Where News Articles Go Until They Reappear

Why Threads Never Die

by Nicole Aucoin (nicole@ariel.cs.yorku.ca)
written 19 Oct 1994

This article is classified "Fictional"


Have you ever wondered why every so often, a thread will reappear weeks
after you thought it had died on a newsgroup?  Well, wonder no more,
enlightenment is here!  This exciting expose will reveal all - no more secret 
destinations for any articles, their private lives revealed, all this and 
more (only 9.95 plus shipping and handling)!

Those crafty articles do not mundanely sit in bottlenecks at slow sites, nor
do they get garbled by faulty transmissions.  Oh no, they have either been

dnapped by the stone heads of Easter Island, corralled by the ring of

Stonehenge, or vacationed in the Grand Canyon.

You'd wondered what strange and mystical meaning the huge carvings of Easter
Island were for hadn't you?  They were the first tap created by ancient
civilizations.  They draw down passing news articles into their capacious
craniums, ponder them for a while, then let them free to some obscure site.  
There the post continues on as if nothing had happened - it's replied to and
revives a dead thread.

Stonehenge is a particularly nasty piece of work for unwary articles - they
get jammed up under those arches and take days, sometimes weeks to sort
themselves out.  

But the favorite destination by far of delinquent news is the Grand Canyon. 
All those marvelously twisty passages all different, unlike the millions of 
identical newbie minds that they are destined to breeze through without 
making an impression.  In the lovely Colorado River valley, there is no 
stress about being articulate, witty, in-depth (since they get this last for 
free while wizzing about) or grammatically perfect.  So if you spot a 
particularly care-freely spelled article, it has most likely benefited from 
a spin through the Grand Canyon.

So worry no longer about the fate of those missives that take flight from
your keyboards - just imagine the fun they get up to while you stayed tied
to the machine.  Let them free to soar!

See also:
  • Earth

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