| Friday,
September 22, 2000 A nice dinner in BelAire last night with
opera people and an interview with Rodney Gilfrey, the Los Angeles
baritone. I have some pictures which I'll try to do something with when I
g a round tuit. Those tuits can be hard to find.
Recently in mail I posted:
Dr. Pournelle,
I************* Jerry, Came across this today:
"The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words,
there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but government
regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words."
Kit Case kitcase@starpower.net
and I said
No Comment Nesessary ************
Clearly I was wrong. Comment was necessary. I now have:
Dr. Pournelle,
I spotted this; [the above]
on your mail list today. It turns out to be urban
myth; no such government regulation exists, and it has appeared in a
number of different contexts referring to British gov't regulations on
shell eggs, French gov't on duck eggs, and EEC directives on the
importation of caramel and caramel products (the last also, by
coincidence, purportedly coming in at 26,911 words). I got the details
from www.snopes.com, a usually reliable source of information on urban
legends.
Cheers!
JBWoodford
which proves that some people just have too much free time. At least
they have something harmless to do. My mother used to say 'idle hands are
the devil's workshop' and would find me something to do if I seemed to
have too much free time.
Well of course it is an urban legend, and of course most of us have
heard it before, and of course on the face of it it is unlikely to be
true. What is interesting is that you have to think about it. When I was
president of Pepperdine Research Institute Lo! these many years ago, one
of the things we had to deal with was the Armed Services Procurement
Regulations, known as the ASPRS or Aspers. There were 23 linear feet of
them, and it took a graduate student in public administration about 6
hours a week just to keep with the constant stream of revisions; one of
the Aspers insisted that the Aspers themselves be kept up to date, and
about a foot of revisions would come in weekly and would have to be put
into the bound volumes, chapter, or section, or page at a time; sometimes
there would be paragraphs to be pasted over the existing paragraph, saving
the government money on printing the entire page but at the cost of
thousands of intelligent people put to silly makework.
Now I probably exaggerate, but not much: the Aspers took up 2 shelves
and I recall those shelves ran along the whole wall of the documents
library, and I know that my administrative officer, a student who had
graduated from Howard and won the Honor Sword at ROTC and was spending a
year at Pepperdine before being commissioned into the Army, had keeping
them up as an onerous duty; whether a full 6 hours a week I suppose I
don't know, but the time wasted on that was not trivial.
And there certainly is a three page regulation defining what may
legitimately be called a 'jelly' in advertising: the case is a famous one
studied in public administration classes, and I once quoted from it in a
paper on the burden of regulations for my graduate seminar in
administration. Moreover, I have seen some of the Market Orders (a
somewhat fascist procedure left over from the Roosevelt Administration) on
the difference between tangerine and tangelos and that ran to seven or so
pages.
So, yes, the 26,911 words is probably legend; but absurd as it is, we
all know it could be true, and given enough time with bureaucrats
justifying their payment, one day it may be.
And see mail...
From Clark Myers:
Article is at:
http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0%2C1284%2C38945%2C00.html
Pirates Invade Book Publishing
by M.J. Rose
It's well worth reading. And I haven't yet come up with an magical
solution to this.
Dr. Pournelle,
A nice feature of the internet is that you can have
"groupies" but never
actually have to meet them. For my Chaos Manor To
Go, I used the AvantGo
automatic channel bookmark to make an AvantGo
channel out of the Chaos Manor
Current Mail page. Here's a link for savvy readers:
https://avantgo.com/mydevice/autochannel.html
Even with this week's rather protracted discussions,
the channel size is
less than 100K.
Enjoy your weekend now that more seasonable weather
is upon us.
Stephen Borchert (proud subscriber to Chaos Manor)
Thanks!
And Roland reports:
Another Theory proven correct:
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/09/21/black.hole.ap/
AND Microsoft fixes licensing policy:
http://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/licensing/docs/re-imaging_brief.htm
Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@netmore.net>
For those interested in what really happened to the Kursk, click
here. Warning: this is thought to be in bad taste by some, and it may
well be. If jokes about the dead offend you don't read it.
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