label 1000;
"What are you doing?"
"Um, writing something.."
"For this newsgroup, whatchacallit, 'talk.bizarre'?"
"Yes."
"Again?"
"Yes."
"What is this group, anyway?"
"It's a Usenet newsgroup."
"I know. I mean what are you guys writing about, there?"
"Bizarre things, mostly".
"Like what?"
"Well, I can't tell you _exactly_ what people have been writing about, it would take me eons to list all available topics that have been discussed there."
"So there's no specific topic, perse, eh?"
1000:
"Well, the topic is sort of irrelevant, as long as an article is 'bizarre'."
"So what makes an article 'bizarre'?"
"There is no accurate definition that I could use to illustrate it to you."
"Try me."
"Well, there are lots of subscribers there. Most of them are kind of 'peculiar', if you know what I mean."
"How so?"
"There are x NASA employees there, homeless veterans fluent in JAVA lingo, extremely talented poets who were molested when they were young, dangerously knowledgeable engineers who could easily mantle a nuke, as well as computer scientists, mathematicians, hippie wiccans who dye their hair purple, people who have tried just about every available chemical out there, deaf people who like bragging about the size of their penis and play chess 12 hours a day, computer scientists who had sex changes, people who can manipulate the English language like it was a female genital, people who could easily be strategic advisors or attaches with any respectable government, Christian anti-Semites, bisexuals, homosexuals, people who are in never-ending vacations, there are some Ph.D.'s there, schizophrenics, religious nuts, people with funny names, people who make fun of other people's names, people who have anal fixations with laxatives, chemists, portrait painters, sound and audio experts, music experts, mathematical logic experts, Macintosh and Windows programmers, literary experts who have probably published articles in respectable magazines, acrobats, masturbators, medical doctors, discordians and many other ones..."
[Laugh]
"You've just described a big bunch of weirdoes. How do you guys communicate _anything_ under those circumstances?"
"Well, that's where 'bizarre' comes in. It's the very fine 'veil' that ties all that together."
"I don't understand."
"Course you don't. If you understood, it'd be 'bizarre' and you'd be already a member. However, note that 'bizarre' doesn't always equal 'weird'. Bizarre _is_ weird, but weird is not necessarily bizarre."
"HUH?"
"Never mind. Let's try this: Can you define what's 'funny'?"
"Oh, I see what you mean, sorta. No. I can't."
"It's kinda like that. 'Bizarre' cannot properly be defined, likewise".
"Well, that way you are defining it indirectly though, as 'something' belonging to the class of things which cannot be properly defined. Like humor."
"It's more complicated than humor: If someone says 'x is funny', x may or may not be funny. If someone claims 'x is bizarre', x is almost certainly _never_ bizarre. Likewise, if someone claims 'x is non bizarre', x is again, almost certainly _never_ bizarre. Can you see the difference?"
"No. I am confused. Use simpler examples. If someone claims that 'x is not bizarre', then what is x? Bizarre or non bizarre?"
"It can be bizarre, non bizarre or neither, with a very high likelihood of being non bizarre."
"Is that what you guys talk about in this newsgroup?"
"No, not really. We usually tend to avoid meta-bizarreity discussions, as such arguments usually introduce Russell's Paradox."
"However, you all seem to have some crude idea about what _constitutes_ bizarre, no?"
"No. There are lots of people in the group who have absolutely no idea about what bizarre is."
"So why is it called 'talk.bizarre'?"
"I have no idea. There are only crude recursive rules there. Like, for example:
Rule #1: If an article _is_ bizarre, any follow-ups to it usually are not. And,
Rule #2: If an article is _not_ bizarre, any follow-ups to it are not.
Rule #3: Don't follow-up on articles."
"Is there a possibility a follow-up _can_ be bizarre?"
"Yes, but see Rule #3."
"I think you are just wasting your time there. Are there any people who have _any_ idea about what bizarre is?"
"Of course. The people who write various 'bizarre' articles."
"On what topic?"
goto 1000;