I'd Never Join an  Organization:  That Would Have Me as a Member

(A random sampling of things that have gone through my mind during the last few decades. Eek!)

In the early days of the 'net, when email had a tendency to get lost or go astray, it was really important to identify the organization that email and Usenet messages were coming from. Messages have an Organization: header field for this purpose. Some of us have never been 100% formal about this feature, using it to claim affiliations that we found amusing.

This web page collects my own humble contributions to this underappreciated art form: some of the organizations I've claimed to be a part of over the years. They're all 65 characters or less -- not even half the size of a tweet -- so if brevity is the soul of wit, these could well be the very heart of humor. (This web page is going to spoil all that with explanations, though.)

  • Ask Any Hippie Jun-2015
    • Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia suggests that we obtain marriage advice from any hippie.
  • An All-Powerful Enterprise Jun-2013
    • In a rather insane "DEATH BY BICYCLE" video op-ed piece, a member of the Wall Street Journal editor board made some extravagant claims, including one that the bike lobby is an all-powerful enterprise. Imagine my delight.
  • Rude Boy and the Ska-Tastics Apr-2013
    • A new wave of zombie ska would have taken over, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids! When Margaret Thatcher died, "Stand Down Margaret," a song by The [English] Beat, returned to the airwaves. Somewhere in the news coverage I'd learned that Beat founder Roger Wakeling had composed and performed music as a zombie ska band for a newish Scooby-Doo episode.
  • #Occupy Whose Streets? Oct-2011
    • The name of one movement mashed up with another movement's rallying cry. (The answer to this question is, of course, "Our streets!")
  • Magnited States of America Jun-2011
    • This is a the name of a country where it's apparently totally fine to go into a movie theatre and subject moviegoers to your talking and texting. Thankfully, the Alamo Drafthouse is not in that country.
  • True Stories Feb-2011
    • ... Saw David Byrne, who rules!
  • Privilege Denying Dude Nov-2010
    • ... Also Privilege-Affirming Dude, Privilege-Implying Dude, Privilege-Belying Dude, Privilege-Outlying Dude, Privilege-Applying Dude, etc. A stock photo of a man in a suit was used to create a "meme" on MemeGenerator, using the Impact Bold Outline typeface to convey hapless remarks that betray privilege. The man in the photo balked at this and iStockPhoto leaned on websites to take the "memes" down because they were a "disreputable" use of the photo. MemeGenerator prides itself on "bluntly offensive" material, much of it racist, sexist, and in violation of copyrights, but they quickly took this one down. Privilege, it seems, has its privileges.
  • I Meant To Do That Aug-2010
    • The bicyclist's mantra. Bicycling magazine honored the 25th anniversary of Pee Wee's Big Adventure with an article explaining why it's the greatest bicycling movie ever made, but it was the article's preamble that truly expressed the profundity of these words.
  • Reasonably Suspicious Apr-2010
    • Arizona's anti-immigration law is an unConstitutional travesty, violating one of my favorite Amendments (the 14th). Matt Bors did an excellent comic strip on the topic, reminding me that I am reasonably suspicious in my own right.
  • Wildlife Man Oct-2009
    • The at once obvious and profound question about Mark Trail, "Is he a wild-life man?"
  • Sex With Ducks Aug-2009
    • Title of a brilliant song by Garfunkel and Oates.
  • Solid Potato Salad Apr-2009
    • I saw a video from 1944 of the contortionist Ross Sisters and was duly impressed.
  • Swing Time Jan-2009
    • In his inauguration speech, Barrack Obama said, "we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." These words come from a song in a great Depression-era film, Swing Time.
  • Unacceptable Lean Oct-2008
    • This is an arborist's term for a tree whose trunk has grown so far from vertical that it's in danger of falling. In windy San Francisco most trees have a slight lean, and unfortunately the term is overused as a pretext for killing perfectly healthy trees to put in garages. Exactly the opposite of "Trees Not Cars" (see below).
    Another possible meaning was prompted by a profoundly stupid article in the Fox News Wall Street Journal, arguing that Barack Obama might be too physically fit to be elected by a nation that's 66% overweight.
  • Green Bay Steelers for Truth Sep-2008
    • John McCain wrote that, as a prisoner of war, he faced an interrogator who tortured him to name names, so the names he gave were from the Green Bay Packers football team. This story was supposed to illustrate how ineffective torture is. Later on, when campaigning in Pittsburgh, the football team in his story morphed into the Pittsburgh Steelers. And oh yeah, he voted to approve torture at about the same time.
    Absinthe Verte / St. George / 21-Dec-2007, First Date of Issue
  • L'Heure Verte Jul-2008
    • I got a green bike and they're making absinthe across the Bay, so the Green Hour has definitely arrived. (This is also my proposed and IMHO much improved alternative to Earth Hour.)
  • Olde Passaic Gardens Jun-2008
    • Just your typical, everyday, concrete modernist horror of redevelopment, as seen in Be Kind, Rewind.
  • Year of the Squirrel Apr-2008
    • It's the Year of the Rat, and I am, by some accounts, a Rat. I'm more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed than a rat, so for years I've tried to promote myself as a Squirrel. As it was so astutely put in the comic strip Frazz, "Never dismiss the public relations value of a cute backside."
    However, China's government has promulgated this as the Year of the Mouse, replete with an official merchandizable cute little squealy cartoon mascot. It may well be time to embrace my inner Rat.
    Sheldon Brown Has a Posse
  • Sheldon Brown Has A Posse Feb-2008
    • Captain Bike is now riding the cycle tracks which, according to H.G. Wells, abound in Heaven.
  • Homefire Radio Dec-2007
    • Christmas Day 2007 was the 100th birthday of Cab Calloway, who sold this particular brand of radio.
  • The Densest City on the West Coast Nov-2007
    • San Francisco has the highest population density on the West Coast, but due to the poor state of its transportation infrastructure it is also one of the top cities in the nation in terms of car density. Which suggests an entirely different form of density suffered by its policymakers.
  • A Nasty, Bad, Naughty Boy Sep-2007
    • This is Larry "Wide Stance" Craig's description of Bill Clinton. And he should know.
  • Works Well Running With Others' Scissors Aug-2007
    • I'm multi-talented, combining "Works Well With Others" and "Running With Scissors."
    (This gag didn't work very well, though, so I cut it.)
  • The Co-Mingled [sic] Threat May-2007
  • The Commingled Threat May-2007
    • Alleged journalist Judith Miller quoted David Cohen, the N.Y.P.D. commissioner for "intelligence," as he spouted some nonsense about a "co-mingled threat" of "terrorism, anarchist violence and unlawful civil disobedience." Her spelling brought to mind a gung-ho cop pronouncing "co-mingled" much like "ve-hickle." The threat is of course as bogus as Miller's spelling.
  • Some Assembly Required Apr-2007
    • The N.Y.P.D. is promulgating and attempting to enforce rules that are a direct contradiction to the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to free assembly.
  • Tops With Quips (Maybe) Feb-2007
    • This was a clue in the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. Can you figure out the answer?
  • "I'm Mark Foley and I approve of this text message." Oct-2006
    • This works so much better as a .sig, so I soon moved it to the bottom of my outgoing messages.
  • Crikey! Sep-2006
    • Steve Irwin, R.I.P. :-(
  • Keep Tahoe Crip Aug-2006
    • Lake Tahoe is polluted by ground-level fossil fuel exhaust of various kinds, including that from the SUVs of enthusiasts who put "Keep Tahoe Blue" stickers on their bumpers. I saw this variant on a T-shirt.
  • Brooklyn Roasted Apr-2006
    • This is the slogan for Gorilla Coffee, and it certainly also applies to me!
  • my other bike is a pipe bomb Mar-2006
    • A punk band named "this bike is a pipe bomb" makes stickers that can be put on bikes. Foolish authorities saw this sticker on a bike and panicked, calling in the bomb squad to tear the bike apart. I offer this alternative slogan as a way to keep the authorities busy but out of trouble.
  • Pat Robertson Issues Fatwah Sep-2005
    • Televangelist lunatic Pat Robertson called for the assassination of the duly-elected president of Venezuela. Why is it wrong for mullahs to do this but not televangelists?
    Still We Ride (Illustration by Fly)
  • Still We Ride Jul-2005
    • My response to a police attack on bicyclists in New York City. I was inspired by the group Still We Rise (who were attacked in the same manner as we were), and they in turn were inspired by a poem by Maya Angelou. My coinage became a slogan and also the title of a documentary.
  • Obscure Sports Quarterly Mar-2005
    • An exciting publication (known as OSQ to insiders) in the movie DodgeBall.
  • The Island of Misfit Toys Dec-2004
    • Actually, do a web search if you don't understand this one.
  • True Blue Red Scare America Nov-2004
    • A simpleminded way of looking at election results came up with mindless memes about "blue and red states" and even "Blue and Red America." This is a short commentary about that blithering nonsense.
  • Dis-Appoint Bush in 2004 Sep-2004
  • Osama bin Forgotten (Oct Surprised!) Oct-2004
    • Blatant election-year political campaigning. (I voted for the other candidate ... I think.)
  • 57th Leader of the Anarchists Aug-2004
    • In the weeks leading up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the N.Y.P.D.'s public relations department conducted a campaign to demonize protesters. They sent out alarmist warnings about "anarchists" who were going to come destroy the city. These were dutifully reprinted by the New York Daily News, whose interest in lurid tabloid headlines trumped any concern for accuracy, integrity, or the civil rights of peaceful protesters.
    An early propaganda piece claimed that "56 anarchist leaders" were coming to wreak havoc. The oxymoronic nature of anarchist leadership did not seem to occur to the public relations flaks, so some of us wondered allowed why there weren't 57 varieties of this absurdity, and wondered what it took to make the cut. Some of us just went ahead and declared ourselves Leader #57, without consulting any authorities on the matter. (Good lord! That's ... that's ... anarchy!)
    Disclaimer: For those of you incapable of grasping the obvious, I am not really an anarchist leader, 57th or otherwise. As far as I can tell, there is no such thing. Get a grip.
    The N.Y.P.D./tabloid reports kept changing the number of "anarchist leaders" who were coming to menace the metropolis. At one point they even became "50 anarchist leaders with 50 anarchist followers each," which sounds like a scourge of Biblical proportions! Sorry to spoil the ending, but as it turns out, no anarchist mayhem actually happened.
  • Swelltown Jul-2004
    • Don't you hate it when people tell you about dreams they had that don't make any sense? So anyway, I had a dream that my local neighborhood had renamed itself "Swelltown" in a fit of boosterism. I took a dim view of this until I discovered that it somehow involved a memorial to the much-beloved Martin Minow. Then it was just swell with me.
  • The Vegetarian Taliban Feb-2004
    • According to Veronica Atkins, this refers to those of us who are vegetarian and would dare to present evidence that ketosis is not the greatest thing since, um, sliced bread.
  • No Sleep 'til ... Jan-2004
  • A Tree Grows in ... Feb-2004
  • Last Exit to ... Mar-2004
  • ... What? Apr-2004
  • Een Draght Mackt Maght Jul-2004
    • I used these in one particular online forum that's frequented by people who were a bit thick in the head and kept asking me where I lived. I dropped these hints, which didn't seem to help.
  • Belleville Soir Jan-2004
    • A newspaper I once wrote for.
  • Fair and Balanced Nov-2003
    • The absurdly-inaccurate doublethink motto of Fox News, which Bill O'Reilly wanted to sue Al Franken for using in a book title. I'm less afeared of lawyers these days than I was in 1984 (see below), but I do still fret about keeping annoying things alive with mockery. Détournement can be a tricky thing.)
  • Freedom Toaster Mar-2003
    • Some idiots thought they could insult the good people of France by referring to grease-laden potato shards as "freedom fries." As it happens, these idiots have tended to align themselves with forces that would restrict freedoms that happen to involve French kisses and French letters. My response to all this idiocy is to raise a glass of Châteauneuf-du-Papes in honor of liberté, egalité, et fraternité.
  • Romanticorp Apr-2002
    • Again with the Futurama. Hey, it looked like a fun place to work.
  • Don't Date Robots! May-2001
    • Sage advice from a "middle school hygiene" filmstrip in a Futurama episode.
  • Dirt First! Nov-2000
    • An environmental group in a Simpsons episode. "You mean you don't pocket-mulch?" I received a few seemingly earnest inquiries about this organization, from would-be pro-dirt activists.
  • Vegetarian Bicyclist Menace May-2000
    • Boston's "Big Dig" underground freeway project went billions of dollars over budget, and some San Francisco politicians thought that sort of boondoggle was a swell idea. My friends and I were paid a backhanded compliment when a reporter complained that such a project would be prevented by "vegetarian bicyclists throwing themselves in the way."
  • Bad To The Proton Sep-1999
    • Geekery from Foxtrot.
  • Biotic Biking Brigade 1999
    • It's the Biotic Baking Brigade gone mobile!
  • Noe Valley SUV Eradication Project Nov-1998
    • Someone in San Francisco responded to the upscaling of the Mission District with "Mission Yuppie Eradication Project" posters, suggesting that degentrification could be achieved by vandalizing SUVs. At the time, I was living one neighborhood over, and I minded the SUVs more than the yuppies.
    The creator of the MYEP posters created quite a stir, but once he had the city's ear he started using words like "bourgeois," at which point he was completely ignored.
  • 3-D Billboards and 30-Foot Smurfs Apr-1996
    • A lyric snippet from the Presidents of the United States of America (the good Presidents, that is).
  • http://scorcher/~jym/ 1994
    • At my job, we started making HTML pages as soon as the Mosaic browser was made available. My first home page was intranet-only and ran on my workstation there, so I put its URL in the Organization: field of my internal email. Later I moved the URL to an unauthorized, unofficial, etc. Home-Page: field and got back to misusing my Organization: field for the usual nonsense.
    NOTE: My workstation was named scorcher. I obtained the scorcher.org domain some years later.
  • Dilute! Dilute! OK!
    • This one's pretty geeky, so if you can't handle that sort of thing, you might want to scroll down to the next one.
    There's a Path: header field that's supposed to identify every computer that a Usenet message passes through. The computers' names are separated by the "!" character. Some programmers put things in this field which, as with these Organization: fields, were not its intended purpose. At first I just appended "!naughty-peahen" to this field, but then I put it to use in service of free speech.
    Most newsreaders don't display this header because it's boring, so sometimes we'd sneak in naughty words directed at a politician who was trying to censor the Internet. That way an automated naughty-word detector might find it but a human reader wouldn't see it. If it seems that a computer has a naughty name in a forest where nobody can read it, is it legally "indecent?" With conundrums like these, the scourge of Senator Exon was vanquished by the mighty fellowship of computer geeks.
    After that, the enthusiastic overuse of exclamation points on bottles of Dr. Bronner's soap inspired me to append "!dilute!dilute!ok!" to my Path: field. It was later promoted to an organization.
  • The Naughty Peahen Party Line
    • This is a "1-900" phone service in the comic strip Outland, which Opus would call in moments of weakness. When these particular comic strips ran, I was living in Berkeley, where peafowl roamed the streets. The noises they made during their, um, "naughty" season was considered by some to be more objectionable than the constant roar and blare of car traffic. I sided with the birds, but they eventually got evicted.
    There was also a "Nude Loon Hotline" in Outland, but other Berkeleyites had that sort of thing covered. Or, rather, uncovered. I opted to stick up for the underbird.
  • The Group W Bench Thanksgiving 1989
    • This is where you have to sit if you're "not moral enough to join the Army," according to Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant." If you don't understand that, listen to that song every Thanksgiving until you do. I've used this one for years, because I'm still sitting here on the Group W Bench.
  • Real Programmers Eat Quiche Jun-1984
    • I used to think it was fun to mock the things in popular culture that annoyed me. Alas, it just keeps them alive. I've overdone it. This mockery, however, pays homage to another, better mockery, Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL. (Warning: Geeky, though not in a nasal, dorky way.)
  • Example #22 Apr-1984
    • I was afeared of lawyers (or, rather, geeks brandishing lawyers), so I hastily switched to the title of whatever I was listening to at the time, which happened to be a Laurie Anderson song.
  • Official Mail of the 1984 Olympics Apr-1984
    •
    The 1984 Olympics took place in the U.S., which prompted hucksterish merchandising of Orwellian proportions. Junk food and other ridiculous products were licensed as "The Official ... of the 1984 Olympics." I decided that my email messages were as official as anything else, but some geek working for AT&T informed me (imagine a disdainful tone filtered through a nasal, dorky voice) that his employer was implementing The Official Messenging System of the 1984 Olympics, and if I continued to claim otherwise, he would inform his employer's legal department.

    Actual Organizations, Sorta

    On rare occasion I have actually used Organization: in the way it was intended to be used.

  • TIME'S UP!
  • Partnership of Justice
    • TIME'S UP! is an actual nonprofit organization that I'm involved with. Its logo is an X ("times") and an up-arrow ("up"), which happens to look exactly like Nordic runes which mean "partnership of justice." How cool is that?
  • Trees Not Cars Mid 2002
    • Along the lines of "Food Not Bombs" and "Homes Not Jails," I thought this up as a concept and rallying cry that would encapsulate the type of activism I do. Later on, I co-founded an actual organization with this name.
  • Berzerkely 1989
    • I used this when I was living in Berkeley, California, and was a turist on U.C. Berkeley's systems.

    The Line-Eater Bug

    Early versions of Usenet news software had a "line-eater bug" that would delete part of your message if you indented your first paragraph (or otherwise started it with whitespace). To thwart this, people would start off their messages with an amusing one-liner, to "feed" the bug.

    At first I indented my paragraphs, as I'd learned in typing class, but when I was bitten by the bug, I bit back by putting a decorative "~~~" in front of my first paragraph. (This would later evolve into all sorts of dingbats.)

    People get nostalgic about these things, because such widespread whimsy has mostly vanished from Internet messages. Since brevity is the soul of lingerie, I didn't add these to my messages very often, but I did come up with a couple.

  • @@@@@ <- Escargot for the line eater ...
  • [ If this line is eaten; and nobody sees it; was it ever really here? ]

    • The .sig File

    The .sig file is much more famous as a form of expression. In theory it's supposed to be limited to four lines and have serious information in it (your name and organization, in case the message header fields don't work), but these guidelines are routinely violated. I've taken the four-line limit as another exercise in brevity, but sometimes I'll sneak in extra lines with ascending and dangling ASCII art. My worst offender is my Marge Simpson .sig (see below).

    Boring Endlessly Exciting Technical Details

    I have to confess, not all of those were Organization: header fields. The VMS operating system's applications don't use that header field, nor have they ever had a line-eater bug, so its users have had to find other avenues to the soul of wit. Like all mailers, the ones on VMS let us specify our personal names, and if they're short (e.g. "Jym Dyer"), there's room to add an organization or quip (e.g. "Jym Dyer, Freedom Toaster").

    Sometimes the impulse to quip meant that people didn't use their names at all. My VMS peops sometimes only knew each other by email address, because their actual names were nowhere to be found. Hmmm, maybe they should implement .sig files ...

    "Brevity is ... wit."
        -- The Reading Digest Condensed Version

     =J= Jym's Home Pagejym©econet.org
                                                                 (****)
                                                          (*******)
                                                        (*********)
    <_Jym_>                                            (*********) 
   .--.                                               (*********)  
  /|   \                                             (*********)   
 / |____\__                                         (*********)     
+::| . .   \: Jym Dyer http://www.things.org/~jym/ :(o)(o)(*):::   
:::|   ____/::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::(      (*)::   
:::|  .__\:::: Annoying Republicans since 1960 :::::/__-' (*):::   
:::|   |:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|    |:::::   
                                                     OOOOOO