...We are pleased to announce the birth of Alicia Kathryn Schooley, the daughter of Bernal and Kathryn Schooley. Alicia (8 pounds, 4 ounces, 27 rebounds, 14 assists, 8 points) was born on the 31st of January at 11:21pm. The parents are doing well...
We are also pleased to announce the engagement of Andrea "no middle name" Marino and Ralph Mardyla. Banzai Staffer Mary Wisnewski spent three fabulous days and nights in foggy Louisville, Kentucky to kick off 1991.
She attended a national Presbyterian student conference. As you can well imagine, those Presbyterians really tore up the place! Banzai Associate and Southern Gentleman Steve Stone showed Mary the sights and sounds of Louisville, a city where Going Out means Dressing Up...
Upon her return, Mary hosted her star-studded birthday fete featuring exotic curried cuisine and cacophonous conversation. Bill Walker entered the world of personal debt this month by acquiring no fewer than two of those little plastic thingies with the holograms and numbers on them.
The computer mail order industry will never be the same. We believe that Kenyon West and Karin Simonitsch have set a date for their impending wedding, but we can't be certain because Mr. West has declined to write any letters recently and in his present Luddite phase is unable to maintain a telephone. (Kenyon, if you are out there, PLEASE WRITE)
And finally, just under the wire for this issue, Banzai Parent and Chauffeur (Chauffeuse?) Joanne Wisnewski celebrated a birthday - don't ask which one - on February 7. Our best wishes to her.
2/6/91 As may or may not be known, prelims have been written by the Banzai Historian, though the re-sults have not been revealed, and certain amounts of stress have been exchanged for alternative types, though these types have not gained specificity through examination by either recipient or therapist. Such a lack of adequate information must surely end in frus-tration of all those involved or in relative proximity to the said recipient. The crusade of the moment, having been undertaken in good faith by a small group of individuals which might include the Banzai historian (but subject, actor, and any possible action have been carefully avoided so as not to saddle anyone with responsibility), is the investigation and ridicule of cer-tain styles of prose prevalent in the spheres of bureaucracy for reasons of ambiguity and to ensure the confusion of the maximum number of readers and listeners at any given moment. Such vapid, over-wordy, hyper-reflex-ive and jargon-ridden (not to mention the predominance of less-than-necessary hyphenation) language, if such spoutings can be labelled as such, is lurking in low visibility in plain view all around us, reproducing itself and causing minds to be twisted to an agenda of its own, both sinister and reeking of verbositude. Calls to action (and active verbs) should be made. Writers of the world unite! Oops!! The items to be lost are little more than the chains which tend to inhibit your mobility and freedom of both expression and thought.
Translator's note: "I have finished prelims, though I do not yet know the results. I hate business prose and desire to see it ridiculed and extirpated. Please help." -REL
My new computer is here! (Just in time for me to complete my last music project on the aging IBM PC) I'm writing this from the Institute, instead of sitting in some office late at night. I've managed to amass a collection of games, obscure foreign language fonts, and audio samples from movies for a total of 32,502,000 bytes of stuff. I've also used this computer to write a funk tune for use in a dance class here on campus. I wanted a cool name for the piece, a name to hint at the fact that it is written in 5/4, an odd meter. After much reflection, and in deference to George Clinton, I've decided to call it PentaFunkular 5-opolis. As you can imagine, a title like that is useless unless you share it.
It was difficult for us to decide how and whether to write this issue of the Transactions in light of the present war. We decided to press ahead mostly as usual. Nevertheless, most of us cannot live our lives as if nothing were happening. I hope you will all strive to be informed and informative. We cannot even form legitimate opinions about what is happening without uncensored information. -WFW
In my own life, I'm really enjoying my job this semester (still meeting with students to help them get themselves off probation) and sort of enjoying some of my classes. Talking to an assistant to the dean in Library Science helped me feel a little better about library school. I may still finish. I miss Austria lots and lots, which is funny, because when I was in Austria, I missed friends and family lots and lots. Can't have it all, I guess. For diversion outside of work and school, I am jogging twice a week and meeting with groups discussing women's issues, which I enjoy very much. The only question remaining is: Will I solve the world's problems before I run out of evening free time. Oh, and I occasionally do homework. And once in a blue moon I write a letter. Love and Kisses - MMW
"I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked."
- C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (A reference to my performance last semester - MMW)
"Language-model epistemology [has been] smuggled out of linguistics and philosophy departments by literary critics and free-ranging or metacritics, and lobbed like grenades into unsuspecting history departments."
-Nancy F. Partner, Making Up Lost Tme: Writing on the Writing of History (WHAT??? - Ed.)
"In 800, Charlemagne made one of the most impacting trips of his life."
Fellow procrastinators,
slackademia exists here at Hampster collage in Amherst Massachusetts; perhaps even without grasping the life-shattering significance of the acronyms DIV I, DIV II, DIV III, SAGA, ASH, FPH, and EDH, you may realize that hives of hardly-hyperorganized thinkers thrive here in the post-everything USSA, in our own backyard. Loosely, we learn by doing: in DIV I gradeless examless courses merely suggest possible self-organized projects leading to advancement towards DIV II. The result? Simultaneous fun and learning, which, as you already know, means procrastination free-for-all. The scary hippie so stereotypical of this institution is the stuff of myth; the cafeteria food was not dosed with with LSD on the day of the so-called "trip or treat" celebration (complete with what the school-sponsored brochure labeled "fucking fireworks") and the hippie-sacrament marijuana is scarcely to be seen or smelled in the dorm hallways I frequent. What persists here is a fierce uni-high-esque kind of personal eclecticism which sometimes gloriously bursts out in individual acts of hardly-conservative unprecedentedness, like Amy's nudist uprising of a month ago, or the marching band (in which I play SK5)'s "james brown funeral march" for the recent "funeral of student power" protest. As for the future, let's hope the government doesn't ignore our loud opposition to its military adventurism, or (good lord no) it might do something that would affect our lives more than just insidiously and peripherally.
incessantly,
Joe "no pithy nickname" Futrelle
(The editors wish to note that Mr. Futrelle, true to Banzai form, mailed his letter one and one half months after writing it, and we are not scavenging our garbage cans for reader mail. Yet.)
Those FUCKING IDIOTS actually did it. The stand-off came to a head after much saber rattling and "hey, my dick is bigger than your dick" talk. It would have been much more simple if George and Saddam could have gotten together, dropped their pants, and laid their members on the table. Winner take all, simple and straightforward. No need for angst or bloodshed. It's all a matter of size once the bluff and jazzy talk are stripped away. Male ego. As a friend acidly remarked recently, "That's all men do all day anyway, walk around behind their dicks." As the weeks turned into months and the January 15th deadline drew near, the size of the bulge in the pants of the nation's leaders became increasingly large. Somebody was bluffing, both refused to get out the tape measure. I figured both George and Saddam to be members of the U8IC. Last night George had the opportunity to show the world what he's got. OK, I retract my opinion about Mr. Bush. He's not a wimp, he's a wimp with a big willie. Mr. Baker, his must be long and thin, it fits his crisp, calculating style. Beware of Colin Powell. This man means business and has no competition. How much do you want to bet that his member is as thick as a baseball bat and about as long.
-Andrew K. Stewart