Loren Petrich's Grab-Bag Page

• Intel Outside, as a GIF or as a BinHexed Macintosh startup screen. It was originally composed by someone else as a response to the "Intel Inside" ads, and I've slightly retouched it.
• If Megasloth Windoze, a.k.a. Microsoft Windows, is getting you down, consider this satire of its startup screen. This was composed from version 3.1, not 4.0, a.k.a. 95., or any of the later versions.
• A few years back, Apple Computer has been much in the news about merger plans with numerous companies, one of them being Sun Microsystems; I have composed some pictorial commentary on that subject. Since then, however, Apple has acquired NeXT, whose CEO then proceeded to take over Apple from the inside.
• If you want an answer to those Jesus-Christ Fish, check out a Darwin Fish. And here is some places you can look to find one. Notice how the fins have become limbs; land-vertebrate limbs still have a finny structure deep inside, but with the first set (single) and the second set (a pair) of bones often growing much longer than the others.
• If you want to warn others of the dangers of messing with your computer while you are away, here is a classic warning, rendered in an appropriate typeface: Das Blinkenlights. Feel free to attempt to incorporate its contents into a screensaver; let me know what you've accomplished if you've done so.
• If you have a Macintosh and some files that had been packaged with Wrapster, simply use my Simple Macintosh Unwrapster on it to retrieve those files. I've included its source code for the benefit of anyone who might want to write improved versions of it.
• The late Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan are two of my favorite writers; here is Isaac Asimov on
  • Christian Science,
  • hypocritical piety,
  • whether God is on anyone's side.
  As can be clearly seen, Dr. Asimov had shown a very strong critical sense, to the point that one of his colleagues once charged that he had a "built-in doubter" (an assessment he considered flattering). This colleague was Joseph Campbell, longtime editor of Astounding Science Fiction, now Analog Science Fiction -- Science Fact. And what had elicited that response was Campbell going wild over Dianetics, a precursor to Scientology. Eventually, he split with its inventor, L. Ron Hubbard, the reason being, as Dr. Asimov had concluded, that no movement could have two Messiahs.
• And here is the time that Carl Sagan had gotten sexually harassed by a dolphin, and also his discussion of whether Marxist theory implies that every planet is inhabited.
• And for some zany pseudoscientific fun, check out George Francis Gillette's Spiral Universe. See for yourself if unwillingness to take it seriously makes you an "orthodox ox". And Hanns Hoerbiger's Welteislehre (Cosmic Ice Theory), a Velikovsky-style cosmology that shows that (1) Velikovskian methods can produce results that the Velikovskians themselves would find heretical and (2) Velikovsky's ideas were far from original.
• For other weirdness, check out Soviet Censorship Regulations, and see for yourself whether that example of press censorship was worthwhile. It was written several years ago, which is why there are these anachronistic-looking references to the Soviet Union as still existing. I had actually been there in 1970, and I got a history book there that has some incredibly entertaining history rewrites, especially if one pays attention to what ought to be present, but is not. A big example of that was Iosip Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, a.k.a. Joseph Stalin. While he was in power, he had a big personality cult, with statues of him and praise for him everywhere. However, that book does not mention him at all, and its discussion of WWII (which it calls the Great Patriotic War) states that it was the Communist Party that commanded this, that, and the other thing. This sort of omission would have been unthinkable while Stalin was still in power, at least if one wanted to avoid being labeled an Enemy of the People and sent on an extended involuntary vacation in Siberia.