On looking through some old files, I found a file from mid-1989 titled “peter.anecdotes.” He must have sent me these notes in email at some point (see a forthcoming entry about Peter and email), but I don’t know exactly when (probably early ’89), and I’m not sure whether these three paragraphs were all in the same message or in different ones.<\/p>\n
Here’s the contents of the file:<\/p>\n
\nWhen the poet Gregory Corso (Allen Ginsberg’s Friend) was 21 he went into a police station in Brooklyn and announced “Now that I have attained my majority I demand to be executed!” (Some sens’a huma’, some people have….) They not only didn’t oblige him, they confined him to Belleview for observation for a few weeks. The day I was 21 I went into a tavern where I’d been drinking for 3 years, feeling deliciously legal: “Today’s my birthday Jack — buy me a beer…!” “Here — how old are ya?” “TWENTY-ONE!” “Arrgghh!!” I imagine you can come up with something better than these for yours.<\/p>\n
Did you hear about the Dan Quayle bond issue? No principles, no interest, and never matures. Dan Quayle asked his opinion about Rowe vs. Wade: “Yeah, well, those are two ways to get across the Potomac…?”<\/p>\n
Ok, I’m going back to work — it was nice talking to you…. It was far out that I’d ask you for the first time a question that for the first time you had a non-empty answer for…. The Cosmic Coincidence Control Center also arranged last week for me to write a letter to my boss detailing a scenario whereby a user could get “permanently” locked out of his\/her system (at least until the CMOS chip is electrically discharged by removing the battery for a while). The author of the BIOS, a likable guy from Italy, assured me for twenty minutes that this scenario was outlandish and would never happen in a billion years etc. That afternoon, for the first time in more than a year, the “worst-case” happened in the product manager’s lab (a system in which a password had never been specified suddenly demanded one…). All and sundry were blown away. Why do ducks dive into the water? (For divers’ reasons…) Why do ducks lie on a rock in the sun? (For sun-dry reasons…) Enough.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I posted the Peter-turning-21 story in this blog a while back, but I figured it was worth posting his version.<\/p>\n
I think the question he mentions above was probably something like “Do you have a girlfriend?” Although the timing on that doesn’t seem right. Not sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On looking through some old files, I found a file from mid-1989 titled “peter.anecdotes.” He must have sent me these notes in email at some point (see a forthcoming entry about Peter and email), but I don’t know exactly when (probably early ’89), and I’m not sure whether these three paragraphs were all in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-things-peter-said"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/peter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}