The Ishmael Gradsdovic Papers, part fifty-seven

Ishmael blows the lid off of the Ultraviolet Banausic Buncombe Society


Article 5884 of slo.punks:
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From: igradsdo@polyslo.csc.calpoly.edu (Ishmael Gradsdovic)
Subject: A confession and an apology
Message-ID: <1994Sep17.012256.15916@rat.csc.calpoly.edu>
Date: Sat, 17 Sep 94 01:22:56 GMT
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Reply-To: igradsdo@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Ishmael Gradsdovic)
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Well, this isn't likely to win me any popularity points, but it needs to be said. This is a story that is going to be some time in the telling, but here it is -- apologies in advance to any who may be offended or hurt.

One day when I was walking downtown on my lunch break, I came across some fliers stuck to a telephone pole. Written on them in dim, deep purple, were the words: "Can You Read This? If so, call (800) XXX-XXXX" Being a curious sort, and the number being toll-free, I gave them a call.

I couldn't figure out what they were driving at from the flier. "Can You Read This?" like there's some shortage of people who can read English in the U.S. I figured it was some sort of weird advertising ploy. Turns out it was much weirder than that.

When I called the number I was thanked for calling and welcomed to the club. What club? I wondered, but went along with it. When they asked if they could send me some information, I said "Sure!" I'm always up for weird propaganda showing up in my mailbox.

The information they sent me was well-written and convincing. I'll give a summary:

There is variance in the human population as to the sensitivity of our senses. Some people have wider ranges of hearing than others, for instance, and there are some flavors that a certain percentage of the population can taste easily that the rest cannot taste at all. This isn't news to anyone.

Sometimes this variance is gradual, continuous, other times (like in color blindness) it is discrete. This is the case of people who called the 1-800 number listed above. The fliers were printed using an ink which only reflected light that to most people in the population is outside of the range of visibility.

It all depends on how the buncombic system in your retina is set up (this is actually shorthand, there is no "buncombic" system per se. What this refers to is a set of genetic markers in the same region as that which indicates color blindness that effect the eye's color sensitivity and range), whether you are set up to have a finer granularity in your detection of variation in the green range (like most people do), or whether you have a broader violet limit. Nothing too exciting about that.

If you have Ultraviolet Banausic Buncombe (literally "more useful buncombes") Syndrome, you can read the flier. That's the big secret.

Well, the people I called (the Ultraviolet Banausic Buncombe Society), had a lot of strange ideas about what this meant. At first it was all in fun, jokes that we were aliens from another planet or genetically engineered super beings. Pretty soon, though, people started taking it seriously in a sort of star-bellied sneeches way.

Pretty soon you'd see graffiti in public restrooms written in UV+ ink poking fun of the less banausic. At PIT, where I work, the people who had the syndrome would take advantage of this to post messages and write notes that only they could read.

Pretty soon, t-shirts came out that could only be read by people with the syndrome. Bumper-stickers soon followed that said one thing if you didn't have the syndrome, and another if you did. (No computer applications yet; nobody figured out any but the most primitive ways of controlling UV+ monitor output).

There were a lot of in-jokes among the banausic crowd, and a general feeling of camraderie and togetherness. We'd have meetings and view works of art that only banausic people could get the full range of appreciation of. We'd speculate on the genetic origins of the syndrome (many people believed that those with the expanded green-area granularity were genetically closer to our tree-living ancestors than the more genetically developed banausic UV+ types) and remind people to keep the secret to themselves. It was kind of neat, in a James Bond sort of way. A pile of seemingly blank paper on your desk might in actuality be the Society's newsletter.

Famous people were discovered to be in on the joke. Richard Gere, Olivia Newton-John, Al Gore, to name three. Neat stuff. There was wild speculation at one point as to whether an infrared-sensitive subgroup was engaged in similar shenanigans, but it turns out that although such a condition exists (much rarer than the UV+ variant), they are not mutually exclusive (although those with both conditions are invariably red/green color blind as well), and some people who could see further out both ends said that as far as they knew no such group existed (they could be lying, or there might be such a group now, I don't know)

Well, as it turns out, things were never quite as secret as the society had originally hoped. Word leaked out here and there, and methods for people without the syndrome to view UV+ with special glasses and such were invented. Suddenly there was a little consternation, as the dirty laundry of the banausic folks was in danger of being aired to the normals.

And what was aired wasn't too pretty. Some of it was just trivial stuff exchanged between people curious about what this whole thing meant, but some of the nastier comments about "normals" were embarassing. Some people who never thought of themselves as the frat boy or sorority chick type were acting mighty Greek behind closed doors.

I'll admit, I was one of them. Most of it was all in fun, but I know I was communicating things to my UV+ brethren (and sestren?) that look awfully elitist and nasty when viewed in another context.

But I've had a change of heart. I've thrown away my UV+ pens and toner cartridge; I've cancelled my subscription to the newsletter. If I see some- thing written in UV+, I'll read it, but I won't feel any hesitation translating for a Green Meanie (UV+ slang for non UV+). No more secrets. It just breeds hostility and mean-spirited us-vs-themism.

My apologies to any UV+ friends I may have offended by this coming-out-of-the- closet, and especially to the non UV+ folks who have been the ignorant victims of this whole affair.

-- 
***** INTERNET: igradsdo@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU **** finger for PGP public key *****
"You know the difficulty with a president when he makes a statement is that
 everybody checks to see whether it is true."
					-- Richard Nixon
  

Article 5893 of slo.punks:
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Path: rat!zeus!cambler
From: cambler@harp.aix.calpoly.edu (Christopher Ambler)
Subject: Re: A confession and an apology
Message-ID: <1994Sep19.092151.138351@zeus.aix.calpoly.edu>
Sender: news@zeus.calpoly.edu
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Date: Mon, 19 Sep 1994 09:21:51 GMT
igradsdo@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Ishmael Gradsdovic) says:
>Famous people were discovered to be in on the joke.  Richard Gere, Olivia
>Newton-John, Al Gore, to name three.
  
Now, this is complete tripe. Al Gore is *not* a member. If you want to know how I know, ask me in e-mail, I'm not keen on giving anything away on here. Now that you've posted, I guess it's no secret around here (it's been common knowledge in LA for a couple of months now, and a San Francisco member-friend of mine says that all the fliers have been taken down), but *I'm* not going to volunteer any information other than to deny that Al Gore is a member.
>Well, as it turns out, things were never quite as secret as the society had
>originally hoped.  Word leaked out here and there, and methods for people
>without the syndrome to view UV+ with special glasses and such were invented.
  
I challenge you to show me a pair of these glasses. I have yet to see them, and frankly, don't believe you for a minute. How can a lens STEP UP or STEP DOWN the frequency of light so that a GM can see it?
 
>I'll admit, I was one of them.  Most of it was all in fun, but I know I was
>communicating things to my UV+ brethren (and sestren?) that look awfully
>elitist and nasty when viewed in another context.
  
That's YOUR opinion, Ishmael. I see it merely as those with an ability using it. If this logic holds up, should you allow EVERYONE to tap into your phone calls since you have the ABILITY to make a private call? Perhaps all your email should be posted to news? Just because you have the ability to communicate in UV+, must you consider it elitist?
>My apologies to any UV+ friends I may have offended by this coming-out-of-the-
>closet, and especially to the non UV+ folks who have been the ignorant victims
>of this whole affair.
  
Oh, I'm not offended, per se. I'll still have an ability that a GM won't have, and will use it as I like. If you translate anything of mine that you feel you must, I'll just consider it a breach of privacy, and deny it. How can anyone other than a UV+ know? But I have lost a bit of respect for you, since you DID take a pledge that you'd never reveal any of this. But, like I said, it's not much of a secret anymore, so you really havn't said much.

Oh, and as for an IR analogue, I've heard that there are some, but that they have to have a heat-source to make it bright enough to see, as the reflected imaging washes out in visible light. I would think it would be too expensive for them to really get something going. Besides, it's much rarer, and there are even less people in that group. Just FYI.

-- 
++Christopher(); // Christopher J. Ambler (chris@uuplus.com)
Fubar Systems BBS --- 805-54-FUBAR --- 8 Lines at 14400 & 28800 BPS
The above verbosity is strictly the opinion of the author, various AI, an ISDN 
Internet connection, and the occasional Ozric Tentacles CD. So There.
  

Article 5897 of slo.punks:
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Path: rat!polyslo.csc.calpoly.edu!igradsdo
From: igradsdo@polyslo.csc.calpoly.edu (Ishmael Gradsdovic)
Subject: Re: A confession and an apology
Message-ID: <1994Sep20.162837.12783@rat.csc.calpoly.edu>
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 94 16:28:37 GMT
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According to cambler@harp.aix.calpoly.edu (Christopher Ambler):
>igradsdo@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Ishmael Gradsdovic) says:
>>Famous people were discovered to be in on the joke.  Richard Gere, Olivia
>>Newton-John, Al Gore, to name three.
>
>Now, this is complete tripe. Al Gore is *not* a member. If you want to know
>how I know, ask me in e-mail, I'm not keen on giving anything away on here.
  

Well, I have this from one of the campaign staffers for Gore back during the election. The way he found out about it was that he was the one who got Grateful Dead tickets for the Gore family. The Dead have a problem with counterfeit tickets, and one way they deal with this is to use UV+ ink on the tickets, which then glows under a blacklight so that people at the gate can detect which tickets are good and which aren't. This discourages scalping (actually, it doesn't, but that's the theory, anyway). In any case, the Dead usually put cutesy messages in UV+ ink on the tickets -- lyrics from their songs, that sort of thing -- when Gore got his tickets, he looked `em over and spouted the lyric ("all I want to know is are you kind?" I think) that was on the tickets. I don't know how he could have done this unless he was a UV+ guy. Coincidence seems a little far-fetched, unless you think Gore was trying to arrange a drug deal with this guy (for those not in the know, "the kind" is Deadhead lingo for marijuana).

>I challenge you to show me a pair of these glasses. I have yet to see them, and
>frankly, don't believe you for a minute. How can a lens STEP UP or STEP DOWN
>the frequency of light so that a GM can see it?
  

"Glasses" was misleading. They're actually goggles that use some sort of electronic contraption, not just lenses. I think it just splits the spectrum, siphons off the UV+ stuff up to a certain range, then sends that to a phosphorescent screen like the inside of a CRT. I'm not really sure, though.

 
>>I'll admit, I was one of them.  Most of it was all in fun, but I know I was
>>communicating things to my UV+ brethren (and sestren?) that look awfully
>>elitist and nasty when viewed in another context.
>
>That's YOUR opinion, Ishmael. I see it merely as those with an ability using it.
>If this logic holds up, should you allow EVERYONE to tap into your phone calls
>since you have the ABILITY to make a private call? Perhaps all your email 
>should be posted to news? Just because you have the ability to communicate
>in UV+, must you consider it elitist?
  

No, not at all. It's not the medium, necessarily, but the message. If we were content to say, "look at this neat thing we have in common" I wouldn't have felt so squicked about it. It was the whole star-bellied sneeches aspect of the actual conversations that resulted that got to me.

-- 
***** INTERNET: igradsdo@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU **** finger for PGP public key *****
"That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling
 like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust."
					-- Gustave Flaubert
  

Article 5894 of slo.punks:
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Path: rat!news
From: awozniak@galaxy.csc.calpoly.edu (Adam P Wozniak)
Subject: Re: A confession and an apology
Message-ID: <1994Sep19.165624.6746@rat.csc.calpoly.edu>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 94 16:56:24 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Department, Cal Poly SLO
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Ishmael Gradsdovic  wrote:
>
>Well, as it turns out, things were never quite as secret as the society had
>originally hoped.  Word leaked out here and there, and methods for people
>without the syndrome to view UV+ with special glasses and such were invented.
>Suddenly there was a little consternation, as the dirty laundry of the
>banausic folks was in danger of being aired to the normals.
>
>And what was aired wasn't too pretty.  Some of it was just trivial stuff
>exchanged between people curious about what this whole thing meant, but some of
>the nastier comments about "normals" were embarassing.  Some people who never
>thought of themselves as the frat boy or sorority chick type were acting
>mighty Greek behind closed doors.
>
>I'll admit, I was one of them.  Most of it was all in fun, but I know I was
>communicating things to my UV+ brethren (and sestren?) that look awfully
>elitist and nasty when viewed in another context.
>
>But I've had a change of heart.  I've thrown away my UV+ pens and toner
>cartridge; I've cancelled my subscription to the newsletter.  If I see some-
>thing written in UV+, I'll read it, but I won't feel any hesitation translating
>for a Green Meanie (UV+ slang for non UV+).  No more secrets.  It just breeds
>hostility and mean-spirited us-vs-themism.
>
>My apologies to any UV+ friends I may have offended by this coming-out-of-the-
>closet, and especially to the non UV+ folks who have been the ignorant victims
>of this whole affair.
  

Sorry Ishmael, I'm holding on to my UV+ pen. It may seem elitist from the outside, but everybody has friends who they tell their troubles to from time to time, and we're not any different from the GMs except that we've chosen a different way to communicate with each other.

These people are, after all, my friends. Your coming out and apologizing this way isn't going to change what I have to say. I meant what I said, and I said what I meant (an elephant's faithful, one hundred percent).

--
a o n     a a     l o y e u           l s ?   r         o         !       
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      a @     y c             E t m             n   y b   d   S c   S c ! 
               .               a   y                                   k  
  

Article 5899 of slo.punks:
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Path: rat!zeus!jemenake
From: jemenake@harp.aix.calpoly.edu (Joe Emenaker)
Subject: Re: A confession and an apology
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References: <1994Sep17.012256.15916@rat.csc.calpoly.edu>
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Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 18:01:56 GMT
Ishmael Gradsdovic  wrote:
>Well, this isn't likely to win me any popularity points, but it needs to be
>said.  This is a story that is going to be some time in the telling, but here
>it is -- apologies in advance to any who may be offended or hurt.
  
(snip)
>Well, the people I called (the Ultraviolet Banausic Buncombe Society), had
>a lot of strange ideas about what this meant.  At first it was all in fun,
>jokes that we were aliens from another planet or genetically engineered super
>beings.  Pretty soon, though, people started taking it seriously in a sort of
>star-bellied sneeches way.
>
>Pretty soon you'd see graffiti in public restrooms written in UV+ ink poking
>fun of the less banausic.  At IPT, where I work, the people who had the
>syndrome would take advantage of this to post messages and write notes that
>only they could read.
  

Ishmael,

Normally, I'd believe this about as far as I can throw a piano, but Chris seems to be backing you up here. So, I'll believe you under two conditions:

  1. You produce one of these quazi-invisible ink pens, and
  2. You allow me to write something with it (that others can't read) and prove that you can read it.
-- 
Joe Emenaker - Sexual Engineer | Our infernal mailer daemon has been quite
   jemenake@oboe.calpoly.edu   | insistent that my signature be limited to just
Linux:"This isn't your father's| 4 lines. However, as you can see, I have
Oldsmo-Unix!" - DON'T finger me| figured out an elegant way to put as many as
  

Article 5900 of slo.punks:
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Path: rat!zeus!tuba.aix.calpoly.edu!jcenter
From: jcenter@tuba.aix.calpoly.edu (The Free Radical)
Subject: Re: A confession and an apology
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Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 18:16:41 GMT
Joe Emenaker (jemenake@harp.aix.calpoly.edu) blead onto cyberpaper:
->Ishmael Gradsdovic  wrote:
->>Well, this isn't likely to win me any popularity points, but it needs to be
->>said.  This is a story that is going to be some time in the telling, but here
->>it is -- apologies in advance to any who may be offended or hurt.

->(snip)

->>Well, the people I called (the Ultraviolet Banausic Buncombe Society), had
->>a lot of strange ideas about what this meant.  At first it was all in fun,
->>jokes that we were aliens from another planet or genetically engineered super
->>beings.  Pretty soon, though, people started taking it seriously in a sort of
->>star-bellied sneeches way.
->>
->>Pretty soon you'd see graffiti in public restrooms written in UV+ ink poking
->>fun of the less banausic.  At IPT, where I work, the people who had the
->>syndrome would take advantage of this to post messages and write notes that
->>only they could read.

->Ishmael,
->	Normally, I'd believe this about as far as I can throw a piano,
->but Chris seems to be backing you up here. So, I'll believe you under
->two conditions:
->	1 - You produce one of these quazi-invisible ink pens, and
->	2 - You allow me to write something with it (that others can't
->            read) and prove that you can read it.
  
Ok, ok. is this stuff for REAL?? Seems a bit bogus.

The Free Radical


Article 5901 of slo.punks:
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Path: rat!zeus!gauss.elee.calpoly.edu!asamonte
From: asamonte@gauss.elee.calpoly.edu (Just some loser...)
Subject: Re: A confession and an apology
Message-ID: <1994Sep20.183533.121740@zeus.aix.calpoly.edu>
Sender: news@zeus.calpoly.edu
Organization: Nothing worth mentioning...
References: <1994Sep17.012256.15916@rat.csc.calpoly.edu> <1994Sep20.180156.104913@zeus.aix.calpoly.edu>
Distribution: slo
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 18:35:33 GMT
jemenake@harp.aix.calpoly.edu (Joe Emenaker) was telling me...
>Ishmael Gradsdovic  wrote:
>>Well, this isn't likely to win me any popularity points, but it needs to be
>>said.  This is a story that is going to be some time in the telling, but here
>>it is -- apologies in advance to any who may be offended or hurt.
>
>Ishmael,
>	Normally, I'd believe this about as far as I can throw a piano,
>but Chris seems to be backing you up here. So, I'll believe you under
>two conditions:
  

Since when has Chris been the upholder of truth and morality?

If Chris were backing me up, i'd be worried.

-Alex



email Ishmael