Where Do Deleted Characters Go?(As reported by Joel Garreau in his Cybersurfing column in the Washington Post.)
Delete Keyboard KeyWhere do the computer typeface characters go when you delete them? Well, the characters go to different places, depending on whom you ask.
The Church’s approach to characters: The nice characters go to Heaven, where they are bathed in the light of happiness. The naughty characters are punished for their sins.
The Buddhist explanation: If a character has lived rightly, and its karma is good, then after it has been deleted it will be reincarnated as a completely different, higher-placed character. For instance, those funny characters located above the numbers on a typical keyboard will become numbers, all numbers will graduate to become letters, and lower-case letters will reach the pinnacle and become upper-case.
The 20th-century bitter cynical nihilist explanation: Who cares? It doesn’t really matter if they’re on the page, deleted, undeleted, underlined, etc. It’s all the same.
Thriller writer Stephen King’s explanation: Every time you hit the (delete) key you unleash a tiny monster inside the cursor that tears the poor unsuspecting characters to shreds, drinks their blood, then eats them, bones and all. Hah, hah, hah!
Humor columnist Dave Barry’s explanation: The deleted characters are shipped to Battle Creek, Michigan, where they’re made into Pop-Tart filling; this explains why Pop-Tarts are so flammable, while cheap imitations are not flammable. I’m not making this up.
PETA’s (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) explanation: You’ve been DELETING them??? Can’t you hear them SCREAMING???
1990s humor from the Electronic Frontier Foundation site:
Spot Puppy WinkingAn “anagram” is a rearranging of all of the letters in a word or a group of words to make a new word or word grouping that still makes some sense. In the 1990s, when the Internet was just getting off the ground and really gaining its identity, the builders of this new communications medium sometimes called it the “information superhighway” to help explain it to people. There was a big push for everyone to spend money investing in the Internet, the information superhighway, to get it launched, so all people could be connected.
At that time, people had fun coming up with this list of the Top Ten Anagrams for “Information Superhighway”:
- Enormous, hairy pig with fan.
- Hey, ignoramus – win profit? Ha!
- Oh-oh, wiring snafu: empty air.
- When forming, utopia’s hairy.
- A rough whimper of insanity.
- Oh, wormy infuriating phase.
- Inspire humanity, who go far.
- Waiting for any promise, huh?
- Hi-ho! Yow! I’m surfing Arpanet!
And the number-one anagram for “Information Superhighway”:
- New utopia? Horrifying sham
