Re: [Leica] I am so stupid I can't believe it!

["Barney Quinn, Jr." <barney.quinn@noaa.gov>]

Brian,

Good for you! To keep this temporarily on topic I shot with a pair of
IIIf's in my college and grad school days. I went to Syracuse University
in the early and mid-sixties. Syracuse approached the housing or the
animals - er athletes - differently. Rather than keeping them in a
centralized barn, which seems to have been Maryland's approach, Syracuse
distributed them four per floor through out the men's dorms. Horses for
courses. Do you want major damage to one building or light to moderate
damage to all buildings. 

Before I continue let's have full disclosure here. My undergraduate
record has more than one blemish on it, and I thoroughly enjoyed
creating each and every one. :-) Second semester of my freshman year
some members of the football team who will be nameless except to say
that every one of them went on to become brand name athletes were having
a pick up lacrosse game in the corridor outside my room. I was
desperately trying to study for my Calculus final. To this day I don't
believe that I went out into the hall and told them to knock it off
because I was trying to study! Nor do I believe that I lived to be
typing this. I understand the economic and PR importance of collegiate
sports, but having said that I also have to say that it was very
aggravating when you asked one of the prize steers how they did in a
particular course and they replied, "The coach fixed it for me." This
happened more often than one might think.

Barney

Brian Reid wrote:
> 
> Most of you know that there has been something wrong with the Leica
> Users archives for several weeks, since the middle of September. Some of
> you know that I've tried for weeks to find and fix the problem.
> 
> Just now I have found the problem, and fixed it, and I am slowly
> restoring the archives. I can't entirely decide whether this episode is
> because I am stupid, or because God is punishing me for something cruel
> that I did in 1968.
> 
> Let me first tell you what I did in 1968 that makes me fear Divine
> retribution, and then I will tell you what the problem was.
> 
> I went to the University of Maryland. I lived in a dormitory called
> Cambridge A. That was the men's honors dorm. Across the quad from us was
> Bel Air B, the football player's dorm. During the spring semester of
> 1968 the men in the football player's dorm brutally harassed the
> eyeglass-wearing scholars in the honors dorm. And this being a state
> university in the era when the football coach ran the university, we had
> no resource save to put up with it or to solve the problem ourselves.
> 
> I took charge of the "solve the problem ourselves" venture, and for one
> week we made their lives miserable. We waited until the week of midterm
> exams, figuring that the easiest way to hurt a football player was to
> get them declared ineligible by the NCAA, and that flunking midterms
> would be a good way to do that. Every night, mysteriously, their dorm
> lost power. Their water supply kept getting turned off, so they couldn't
> shower. Their phones stopped working. Their radios were somehow
> mysteriously jammed. Bizarre smells permeated their building.
> 
> After three days the university physical-plant people figured out how we
> were turning off their water every night, and they welded the manhole
> shut. So  instead of turning off the water to the building, we went into
> the building in the middle of the night and turned off, individually,
> every plumbing fixture. We turned off every sink, every toilet, every
> shower, every drinking fountain. Anything that was supposed to have
> water was turned off.
> 
> Naturally, after 3 days of us turning off the water main and the
> university turning it back on again, they were programmed to look for
> some sort of a water-main shutoff. It took them 5 days to discover that
> there was nothing wrong with the main, but that every single fixture was
> independently turned off.
> 
> What on earth does this college prank of 34 years ago have to do with
> Leica Users? Well, it turns out that the reason I haven't been able to
> fix the archive problem is that there's nothing wrong with the archive.
> The archive mechanism is working perfectly. It's just that every message
> was being individually deleted before reaching the archive mechanism.
> 
> For the entire time that the Leica Users archive has existed, messages
> that contain the word "unsubscribe" have not been added to the archives,
> because in the past, such messages have been misdirected requests to
> unsubscribe, and I wanted neither to clutter the archives with them nor
> file away the evidence that someone couldn't follow instructions.
> 
> Sometime in the middle of September, in order to be helpful and
> "clarify" things, I caused this line to be added to the end of every
> Leica-Users message. Notice its second word:
> 
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