miscalculation, his momentum carried him right over the railing, which he caught hold of for a few moments before his grip slipped, sending him plummeting 24 feet to the cement below.

The military specialist had a blood alcohol content of 0.14%, impairing his judgment and paving the way for his opportunity to win a Darwin Award.

(11 August 1999) A 42-year-old man killed himself watching the eclipse while driving near Kaiserslautern, Germany. A witness driving behind him stated that the man was weaving back and forth as he concentrated on the partially occluded sun, when he suddenly accelerated and hit the bridge pier. He had apparently just donned his solar viewers, which are dark enough to totally obscure everything except the sun.

(25 May 1999, Ukraine) A fisherman in Kiev electrocuted himself while fishing in the river Tereblya. The 43-year-old man connected cables to the main power supply of his home, and trailed the end into the river. The electric shock killed the fish, which floated belly-up to the top of the water. The man waded in to collect his catch, neglecting to remove the live wire, and tragically suffered the same fate as the fish. In an ironic twist, the man was fishing for a mourning meal to commemorate the first anniversary of his mother-in-law's death.

(16 August 1999, Germany) A hunter from Bad Urach was shot dead by his own dog on Monday. The 51-year-old man was found sprawled next to his car in the Black Forest. A gun barrel was pointing out the window, and his bereaved dog was howling inside the car. The animal is presumed to have pressed the trigger with its paw. Police have ruled out foul play.

(1991, Nicosia, Cypress) Under similar circumstances, an Iranian hunter was shot to death near Tehran by a snake that coiled around his shotgun as he pinned the reptile to the ground. Another hunter reported that that the victim, named Ali, tried to catch the snake alive by pressing the butt of his shotgun behind its head. The snake coiled around the butt and pulled the trigger, shooting Ali in the head.

(August 1999, Australia) Drinking oneself to death need not be a long lingering process. Allan, a 33-year-old computer technician, showed his competitive spirit by dying of competitive spirits. A Sydney, Australia hotel bar held a drinking competition, known as Feral Friday, with a 100-minute time limit and a sliding point scale ranging from 1 point for beer to 8 points for hard liquor. Allan stood and cheered his winning total of 236, (winners never quit!) which had also netted him the literally staggering blood alcohol level of 0.353, 7 times greater than Australia's legal driving limit of 0.05%. After several trips to the usual temple of overindulgence, the bathroom, Allan was helped back to his workplace to sleep it off, a condition that became permanent. A forensic pharmacologist estimated that after downing 34 beers, 4 bourbons, and 17 shots of tequila within 1 hour and 40 minutes, his blood alcohol level would have been 0.41 to 0.43, but Allan had vomited several times after the drinking stopped. The cost paid by Allan was much higher than that of the hotel, which was fined the equivalent of $13,100 US dollars for not intervening. It is not known whether Allan required any further embalming.

First Runner Up Award goes to ...

(22 March 1999, Phnom Penh) Decades of armed strife has littered Cambodia with unexploded munitions and ordnance. Authorities warn citizens not to tamper with the devices. Three friends recently spent an evening sharing drinks and exchanging insults at a local cafe in the southeastern province of Svay Rieng. Their companionable arguing continued for hours, until one man pulled out a 25-year-old unexploded anti-tank mine found in his backyard. He tossed it under the table, and the three men began playing Russian roulette, each tossing down a drink and then stomping on the mine. The other villagers fled in terror. Minutes later, the explosive detonated with a tremendous boom, killing the three men in the bar. "Their wives could not even find their flesh because the blast destroyed everything," the Rasmei Kampuchea newspaper reported.

And the 1999 Darwin Award winner is.....

(5 September 1999, Jerusalem) The switch away from daylight savings time caused consternation among terrorist groups this year. At precisely 5:30 Israel time on Sunday, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities, killing three terrorists who were transporting the bombs. It was initially believed that the devices had been detonated prematurely by klutzy amateurs. A closer look revealed the truth behind the untimely explosions.

Three days before, Israel had made a premature switch from daylight savings time to standard time in order to accommodate a week of Slihot, involving pre-sunrise prayers. Palestinians refused to "live on Zionist time." Two weeks of scheduling havoc ensued. The bombs had been prepared in a Palestine-controlled area, and set on Daylight Savings time. The confused drivers had already switched to standard time. As a result, the cars were still en-route when the explosives detonated, delivering to the terrorists their well-deserved demise.

August, 1998, Montevideo, Uruguay

Paolo Esperanza, bass-trombonist with the Simphonica Mayor de Uruguay, in a misplaced moment of inspiration decided to make his own contribution to the cannon shots fired as part of the orchestra's performance of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture at an outdoor children's concert. In complete seriousness he placed a large, ignited firecracker, which was equivalent in strength to a quarter stick of dynamite, into his aluminum straight mute and then stuck the mute into the bell of his quite new Yamaha in-line double-valve bass trombone.

Later, from his hospital bed he explained to a reporter through bandages on his mouth, "I thought that the bell of my trombone would shield me from the explosion and, instead, would focus the energy of the blast outward and away from me, propelling the mute high above the orchestra, like a rocket." However, Paolo was not up on his propulsion physics nor qualified to use high-powered artillery and in his haste to get the horn up before the firecracker went off, he failed to raise the bell of the horn high enough so as to give the mute enough arc to clear the orchestra.

What actually happened should serve as a lesson to us all during those delirious moments of divine inspiration. First, because he failed to sufficiently elevate the bell of his horn, the blast propelled the mute between rows of players in the woodwind and viola sections of the orchestra, missing the players and straight into the stomach of the conductor, driving him off the podium and directly into the front row of the audience.

Fortunately, the audience were sitting in folding chairs and thus they were protected from serious injury, for the chairs collapsed under them passing the energy of the impact of the flying conductor backwards into row of people sitting behind them, who in turn were driven back into the people in the row behind and so on, like a row of dominos. The sound of collapsing wooden chairs and grunts of people falling on their behinds increased logarithmically, adding to the overall sound of brass cannons and brass playing as constitutes the closing measures of the Overture.

Meanwhile, all of this unplanned choreography not withstanding, back on stage Paolo's Waterloo was still unfolding. According to Paolo, "Just as I heard the sound of the blast, time seemed to stand still. Everything moved in slow motion. Just before I felt searing pain in my mouth, I could swear I heard a voice with a Austrian accent say, "Fur every akshon zer iz un eekvul un opposeet reakshon!" Well, this should come as no surprise, for Paolo had set himself up for a textbook demonstration of this fundamental law of physics.

Having failed to plug the lead pipe of his trombone, he allowed the energy of the blast to send a superheated jet of gas backwards through the mouth pipe of the trombone, which exited the mouthpiece, burning his lips and face. The pyrotechnic ballet wasn't over yet. The force of the blast was so great it split the bell of his shiny Yamaha right down the middle, turning it inside out while at the same time propelling Paolo backwards off the riser. And for the grand finale, as Paolo fell backwards he lost his grip on the slide of the trombone allowing the pressure of the hot gases coursing through the horn to propel the trombone's slide like a double golden spear into the head of the 3rd clarinetist, knocking him unconscious and fracturing his skull. I would think the moral of this story is, Beware the next time you hear someone in the trombone section yell out, "Hey, y'all, watch this!"

According to the Knight-Ridder News Service, the inscription on the metal bands used by the U.S. Department of the Interior to tag migratory birds has been changed. The bands used to bear the address of the Washington Biological Survey, abbreviated, "Wash. Biol. Surv." until the agency received the following letter from an Arkansas camper:

"Dear Sirs: While camping last week I shot one of your birds. I think it was a crow. I followed the cooking instructions on the leg tag and I want to tell you it was horrible."

Mariah Carey was one of the first celebrities to comment on the death of the King of Jordan. Mariah told CNN "I'm inconsolable at the present time, I was a very good friend of Jordan, he was probably the greatest basketball player this country has ever seen, we will never see his like again".

When told by reporters that it was King Hussein of Jordan who had died and not Michael Jordan, Mariah was then led away by her security in a state of "confusion".

Stupid people

LICENSE TO STEAL

Two Kentucky men tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they pulled the bumper off the truck. They panicked and fled, leaving the chain still attached to the machine, their bumper still attached to the chain, and their license plate still attached to the bumper.

IN THE BAG

A "tourist," supposedly on a golf holiday, stood in line at the customs counter. While making idle chatter, the customs official thought it odd that the golfer didn't know what a handicap was. The officer then asked the tourist to demonstrate his swing. He did - backwards. A substantial amount of narcotics was found in the golf bag.

MADE FOR TV

Guns For Hire, an Arizona company specializing in staged gunfights for Western movies, got a call from a 47-year-old woman who wanted to have her husband shot. She was sentenced to four years in jail.

DO YOU ACCEPT CREDIT CARDS?

A Texan convicted of robbery worked out a deal to pay $9600 in damages rather than serve a two-year prison sentence. For payment, he provided the court a forged check. He got his prison term back, plus eight more years.

YOU MEAN ME?

A pair of Michigan robbers entered a record shop nervously waving revolvers. The first one shouted, "Nobody move!" When his partner moved, the startled first bandit shot him.

Stupid people

DEADHEADS

A man in Orange County Municipal Court had been ticketed for driving alone in the carpool lane. He claimed that the four frozen cadavers in the mortuary van he was driving should be counted. The judged ruled that passengers must be alive to qualify.

THIS WOULD BE ME

The judge called the case of People vs. Steven Lewon Crook. The bailiff opened the door to the holding cell and called, "Crook, come forward." Five of the prisoners entered the courtroom.

LEARN YOUR LESSON

When asked for her occupation, a woman charged with a traffic violation said she was a schoolteacher. The judge rose from the bench. "Madam, I have waited years for a schoolteacher to appear before this court," he smiled with delight. "Now sit down at that table and write 'I will not pass through a red light' five hundred times."

AHH, THAT'S BETTER!

A judge in Louisville decided a jury went "a little bit too far" in recommending a sentence of 5,005 years for a man who was convicted of five robberies and a kidnapping. The judge reduced the sentence to 1,001 years.

OOPS! I BLEW THAT ONE!

A lawyer defending a man accused of burglary tried this creative defense: "My client merely inserted his arm into the window and removed a few trifling articles. His arm is not himself, and I fail to see how you can punish the whole individual for an offense committed by his limb." "Well put," the judge replied. "Using your logic, I sentence the defendant's arm to one year's imprisonment. He can accompany it or not, as he chooses." The defendant smiled. With his lawyer's assistance he detached his artificial limb, laid it on the bench, and walked out.

For those unfamiliar, Welfare payments are made in the US to individuals and families with income below a level. The following quotations are taken from actual letters received by the Welfare Department in applications for support of receiving payments.

I am forwarding my marriage certificate and 6 children. I had seven but one died which was baptized on a half sheet of paper.

I am writing the welfare department to say that my baby was born two years old. When do I get my money?

Mrs. Jones has not had any clothes for two years and has been visited regularly by the clergy.

I cannot get sick pay. I have six children can you tell me why?

I am glad to report that my husband who is missing is dead.

This is my eighth child. What are you going to do about it.

Please find for if my husband is dead. The man I am now living with can't do anything until he knows.

I am very much annoyed to find out that you have branded my son illiterate. This is a dirty lie as I was married a week before he was born.

In answer to your letter, I have given birth to a son weighing 10 lbs. I hope this is satisfactory.

I am forwarding my marriage certificate and my 3 children one of which is a mistake as you can see.

My husband got his project cut off about two weeks ago and I haven't had any relief since.

Unless I get my husband's money pretty soon, I will be forced to lead an immortal life.

You have my changed little boy to a girl, will this make any difference?

I have no children yet, as my husband is a truck driver and works night and day.

I want money as quick as I can get it. I have been in bed with the doctor for two weeks and he doesn't do me any good. If things don't improve, I will have to send for another doctor.

In accordance with your instructions, I have given birth to twins in the enclosed envelope.

Form Feed

Insurance form question and answer about a recent accident:

Q: Could either driver have done anything to avoid the accident? A: I could have traveled by bus.

A man collided with a cow and completed the requested form as follows:

Q: What warning did you give the other party before the collision? A: Horn

Q: What warning was given by the other party? A: Moo

• The process of orienting the transmitter and receiver circuits in the proper manner in order that they can be synchronized . Home television sets are synchronized by an incoming sync signal with the television cameras in the studios 60 times per second. The horizontal and vertical hold controls on the television set are used to set the receiver circuits to the approximate sync frequencies of incoming television picture and the sync pulses in the signal then fine tune the circuits to the exact frequency and phase.
  www.satnews.com/GLOSSARY.HTML

• In serial data transmission, a method of ensuring that the receiving end can recognize characters in the order in which the transmitting end sent them, and can know where one character ends and the next begins. Without synchronization, the receiving end would perceive data simply as a series of binary digits with no relation to one another. Synchronous communication relies on a clocking mechanism to synchronize the signals between the sending and receiving machines.
  www.videoconferencing.org/StoT.htm
• A set of workflow instances with the same workflow schema can be synchronized. If a transition in this schema is marked as synchronized, it can only be invoked on all instances in the set at the same time. When a workflow event is invoked on a set of synchronized workflow instances, the transition is invoked only if all instances are in the source state of the transition, and all conditions of the transition are complied for all instances. Then the transition is invoked for all instances in the set. A common usecase of this concept is the simultaneous publishing of
  lenya.apache.org/1_2_x/components/workflow/terms.html
• A picture record and a sound record are said to be "in sync" when they are placed relative to each other on a release print so that when they are projected the action will coincide precisely with the accompanying sound. See LIP SYNC.
  www.kodak.com/country/US/en/motion/students/handbook/glossary13.jhtml

• Communication between threads with the effect of constraining the relative order that the threads execute code.
  books.nap.edu/html/up_to_speed/appD.html
• Enforcing constraints on the ordering of events occurring in different UEs. This is primarily used to ensure that shared resources are accessed by a collection of UEs in such a way that the program is correct regardless of how the UEs are scheduled.
  www.cise.ufl.edu/research/ParallelPatterns/glossary.htm
• The right to use a track of music in a Production
  www.pmamusic.com/frontdoor/licensing.cfm
• Timing the actions of PEs to avoid problems. For instance, the BARRIER function might be used to prevent one PE from accessing a data location before another PE has updated that location.
  www.cray.com/craydoc/manuals/004-2518-002/html-004-2518-002/zglossaryqkdxjklv.html
• The process of setting two or more clocks to the same time.
  www.spectracomcorp.com/support/glossary.php
• Method of making a flash light fire at the correct moment, exactly when the shutter is fully open. Normally a camera's flash sync. speed is quoted as the highest speed that a given camera can synchronize with a flash unit (eg:1/125th. sec.). (see Shutter speed)
  www.peterashbyhayter.co.uk/glossaryF.html
• Synchronization is the process of copying files from one device to another (for example, from a palmtop to a desktop computer), and vice versa, so that the files (such as a calendar or address book) update each other with any new information entered into either device. Synchronization also controls the way information gets delivered at specific times to mobile devices, to update information and to keep the devices "in synch" with each other.
  www.chin.gc.ca/English/Digital_Content/Tip_Sheets/Wireless/glossary.html
• A management practice used to cause the goats to cycle at the same time.
  www.goatworld.com/articles/terminology.shtml
• A series of measures that allow an outfit, such as a TV station or a production studio to synchronize all sources so that all frames start at the same instant.
  www.ic.sunysb.edu/clubs/sbutv/glossary.htm
• An operation that keeps distributed databases in agreement.
  www.cs.nott.ac.uk/TSG/manuals/java/JDK12EE/cloudscape/doc/html/tutorial/gloss.htm
• The timing of separate elements or events to occur simultaneously. In a multimedia presentation, synchronization ensures that the audio and video components are timed correctly. In a computer-to-computer communications, the hardware and software must be synchronized so that the file transfers can take place. The process of updating files on both a portable comp and a desktop system so that they both have the latest versions.
  www.angelfire.com/ny3/diGi8tech/SGlossary.html

• 1. A communications transmission in which multibyte packets of data are sent and received at a fixed rate. 2. The matching of timing between computers on the network. All of the computers are generally assigned identical times to facilitate and coordinate communications.
  www.pivod.com/AboutPivod/informationresources/glossary_telco_terms.htm
• Allows roll-free switching from camera to camera in multi-camera installations. An important part of the video signal that keeps the picture stable so it is watchable on the display device.
  www.prosecuritywarehouse.com/techschool.html
• Also known as 'replication,' it is the process of uploading and downloading information from two or more databases, so that each is identical.
  www.discretewireless.com/products/glossary/glossary.asp

• A network function that keeps transmission interfaces and customer premise equipment in step with one another to prevent the loss of the signal. Channel Synchronization is created by the CSU/DSU at each end of the circuit. Network Synchronization is created by digital communications links within the service provider's network.
  www.ldcircuit.com/library-glossary.htm
• The geographic mirroring processing that copies data from the production copy to the mirror copy. During synchronization the mirror copy contains unusable data. When synchronization is completed, the mirror copy contains usable data.
  publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v5r3/ic2924/info/rzaly/rzalyterminology.htm
• The shutter speed that corresponds to the proper timing of the flash. Any faster and the shutter won't be open for the duration of the flash. Any shorter and subject movement might cause blur. There are usually two settings on a camera, X and M. X is the setting used for electronic flash. M is for most expendable types of flash (bulbs) which require a delay in shutter opening.
  www.startphoto.com/learn/glossary/glossary_fl-fz.htm
• Synchronization is arranging activities in time, space, and purpose to mass maximum relative combat power at a decisive place and time. Without synchronization, there is no massing of effects. Through synchronization, commanders arrange battlefield operating systems to mass the effects of combat power at the chosen place and time to overwhelm an enemy or dominate the situation. Synchronization is a means, not an end. Commanders balance synchronization against agility and initiative; they never surrender the initiative or miss a decisive opportunity for the sake of synchronization.
  www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/4-01-011/gloss.htm
• The communication of an EMBASSY Device with an EMBASSY Device Server that ensures that the real-time clock is accurate and updates the device's applet inventory.
  www.wave.com/technology/glossary.html
• In the context of our discussion, this is "the use of special variables or objects that protect data and resources with advisory locks." Careful synchronization is part of the way multi-thread-safe applications achieve their correctness.
  developer.novell.com/research/devnotes/1999/october/04/02.htm
• The process of "locking" audio tracks together so that they will play synchronously with a film. Since most film soundtrack masters are maintained separately from the print (or, "Printmaster"), the audio must be synchronized with the latter each time a new version is made. Although a soundtrack usually does appear on the Printmaster, this is almost never used because the quality of optical soundtracks is inferior to that of analog tape, mag or digital audio.
  home.earthlink.net/~vigilant/stajGloss01.html
• synchronism: the relation that exists when things occur at the same time; "the drug produces an increased synchrony of the brain waves"
• an adjustment that causes something to occur or recur in unison
• coordinating by causing to indicate the same time; "the synchronization of their watches was an important preliminary"
  www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn
• Synchronization is coordination with respect to time. It is an important concept in the following fields: * Computer science* Physics* Telecommunication* Cryptography* Multimedia* Photography* Music (rhythm)
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronization

A professional designer's role is to enhance living by applying a developed sense of aesthetics and utility to the design of the human-made world. Design both shapes and expresses our cultural values. Some designers see themselves as artists, while others prefer to think of themselves as creative problem-solvers. Design concepts and principles provide a basis for understanding how designers apply their skills to design issues as they work to enhance the visual, informational, and mechanical qualities of our material environment.
The word design is both a verb and a noun. Thus design is both a process and a product. To design something, the process, is to organize the various aspects of a work--line, space, light and color, texture, pattern, time and motion--into a totality, a unified whole. One is able to see in that totality something one calls its 'design'--that is, the product. One can recognize in the finished product the process of its organization and composition.
Of all the arts, graphic design comes closest to meeting us in our contemporary daily life. We interact with graphic design on an almost constant basis, and most designers have chosen it as their profession because they relish that close interaction with people in all situations. Many of our encounters with graphic design are even unintentional; we do not often seek out graphic design the way we might seek to view other art forms in a gallery or museum. This fact gives graphic designers an unequalled opportunity to inform, persuade, delight, bore, offend, or repel us.
The term graphic design refers to the process of working with words and pictures to create solutions to problems of visual communication. Much of graphic design involves designing materials to be printed, including books, magazines, brochures, packages, posters, and imagery for electronic media. Such design ranges in scale and complexity from postage stamps and trademarks to billboards, film, video, and web pages.
Graphic design is a creative process employing art and technology to communicate ideas. With control of symbols, type, color, and illustrations, the graphic designer produces visual compositions meant to attract, inform, and persuade a given audience. Under the skilled guidance of a graphic designer, a message becomes visual, transcending words alone.

Often the name, product, or purpose of a company or organization is given a distinctive and memorable appearance by a graphic designer. An identifying mark, or trademark, based on letter forms is known as a logo (short for logotype). An identifying mark based on pictorial (rather than typographic) sources is called a symbol.

On the most basic level, we communicate through symbols. The sound of the syllable dog, for example, has no direct relation to the animal it stands for. In German, after all, the syllables Hund indicate the same animal. Each word is part of a larger symbolic system, a language. Visual communication is also symbolic. Letters are symbols that represent sounds; the lines that we use to draw representational images are symbols for perception.

Symbols convey information or embody ideas. Some are so common that we find it difficult to believe they did not always exist. Who, for example, first used arrows to indicate directions? We follow them instinctively now, but at some point they were new and had to be explained. Other symbols embody more complex ideas and associations. Symbols that instantly communicate important information without words help meet the needs of travelers in foreign countries. When such symbols are not easily understood, they cause more problems than they solve.

Graphic designers are often asked to create visual symbols. In 1974, the U.S. Department of Transportation commissioned the American Institute of Graphic Arts to develop a set of symbols that could communicate essential information across language barriers to international travelers. Designers selected by the institute researched symbols then in use in transportation centers around the world, evaluating them for clarity and effectiveness. The final set of symbols were drawn up the design firm of Cook and Shanosky Associates and introduced in a poster, which explains their meanings. Today, the symbols are a familiar part of signs in airports and train stations, where they help direct travelers to bus and taxi stands, telephones, hotel information, rest rooms, and other key facilities.
 
Among the most persuasive symbols in our visual environment today are logos and trademarks, which are symbols of an organization or product. Simple, clear, distinctive, and memorable corporate logos have become familiar to millions of people around the world, instantly calling to mind the company and its products or services. As with any symbol, a logo means nothing in itself. It is up to an organization to make its logo familiar and to convince people through a sound business practices to associate it with such virtues as service, quality, and dependability. Because symbols serve as focal points for associations of ideas and emotions, one of the most effective ways for a company to change its image is to redo its logo.
A logo is often the first and key element in a complete corporate identity program, which extends a unified design concept to advertising, posters, packaging, stationary, folders, business cards, and other printed matter.

Letter forms are art forms. Typography is the art and technique of composing printed material from letter forms (typefaces or fonts). Designers, hired to meet clients' communication needs, frequently create designs that relate nonverbal images and printed words in complementary ways.

Cultures throughout history have appreciated the visual aspects of their written language. In China, Japan, and Islamic cultures, calligraphy is considered an art. While personal writing in the West has never been granted that status, letters for public architectural inscriptions have been carefully designed since the time of the ancient Romans, whose alphabet we have inherited. With the invention of movable type around 1450, the alphabet again drew the attention to designers. Someone had to decide on the exact form of each letter, creating a visually unified alphabet that could be mass-produced as a typeface, a style of type. No less an artist than Albrecht Dürer turned his attention to the design of well-balanced letterforms. Constructing each letter within a square, Dürer paid special attention to the balance of thick and thin lines and to the visual weight of the serifs, the short cross lines that finish the principle strokes.

The letters Dürer designed would have been laboriously carved in wood or cast in metal, and they would have been set (placed in position) by hand prior to printing. Today, type is created and set by computer and photographic methods. The design of typefaces continues to be an important and often highly specialized field, and graphic designers have literally hundreds of styles to choose from. Moreover, many type designers are redesigning and updating old fonts, keeping in mind readability and contemporary preferences.
A layout is a designer's blueprint for an extended work in print such as a book or magazine. It includes such specifications as the dimensions of the page, the width of the margins, the sizes and styles of type for text and headings, the style and placement of running heads or feet (lines at the top or bottom of the page that commonly give the chapter or part title and page number), and many other elements. Illustrations are placed to relieve and even disguise page symmetry, and a page makeup artist may take pains to arrange each spread in a pleasing asymmetrical composition.

Beginning in the 1980s, a number of designers began to experiment with more radical approaches that sacrificed easy legibility for visual appeal. Some contemporary designers rarely use a consistent layout, preferring to create each spread as a new composition. Text might be scattered, run upside down or at an angle, printed over itself, or made to disappear into a photograph. One spread often continues over the page turn into the next, creating a free-flowing, cinematic feel. To detractors who claim that such work is chaotic and illegible, many modern designers point out that legibility and communication are not the same thing. Communication begins by attracting and engaging the viewer's attention. Readers attracted to the mood of the design will be willing to make an effort to decipher its message.

Presently, anyone who uses a computer can select fonts and can create documents that look typeset, producing desktop publications such as newsletters and brochures. However, computer programs, like pencils, paintbrushes, and cameras, are simply tools: They can facilitate artistic claims if their operator has artistic sensibilities. Finally, designers frequently work together. In printed design, a writer, a designer, and often an illustrator or photographer work as a team.

An illustration is an image or decoration created to enhance the appearance of written material or to clarify its meaning. Illustrators create images for books, magazines, reports, CD cases, greeting cards, and advertisements. Many collected and exhibited artworks were created as illustrations. Examples include the Limbourg brothers' exquisite scenes from the Les Tres Riches Heures and many artists' intricate imaginings of religious episodes.

Some of the most elaborate and sumptuous illustrations ever made were hand painted, however, modern illustration has evolved in conjunction with the development of printing processes. Nineteenth century illustration usually required the insertion of a plate into the block of raised type (letters) that served as text. The plate, prepared by lithography, engraving, or etching, was inked and printed. The resulting page was then bound with the other pages of the text.

Recent photomechanical reproduction processes have enabled illustrators to employ drawing, painting, and photographic techniques--with computers further extending the capabilities of illustrators. Although most illustration is now done with photography, some areas--notably children's books, fashion illustration, and greeting cards--continue to rely on drawn or painted images.

The distinction between illustrations and art displayed in galleries and museums has to do with the purpose the work is intended to serve, rather than the medium in which the work is made, since both illustrations and gallery art can be drawings, paintings, or photographs.

The tight deadlines and throwaway nature of daily newspapers provide a different kind of environment for illustrators. To labor over a time-consuming oil painting is out of the question, but a resourceful and imaginative artist can create an eye-catching image through less labor-intensive means. Some illustrators use collage to create a lighthearted and witty accompaniment to a newspaper article.

Furthermore, a poster can attract attention and convey its message; it is a concise visual announcement that provides information through the integrated design of typographic and pictorial imagery. The creativity of a poster designer/illustrator is directed toward a specific purpose, which may be to advise or to persuade. While they now play a lesser role than they once did, well-designed posters still provide powerful means of instant communication. Posters of all sorts have become so popular as inexpensive images to be framed and hung on walls that printing and selling posters have become big business. Poster design has influenced and been influenced by contemporary fine art; the work of well known poster designers, demonstrates the close link that often exists between graphic design and current developments in art.

Designers in recent years often use an offhand, low-key approach that does not seem very 'designed' at all, many are wary of too-elaborate design ideas. Surprisingly, many well known illustrators believe that illustrations should be secondary to the text. However, when illustration is at its finest, images and text become inseparable.

Much of the freedom that today's designers enjoy is the result of the computer, which enables them to explore multiple approaches quickly and easily. With advanced graphics programs, type can be manipulated almost as a plastic substance--stretched, molded, turned in space, enlarged, reduced, colored, and recolored. Images, too, can be enlarged, reduced, cropped, placed, and moved. A design can be completely worked out on the computer and transmitted in digital form to the printer. More often, the computer is used as simply another tool, although a powerful one, in a design process that also includes traditional studio methods and darkroom techniques.

With the dramatic expansion of the World Wide Web and the increasing popularity of CD-ROM technology, the computer has also become an exciting new place for design. Design for the Web draws on such traditional models as posters, magazine layout, and advertising. To these it adds the potential for motion and interactivity--reactions to choices made by a visitor to the site. Indeed the same viewer examining the same CD on different days may get an entirely different order of output.

Light radiates from a computer screen as it does from a television, allowing a deeper and more luminous sense of space than traditional print media. Some designers believe that artists interested in using the computer must master the language of the computer itself, which is programming. To rely on off-the-shelf design software, they point out, is to accept the limits of someone else's imagination.

Many websites take the form of succeeding 'pages'. This way of presenting information is deeply rooted in our way of thinking, for we have been storing information on pages in books for almost 2,000 years. Yet the computer also permits a more fluid, cinematic sense of space whose graphic possibilities are only beginning to be explored. Moreover, contemporary web design shows how the new digital technology has undercut the traditional truth value of photographic images. If images are so easy to manipulate, then the camera, if it is digital, can indeed be made to lie. Seeing is no longer believing, in the traditional sense of the term.

However, the degree of sophistication of a web-based work is no indicator of its quality. As in other media, designers who are best at organizing meaningful visual information create the best web works. In short, digital design is evolving as fast as computers themselves are. Although they are working with the most advanced technology of the day, contemporary web designers are actually quite conservative for their work embraces the principles of visual elegance and communicative clarity that have been at the core of graphic design since anonymous scribes first developed writing.

Many artists and designers are beginning to take advantage of free universal www-distribution to create works expressly for viewing there. Some create works for posting to their own web pages; in addition there are several sites that specialize in exhibition web works and thus function like interactive galleries. Numerous museums have added collections of web works to their sites as well. Like other branches of digital art, web works have evolved rapidly since the first examples came out in the middle 1990s, in accordance with the increasing capabilities of web browsers and plug-in programs.

During the 1950s a design movement emerged from Switzerland and Germany that has been called Swiss design or, more appropriately, the International Typographic Style. The objective clarity of this design movement won converts throughout the world. It remained a major force for over two decades, and its influence continues into the 1990s. Detractors of the International Typographic Style complain that it is based on formula and results in a sameness of solution; advocates argue that the style's purity of means and legibility of communication enable the designer to achieve a timeless perfection of form, and they point to the inventive range of solutions by leading practitioners as evidence that neither formula nor sameness is intrinsic to the approach, except in the hands of lesser talents.
The visual characteristics of this international style include a visual unity of design achieved by asymmetrical organization of the design elements on a mathematically constructed grid; objective photography and copy that present visual and verbal information in a clear and factual manner, free from the exaggerated claims of much propaganda and commercial advertising; and the use of sans-serif typography expresses the spirit of a progressive age and that mathematical grids are the most legible and harmonious means for structuring information.
More important than the visual appearance of this work is the attitude developed by its early pioneers about their profession. These trailblazers defined design as a socially useful and important activity. Personal expression and eccentric solutions were rejected, while a more universal and scientific approach to design problem solving was embraced. In this paradigm, the designer defines his or her role not as an artist but as an objective conduit for spreading important information between components of society. Achieving clarity and order is the ideal.
More than any other individual, the quality of discipline found in the Swiss design movement can be traced to Ernst Keller (1891-1968). In 1918 Keller joined the Zürich Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Art) to teach the advertising layout course and develop a professional course in design and typography. In teaching and in his own lettering, trademark, and poster design projects, Keller established a standard of excellence over the course of four decades. Rather than espousing a specific style, Keller believed the solution to the design problem should emerge from its content. Fittingly, the range of his work encompassed diverse solutions. 
The roots of the International Typographic Style grew from de Stijl, the Bauhaus, and the new typography of the 1920s and 1930s. Two Swiss designers who studied at the Bauhaus, Théo Ballmer (1902-65) and Max Bill (1908-94), are principal links between the earlier constructivist graphic design and the new movement that formed after World War II. Ballmer, who studied briefly at the Dessau Bauhaus under Klee, Gropius, and Meyer in the late 1920s, made an original application of de Stijl principles to graphic design, using an arithmetic grid of horizontal and vertical alignments. Max Bill's work encompassed painting, architecture, engineering, sculpture, and product and graphic design. After study at the Bauhaus with Gropius, Meyer, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, and Kandinsky from 1927 until 1929, Bill moved to Zürich. In 1931 he embraced the concepts of art concret and began to find his way clearly. Eleven months before Théo van Doesburg died in April 1930, he formulated a Manifesto of Art Concret, calling for a universal art of absolute clarity based on controlled arithmetical construction.

Emerging as a leading theorist and practitioner of the movement. Josef Müller-Brockmann sought an absolute and universal graphic expression through an objective and impersonal presentation, communicating to the audience without the interference of the designer's subjective feelings or propagandistic techniques of persuasion. A measure of his success can be gauged by observing the visual power and impact of his work. Designs made by Müller-Brockmann in the 1950s are as current and vital as they were a half-century ago and communicate their message with a remarkable intensity and clarity. His photographic posters treat the image as an objective symbol, with neutral photographs gaining impact through scale and camera angle. In his celebrated concert posters, the language of constructivism creates a visual equivalent to the structural harmony of the music to be performed.
The International Typographic Style had a major impact on postwar American design. A ripple of influence in the 1950s turned into a tidal wave during the 1960s and 1970s; it was rapidly embraced in corporate and institutional graphics during the 1960s and remained a prominent aspect of American design for over two decades. A noteworthy example was found in the graphic-design office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where a sustained level of quality and imagination was achieved. In the early 1950s MIT established a graphic-design program enabling all members of the university community to benefit from free, professional design assistance on their publications and publicity material. This was a very early recognition of the cultural and communicative value of design by an American university. MIT based its graphic-design program on a commitment to the grid and sans-serif typography. The staff was innovative in the use of designed letterforms and manipulated words as vehicles to express content. This approach evolved in the work of Jacqueline S. Casey (1927-91), director of the Design Services Office Ralph Coburn (b. 1923); and Dietmar Winkler (b. 1938), a German-trained designer who worked with Casey and Coburn from 1966 until 1971.
The Design Services Office produces publications and posters announcing concerts, speakers, seminars, exhibitions, and courses on the university campus. These frequently use solid color backgrounds. Many of their solutions are typographic, created on a drafting table for economical line reproduction. In a sense, letterforms become illustrations, for the design and arrangement of the letters in key words frequently become the dominant image. 
The rapid spread of the International Typographic Style resulted from the harmony and order of its methodology. The design movement that began in Switzerland and Germany, then outgrew its native boundaries to become truly international, has practitioners in many nations around the globe. This approach has special value in countries such as Canada and Switzerland where bilingual or trilingual communications are the norm. It is particularly useful when a diverse body of informational materials ranging from signage to publicity needs to be unified into a coherent body. A growing awareness of design as a logical tool for large organizations after World War II caused a growth in corporate design and visual-identification systems. During the middle 1960s the development of corporate design in the International Typographic Style were linked into one movement.

The people of India have had a continuous civilization since 2500 B.C., when the inhabitants of the Indus River valley developed an urban culture based on commerce and sustained by agricultural trade. This civilization declined around 1500 B.C., probably due to ecological changes.

During the second millennium B.C., pastoral, Aryan-speaking tribes migrated from the northwest into the subcontinent. As they settled in the middle Ganges River valley, they adapted to antecedent cultures.

The political map of ancient and medieval India was made up of myriad kingdoms with fluctuating boundaries. In the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., northern India was unified under the Gupta Dynasty. During this period, known as India's Golden Age, Hindu culture and political administration reached new heights.

Islam spread across the Indian subcontinent over a period of 500 years. In the 10th and 11th centuries, Turks and Afghans invaded India and established sultanates in Delhi. In the early 16th century, descendants of Genghis Khan swept across the Khyber Pass and established the Mughal (Mogul) Dynasty, which lasted for 200 years. From the 11th to the 15th centuries, southern India was dominated by Hindu Chola and Vijayanagar Dynasties. During this time, the two systems--the prevailing Hindu and Muslim--mingled, leaving lasting cultural influences on each other.

The first British outpost in South Asia was established in 1619 at Surat on the northwestern coast. Later in the century, the East India Company opened permanent trading stations at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, each under the protection of native rulers.

The British expanded their influence from these footholds until, by the 1850s, they controlled most of present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In 1857, a rebellion in north India led by mutinous Indian soldiers caused the British Parliament to transfer all political power from the East India Company to the Crown. Great Britain began administering most of India directly while controlling the rest through treaties with local rulers.

In the late 1800s, the first steps were taken toward self-government in British India with the appointment of Indian councilors to advise the British viceroy and the establishment of provincial councils with Indian members; the British subsequently widened participation in legislative councils. Beginning in 1920, Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi transformed the Indian National Congress political party into a mass movement to campaign against British colonial rule. The party used both parliamentary and nonviolent resistance and non-cooperation to achieve independence.

On August 15, 1947, India became a dominion within the Commonwealth, with Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister. Enmity between Hindus and Muslims led the British to partition British India, creating East and West Pakistan, where there were Muslim majorities. India became a republic within the Commonwealth after promulgating its constitution on January 26, 1950.

After independence, the Congress Party, the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, ruled India under the influence first of Nehru and then his daughter and grandson, with the exception of two brief periods in the 1970s and 1980s.

Prime Minister Nehru governed India until his death in 1964. He was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri, who also died in office. In 1966, power passed to Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977. In 1975, beset with deepening political and economic problems, Mrs. Gandhi declared a state of emergency and suspended many civil liberties. Seeking a mandate at the polls for her policies, she called for elections in 1977, only to be defeated by Moraji Desai, who headed the Janata Party, an amalgam of five opposition parties.

In 1979, Desai's Government crumbled. Charan Singh formed an interim government, which was followed by Mrs. Gandhi's return to power in January 1980. On October 31, 1984, Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated, and her son, Rajiv, was chosen by the Congress (I)--for "Indira"--Party to take her place. His government was brought down in 1989 by allegations of corruption and was followed by V.P. Singh and then Chandra Shekhar.

In the 1989 elections, although Rajiv Gandhi and Congress won more seats in the 1989 elections than any other single party, he was unable to form a government with a clear majority. The Janata Dal, a union of opposition parties, was able to form a government with the help of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the right and the communists on the left. This loose coalition collapsed in November 1990, and the government was controlled for a short period by a breakaway Janata Dal group supported by Congress (I), with Chandra Shekhar as Prime Minister. That alliance also collapsed, resulting in national elections in June 1991.

On May 27, 1991, while campaigning in Tamil Nadu on behalf of Congress (I), Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, apparently by Tamil extremists from Sri Lanka. In the elections, Congress (I) won 213 parliamentary seats and put together a coalition, returning to power under the leadership of P.V. Narasimha Rao. This Congress-led government, which served a full 5-year term, initiated a gradual process of economic liberalization and reform, which has opened the Indian economy to global trade and investment. India's domestic politics also took new shape, as traditional alignments by caste, creed, and ethnicity gave way to a plethora of small, regionally based political parties.

The final months of the Rao-led government in the spring of 1996 were marred by several major political corruption scandals, which contributed to the worst electoral performance by the Congress Party in its history. The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged from the May 1996 national elections as the single-largest party in the Lok Sabha but without enough strength to prove a majority on the floor of that Parliament. Under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP coalition lasted in power 13 days. With all political parties wishing to avoid another round of elections, a 14-party coalition led by the Janata Dal emerged to form a government known as the United Front, under the former Chief Minister of Karnataka, H.D. Deve Gowda. His government lasted less than a year, as the leader of the Congress Party withdrew his support in March 1997. Inder Kumar Gujral replaced Deve Gowda as the consensus choice for Prime Minister of a 16-party United Front coalition.

In November 1997, the Congress Party in India again withdrew support for the United Front. New elections in February 1998 brought the BJP the largest number of seats in Parliament--182--but fell far short of a majority. On March 20, 1998, the President inaugurated a BJP-led coalition government with Vajpayee again serving as Prime Minister. On May 11 and 13, 1998, this government conducted a series of underground nuclear tests forcing U.S. President Clinton to impose economic sanctions on India pursuant to the 1994 Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act.

In April 1999, the BJP-led coalition government fell apart, leading to fresh elections in September. The National Democratic Alliance-a new coalition led by the BJP-gained a majority to form the government with Vajpayee as Prime Minister in October 1999.

According to the publication, 'Le Figaro,' a CIA agent visited Osama bin Laden last July. 'Figaro' reports that this meeting took place while bin Laden was being treated in the American Hospital in Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates.

You may have read the article we posted a few weeks ago, with excerpts from a congressional hearing last year on terrorism in South Asia. In that hearing, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher charged the Clinton administration with sabotaging efforts to arrest bin Laden.

As more facts come to light it becomes increasingly evident that the official story, that Osama bin Laden broke with the U.S. Establishment and its Saudi Arabian junior partners a decade ago and has been trying to destroy the U.S. Empire ever since - is an invention. The claim made by the Clinton and Bush administrations, that they have tried, but unfortunately failed, to defeat the wily Mr. bin Laden is full of holes.

Here are a few of the bigger ones.

THE GULF WAR SCENARIO

According to the official story, bin Laden broke with the Saudi and U.S. governments over the Gulf War.

That may sound plausible to Western ears. After all, Iraq is an Arab country and bin Laden is an Arab.

But Iraq and Saudi Arabia are quite different. Saudi Arabia was and is tyrannized by the fanatical Fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, endorsed by the Saudi 'royal family' and by the rich bin Laden family as well. Iraq, by way of contrast, was a center of secular Arab culture.

Bin Laden spent the 1980s fighting a secular government (which was backed by Soviet troops) in Afghanistan. Then he returned to Saudi Arabia where:

"After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait he lobbied the Saudi royal family to organize civil defense in the kingdom and to raise a force from among the Afghan war veterans to fight Iraq." ('Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,' 23 September 2001 Sunday, Two Star Edition, pg. A-12, "How a Holy War against the Soviets turned on US" by Ahmed Rashid)

Why did he want "to raise a force ...to fight Iraq"?

Nobody can seriously argue that the Iraqis intended to attack Saudi Arabia. The argument between Iraq and Kuwait was over oil, and also over a geography that was inherited from colonial times. If you look at a map you will see that Kuwait looks like a tiny but strategic piece chopped out of Iraq.

The Iraq-Kuwait fight was in fact a local war. All reports indicate that Saddam Hussein believed that a) Iraq was in essence being attacked by Kuwait and that therefore an invasion would be a counter-attack and b) that the U.S. would not intervene.

On Sept. 22, 1990, the 'N.Y. Times' published what is apparently an accurate transcript of a conversation between Saddam Hussein and U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie. This conversation took place on July 25, eight days before the outbreak of fighting. We will post the Glaspie-Hussein conversation as soon as possible. It is most interesting. In it, she suggests that the Bush administration understands the Iraqi point of view and does not wish to meddle in an Arab dispute. For instance, Amb. Glaspie says:

"...we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait...we see the Iraqi point of view that the measures taken by the U.A.E. and Kuwait is, in the final analysis, parallel to military aggression against Iraq." ('N.Y. Times, 22 September, 1990)

Since Hussein wanted to make sure of U.S. neutrality before taking action against Kuwait, and since Saudi Arabia is Washington's key Arab ally, with huge U.S. military bases, of which, of course, the Iraqi leaders were aware, it is simply not conceivable that Iraq planned to attack Saudi Arabia.

Thus, bin Laden had no defensive reason to call on "the Saudi royal family to organize civil defense in the kingdom" let alone "to raise a force from among the Afghan war veterans to fight Iraq."

So why did he take such a provocative stance?

The most reasonable explanations are a) that he wanted to crush Iraq because it was a secular Muslim state and b) that he was associated with the CIA and was attempting to increase tensions between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, or even to provoke Iraq into launching a preemptive strike against Saudi Arabia, thus giving the U.S. an excuse to attack Iraq.

In any event, it was clear bin Laden was not upset by the notion of fighting Iraq. Why then, according to the official story, did the Gulf War so upset him?

The official answer is, because it involved a Saudi-U.S. alliance, which he felt desecrated Saudi Arabia.

This is a little much to swallow. Bin laden had worked closely with U.S. forces - namely, the Central Intelligence Agency - as the representative of the Saudi 'royal family' in Afghanistan during the decade when the CIA nurtured Islamist forces to fight Afghan government and Soviet troops.

He was no idealistic holy man. He and his family made a fortune off the carnage in Afghanistan. (This is discussed below.)

Why should bin Laden suddenly go berserk because the Saudi Arabian government was doing exactly what he himself had done - as the representative of the Saudi Arabian government?

Because (according to the official story) the war brought tens of thousands of U.S. troops into Saudi Arabian bases and this massive infidel invasion desecrated Saudi Arabia's sacred soil. Horrified, he broke with the Saudi Arabian 'royal family' and the U.S.

 CONSTRUCTION BIDS ARE THICKER THAN WATER

It's a compelling story, but no cigar. The sacred soil that the U.S. infidel soldiers supposedly desecrated was located in a series of top secret facilities built during the 1980s by the U.S. military at a cost (mostly to Saudi Arabia!) of - are you ready? - over 200 BILLION dollars. This was the largest U.S. military construction project ever attempted outside the continental USA. As a Public Television program reported in 1993:

"Scott Armstrong: A $200 billion program that's basically put together and nobody's paying attention to it. It's-- it's the ultimate government off the books...

"Scott Armstrong: The Saudis have been the principal backers and financers of the largest armaments system that the world has ever seen, in any region of the world, that includes over $95 billion worth of weapons that they bought themselves, includes another $65 billion worth of military infrastructure and ports that they've put in. We've managed to create an interlocking system that has one master control base, five sub-control bases, any one of which is capable of operating the whole thing, that are in hardened bunkers, that are hard-wired, that is to say, against nuclear blast or anything else. They created nine major ports that weren't there before, dozens of airfields all over the kingdom. They have now hundreds of modern American fighter planes and the capability of adding hundreds more. The Saudis alone have spent $156 billion that I can document line by line, item by item, on weapons system and infrastructure to support this." (Frontline Show #1112 Air Date: February 16, 1993 "The Arming of Saudi Arabia". Scott Armstrong is a top investigative reporter for the 'Washington Post']

The contracts for building those bases, ports, and airfields went in part to Saudi construction companies. Osama's family company, Saudi Binladin Group (the name is spelled differently but it's the same family) is intimate with the Saudi royal family; moreover it is the biggest Saudi construction company (and also a giant in the telecommunications field).

So as sure as death and taxes, Saudi Binladin Group got a nice chunk of that $200 billion. And while the bin Ladens were building those U.S. bases, who did Osama think was going to be using them? Martians?

DEMOLITION AND CONSTRUCTION

Getting back to the matter of construction contracts, consider what happened after the Khobar Towers complex in Dhahran was bombed on June 25, 1996. Osama bin Laden was accused by the U.S. of masterminding that bombing, which killed 19 U.S. airmen and wounded about 500 others.

Afterwards, a new 'super-secure' facility was erected:

"The facility very likely is the most heavily guarded operational installation used by the US military. This, clearly, is what retired Army Gen. Wayne A. Downing had in mind when in 1996 he released a report criticizing security at Khobar Towers and recommending more extensive force protection measures.

"… In a supreme irony, the complex was built by the giant contractor, Saudi Binladin Group -- owned by the same family that produced international terrorist Osama bin Laden, now an outcast in his homeland." ('Air Force Magazine,' February, 1999)

'Irony' is not exactly the word I would use, but OK.

HIGH-RENT CAVES

Osama did some building for the infidels in Afghanistan as well. That was during the late 1980s. Under contract with the CIA, he and the family company built the multi-billion dollar "caves" (1) in which he is now, supposedly, hiding, thus causing the U.S. and Britain to bomb the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, and other strategic military installations:

"He brought in engineers from his father's company and heavy construction equipment to build roads and warehouses for the Mujaheddin. In 1986, he helped build a CIA-financed tunnel complex, to serve as a major arms storage depot, training facility and medical center for the Mujaheddin, deep under the mountains close to the Pakistan border." ('Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,' 23 September 2001 Sunday, Two Star Edition, pg. A-12, "How a Holy War against the Soviets turned on US" by Ahmed Rashid)

OH DEAR, DON'T SEND THAT AWFUL MAN TO US!

After supposedly breaking with the Saudi rulers - though we doubt the story - bin Laden went to Sudan. Soon the Sudanese tired of his presence. In March, 1996, Maj. Gen. Elfatih Erwa, then the Sudanese Minister of State for Defense, offered to extradite bin Laden either to Saudi Arabia or the United States.

"The Sudanese security services, he said, would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over, though to whom was ambiguous. In one formulation, Erwa said Sudan would consider any legitimate proffer of criminal charges against the accused terrorist." ('The Washington Post,' 3 October 2001)

U.S. officials turned down the offer of extradition. 'The Washington Post' article that reported this goes into some length quoting U.S. officials attempting to explain exactly why they turned down the offer. The officials are quoted explaining that the Saudis were afraid of a fundamentalist backlash if they jailed and executed bin Laden, that they resented Sudan, that the U.S. resented Sudan, that the U.S. didn't have sufficient evidence to put him on trial. Everything, in fact, except the simplest explanation: that bin Laden was a U.S. asset - either part of the CIA, or someone whom the CIA used. Perhaps the 'Washington Post' writers were hinting at this explanation when they wrote:

"And there were the beginnings of a debate, intensified lately, on whether the United States wanted to indict and try bin Laden or to treat him as a combatant in an underground war." ('The Washington Post,' 3 October 2001)

Emphasis on the word 'treat' as in 'pretend that he was.'

In any case, the Sudanese offer of extradition was turned down.

"[U.S. officials] said, 'Just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia,' Erwa, the Sudanese general, said in an interview. 'We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they [US officials!] said, 'Let him.'"

"On May 15, 1996, Foreign Minister Taha sent a fax to Carney in Nairobi, giving up on the transfer of custody. His government had asked bin Laden to vacate the country, Taha wrote, and he would be free to go." ('The Washington Post,' 3 October 2001)

Note: "We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they [US officials!] said, 'Let him.'"

I find this chilling.

 THAT WOULD BE ILLEGAL!

It is mind boggling that U.S. government officials would try to justify rejecting Sudan's offer to extradite bin Laden because the Clinton administration was 'lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts at the time,' ('WP', 3 Oct.) Do they think Americans have no ability to remember what happened the day before yesterday? For example, that this same U.S. government didn't hesitate to bomb Sudan, Iraq and Yugoslavia, all of which bombings constituted the worst criminal violations of international law? Not to mention Afghanistan.

Not to mention the Red Cross.

Moreover, according to the highly reputable 'Jane's Intelligence Review:'

"In February 1995, US authorities named bin Laden and his Saudi brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, among 172 unindicted co-conspirators with the 11 Muslims charged for the World Trade Center bombing and the associated plot to blow up other New York landmarks." ('Jane's Intelligence Review,' 1 October 1995)

So bin Laden had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator a year before Sudan offered to extradite him.

Why couldn't the U.S. government have accepted the Sudanese offer to extradite bin Laden? Why couldn't they have jailed him, gotten together their best case and put him on trial? What exactly did the U.S. government have to lose? The worst that could have happened would have been that they failed to convict him and had to let him leave the country...

JUST LET HIM GO, OH, ANYWHERE. MAYBE TO AFGHANISTAN!

Instead, the U.S. asked Sudan to expel bin Laden, knowing full well that he would go to Afghanistan - and Kosovo and Macedonia.

By the way, two years later, the U.S. military bombed Sudan, supposedly because the Sudanese government was allied with bin Laden. Doesn't it sound like bin Laden's real friends were not in Sudan, as President Clinton tried to convince the world when he sent cruise missiles to destroy a Sudanese medicine factory, but in the U.S. State Department?

There is so much about bin Laden that suggests he is still in some way associated with the CIA:

His activities in Afghanistan prior to 1990;

His activities on the "U.S. side" in Bosnia, Kosovo and, quite recently, in Macedonia;

The refusal of the Clinton administration to allow Sudan to extradite him in 1996;

The very convincing arguments by Congressman Rohrabacher that the Clinton administration sabotaged efforts to apprehend him;

His functioning as a lightning rod for dissenters - getting people who oppose U.S. policy to support his ultra-repressive Islamist politics. This is discussed in the article, 'Bin Laden, Terrorist Monster.' Take Two!, which can be read at emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/taketwo.htm;

His amazing transformation regarding the World Trade Center attack. At first he denied involvement, saying "that dozens of terrorists organizations from countries like Israel, Russia, India and Serbia could be responsible" (i.e., it was the work of Satan) and "insisted that al Qaida does not consider the United States its enemy." But a week later he issued a video tape where he said "God Almighty hit the United States at its most vulnerable spot....When Almighty God rendered successful a convoy of Muslims, the vanguards of Islam, He allowed them to destroy the United States. I ask God Almighty to elevate their status and grant them Paradise." This latter statement was pre-recorded and released immediately after the U.S. government started bombing Afghanistan, that is, precisely when Mr. Bush needed the emotional impact of just such a statement in order to 'justify' yet another illegal war;

And now this report from the BBC that the Bush administration suppressed investigations into connections between members of the bin Laden family and possible terrorist groups.

Doesn't all this point to a working relationship between U.S. covert forces and Mr. b. L?

"WE ARE DEADLY ENEMIES, SO TAKE THESE 400 TRUCKS, O CURSED ONE!"

Earlier I said I doubted the reality of the 'break' between bin Laden and the Saudi Royals. According to the book, "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia,'' by Ahmed Rashid, who is the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asian correspondent for the 'Far Eastern Economic Review':

"Surprisingly, just a few weeks before the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa, the book tells us...'In July 1998 Prince Turki had visited Kandahar and a few weeks later 400 new pick-up trucks arrived in Kandahar for the Taliban, still bearing their Dubai license plates.''' (Quoted in 'The creation called Osama,' by Shamsul Islam. Can be read at emperors-clothes.com/analysis/creat.htm. 

They were all, I am told, Toyotas.

FAMILY FEUDS?

One final point. Part of the official Osama story is that the elusive Mr. bin Laden broke with his family because of his extreme Fundamentalist religious-politics.

Really?

Let us consider a few pieces of information which might suggest we adopt a stance of extreme skepticism:

"...when Osama bin Laden decided to join the non-Afghan fighters with the Mujaheddin, his family responded enthusiastically." ('Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,' 23 September 2001)

The entire family is known for its fiercely conservative Islamist (Wahhabi) views: "His father is known in these areas as a man with deeply conservative religious and political views and for his profound distaste for non-Islamic influences that have penetrated some of the most remote corners of old Arabia." UPI, quoted at newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/1/3/214858.shtml

It is true that families have feuds. In the typical U.S. family, wars may happen. People fight; they make peace.

But Osama does not come from a 'typical U.S. family.' He comes from an intensely conservative rural Yemeni clan. Such families don't have petty fights and stop talking to each other for ten years and then make up and it's no big deal:

"Though he grew up in the Saudi Arabian city of Jiddah, about 700 miles away across the Arabian peninsula, those who know him say he retains the characteristics of the people of this remote Yemeni region: extremely clannish and intensely conservative in their adherence to strict forms of Islam."  newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/1/3/214858.shtml. 

If such clans do feud, it can get violent. And certainly, it is hard to believe that Osama would be disowned by this sort of clan-family (as the official story claims he was) but nevertheless maintain cordial relations with family members. Consider this report:

"[National Security] Agency officials have sometimes played tapes of bin Laden talking to his mother to impress members of Congress and select visitors to the agency." (quoted in 'Baltimore Sun', 24 April 2001)

And this:

"Bin Ladens building U.S. troops' housing", by Sig Christenson; Express-News Staff Writer

"Bin Laden family members have said they are estranged from their brother, who turned against the Saudi government after joining Muslim fighters following the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.

"But Yossef Bodansky, director of the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, said 'sama maintains connections' with some of his nearly two dozen brothers. He would not elaborate." ('San Antonio Express-News,' 14 September 1998)

And, finally, from 'Le Figaro':

"While he was hospitalised [in the American Hospital in Dubai in July, 2001], bin Laden received visits from many members of his family as well as prominent Saudis and Emiratis."