From chaos @ condor.sccs.swarthmore.edu Sat Jul 17 19:33:01 1999 Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 17:11:26 -0500 (EST) From: chaos golubitsky To: _swat.org.swil @ swarthmore.edu Subject: The Search for SWILNews #8 It was Monday, and Thor was excited. This was not unusual - Monday was rapidly becoming Thor's favourite day of the week. Every Monday, sometime between 3 and 5 in the afternoon, a new SWILNews appeared, full of tales of the escapades of Thor and his rapidly growing group of friends. Thor couldn't wait to read this week's tale; Buffy had, out of the blue, invited him to a movie Saturday night after the spring ball. (Of course, by the time the ball ended, all the movie theatres were closed, so the date was cancelled...) Nonetheless, Thor had a good feeling about the relationship, and was looking forward to seeing his Valkyrie friends' version of the story. Unfortunately, it was not to be. At around 3:30, Thor became impatient, and went over to Wharton to check on the progress of the SWILNews. He burst into the room, but found only Skogul, buried under a mound of Democratic Athens reading. After rescuing the work-drenched Valkyrie, Thor inquired about the progress of his SWILNews. Skogul volunteered that Hlokk was ...ummm ...busy (oh, come on - getting into a wristrest fight in the Sun Lab counts as work), Goll was in invertibrate lab, and Sophocles is much cooler than Thucydides. Thor wandered out, annoyed. Well, if the co-presidents weren't going to do their job, Thor was going to have to do it himself. Unfortunately, there were a few slight problems. First of all, Thor couldn't type. In fact, he couldn't exactly, as such, read or write English. Plus, he didn't have an e-mail account, and hadn't actually attended the last SWIL meeting. But that was okay; he knew who to ask. First, he went off to look for Buffy. She was off somewhere, though, he seemed to recall - a stake-makers' convention or something. (She'd mentioned it last night, and he really should have remembered, but, at any rate, wherever it was, it wasn't here.) The sponges were being "unavoidably detained" by Goll's lab, Thor was told when he asked about their whereabouts. Terry was still recovering from the ball. Ratatosk usefully munched on a few extension cords, but, having no opposable thumbs, couldn't offer much more help than that. Jack Skellington was the first of Thor's friends who actually managed to bring the SWILNews at all closer to existance, by resourcefully scaring away a student using only his natural charisma, plus an oversized severed head which happened to be around. The terrified student fled his terminal without logging out (Note: don't ever do this in real life; it's bad -Thor), and Thor was in business. Unfortunately, he still didn't know how to type, and Jack had vanished, presumably to return the head to its rightful owner. Thor found the last of his circle of friends, the can of spam. After retrieving it from the honors reserve desk, Thor brought the spam back to the Sun Lab. He opened the container, and dumped the contents onto his keyboard. The SWILNews now read "v9py5v4ohoh5otlvrnt54ltkd45p9;/waj;oveg;d" - Thor was getting nowhere fast. He cleaned up the keyboard as well as he could, then resumed staring at the screen in despair. (You look like you could use a hand. -Gustav) Thor looked up at the screen in amazement. (I'm the SWILNews mystery commenter, and, if you don't write SWILNewses, i can comment them, so i'm willing to give you a hand. -Gustav) "Okay, sounds good," Thor said, "but you'll have to do most of the typing." (That's fine; just dictate the minutes of the meeting to me, and i'll take care of the rest. -Gustav) "I wasn't at the meeting, though," Thor whined. (Do i have to tell you how to do *everything*? You Norse deities are all alike - no concept of how to think for yourselves. It's a wonder Valhalla didn't... No, wait, it did - never mind. At any rate, *i* was at the meeting. I was disguised as potato bar. Get a clue. -Gustav) "Okay," Thor muttered. He really wasn't sure he liked this Gustav character, but he didn't exactly have any choice in the matter. Gustav began to type. (SWILBusiness: 1. Budget: Lots of people are terrific, as a result of which we have a budget. Specific thanks to Kyla, our treasurer, Melissa, who went to the Budget Committee meeting with Kyla and was morally supportive, and Amy, our miniprop, who does such good propaganda that BC called us the best-publicized group on campus and increased our copying budget. Wheee! 2. Schlock: Catalogs will be in George as of tonight. Hlokk will put them there. ( -Thor) Go to George any time this week and make notes as to what schlock you'd like to see, and we will vote next week. 3. Challenge chess: We now have challenges, having passed around a list during meeting. We also have some pieces, though we still need black and white kings, queens, and bishops, as well as both white rooks. E-mail Eoj (jmrobins @ sccs) to sign up for something. 4. Walpurgisnacht: will be Saturday, 2 May, this year. Jim will be in charge of organizing it, and Melissa will act as a figurehead, in case Jim isn't allowed to reserve Sharples III. Anna would like it to be known that she is not a figurehead. 5. Spamageddon: will happen twice this year. It was determined that "Spamageddon" implies destruction of spam. Thus, Jimmy (yay, frosh who volunteer for things -Thor) will organize the Spam Pinata. (The pinata will be filled with spam, not made out of spam. You people frighten me. -Thor) In addition, we will have a Spammish Inquisition, which no one will expect, except the lucky people who come to the Sun Lab at 9 tonight to help plan it. (hint, hint. -Thor) 6. SWILCon: There will be a round table discussion real soon now (tm) to talk about the fate of next year's SWILCon. Time and location of this meeting are still to be determined, but it wouldn't hurt to contact Megan or Scott (mhallam1 @ sccs or sprice @ sccs) if you're interested in attending the meeting. 7. T-Shirts: We had several nifty submissions for t-shirt designs this year, so we're going to do what we did last year, and have a pocket design on the front, and a full-size on the back. The caption is "SWIL Life (with Fruit)". Non-SWILBusiness: Babylon5 will happen Monday at Jim's apartment also come to the SWIL movie and there will be a storyreading next Friday and Non-SWILBusiness tends to get compressed into a very small amount of space when SWILBusiness takes so long let this be a lesson to us all. Air Conditioner Wanted List - 28/3: Anna "It's hot. And muggy. And hot." Hess Jennifer "And I'm wearing all black. Anna said I'm stupid - I agree. :)" Tyson Kyla "Woo-hoo! Budgetbudgetbudget!" Tornheim Melissa "Amy (and Chaos) is the most insanely cool person in the entire world" Binde Ben "T-shirt master" Newman Jimmy "Denial is deliver in De'Egypt" Kong Megan "Stan wants to kiss Wendy Testubeyu" Powell Larry "Crush thine enemies like the bugs that they are" Miller Dave "Parker (pause) Kit (pause) Parker" Phillips Sarah "the window, the window, the window... AIR! oh, it's me..." Bergstrom Amy "I'm actually at SWIL meeting.... and I'm warm" Swift Jim "Power behind Melissa's throne" Moskowitz -Gustav)