LETTERS TO VOO DOO

Dear Phos,

As I sit here reading your rag (v76 n1) instead of writing the paper due in 7 hours, I see what would be an otherwise almost funny, at least worth the space it filled, ``Freshman Sensitivity Exam.'' The kicker, item G, a man with a bird on his head, keyed as ``Jimmy Buffet Fans,'' really pisses me off. First of all, you spellled [sic] his name wrong. Try 2 Fs and 2 Ts: BUFFETT. Buffet is what you eat at Lobdell, a smorgasbord, not an experience. Second, what is that clip art picture? Hell, I saw Jerry Garcia running down Mem Drive yesterday, at least get a cool picture to put with a cool bird.

- Just a frustrated Cambridge Parrothead

p.s. that's the term you would have used for Jimmy Buffett fan had you had a clue.

Dear Sirs,

We shall pick the ripened beans of democratic possibility from the plants of our troubled history, roast them over the fires of patience, grind them in the mills of effort and diplomacy, and then, pouring the hot water of American military assistance over these grounds of hope, we shall prepare the coffee of reconciliation through the filter of justice.

Thank you. Thank you.

President Aristide
hiding in my sock drawer, somewhere in Haiti

If you persist in sending me your mindless drug numbed pornographic rag, at least have the good graces to mail it to the correct address!

John Grenfell
Thorndike, Maine

To the entity responsible for the crop circles by the Green Building:

What does it all mean?!!

Bob Ufo

Dear Phos,

What is it that makes cab drivers think that by putting the car in reverse and driving backwards on a one-way street, they're somehow not breaking the law? Actually, now that I think of it, maybe it is OK. If they break the speed limit by -50 m.p.h. in reverse, do we owe them money too?

Ted Kennedy

Dear Voo Doo,

The Doc Edgerton story was funny.

-lifto

Dear Editor,

In the last week, we have met with representatives from the mills which supply our paper. At this time, we would like to share with you the information we received concerning the supply and demand of paper markets. We have been advised by our suppliers that there has been an increased demand for newsprint and offset stocks due to the following reasons:

• (1) The devaluation of the dollar has made it more profitable for paper mills to supply the demands of foreign customers in Europe and Japan than their customers in the United States;
• reasons 2 - 6 deleted, blah blah blah... -- ed.
• (7) The demand by large newspaper companies such as New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post, just to name a few, has increased through January 1.

We have, fortunately, established excellent relationships with our paper companies and they have stated that they will be able to supply us with our inventory requirement provided we give them sufficient notice to produce these orders.

To this end, we would like to request that you provide us with your printing schedules for the next six months. These can, of course, be approximations, but should be as accurate as you can possibly foresee. This information is imperative in order to ensure that we receive adequate inventory as well as plan production time for your publication.

Sincerely,

Richard Saltzberg
President, Chuck River Press

Dear Richard,

Thank you for your letter of September 13, 1994, laying out in gory detail the difficulties with the world's paper supply. We will be happy to provide you with our publication schedule, as best as we can determine it.

Please be aware that our schedule is subject to a variety of considerations, some of which I enumerate here:

• (1) MIT Physical Plant may decide to route the Kosher Kitchen's chimney through our darkroom. This would make our paltry facility the largest concentration of hot, toxic gases this side of Bhopal.
• (2) An increase in cattle mutilations by malevolent aliens will increase the price of beef on the world market, which will in turn increase our expenses on hamburger.
• (3) There is no reason (3).
• (4) Someone may mistake our door for GAMIT's and spray pink foam all over it.
• (5) My thesis proposal may be approved.
• (6) Two words: friendly fire.
• (7) We may have finally reached that critical mass of people that we have pissed off.

Please contact us if you require any clarifications.

Sincerely,

Phosphorous

To my dearest Phos, for whom the sun appears to rise up out of the sea,

How I long to gaze upon your delicately sculpted china-doll earlobes, so cool and glimmering against the fiery beauty shining from the folds of your deep, wavy hair. Your fine nasal hairs glisten beneath your lovely proboscis like the cilia of a paramecium in the silver autumn moonlight. I miss the sweet caress of your elegant feet and think back to the days when we used to lie beneath the old oak tree near the river and pick the lint from each other's toes. I remember how the soft, supple folds of your elbow reminded me of the billowy clouds overhead. How the wind blowing through the hair on your dainty fingers reminded me of the rabbit-bitten meadow grass in March. I remember the hours we spent together picking out conic sections, and rational functions, and modulated sinusoidal waves dotted on the azure sky in soft white cotton. You brightened the darkness of my heart like electrons excite the atoms in a tube of rarefied gas and shone into my life with the radiance of a billion gigacandelas. We went together like the carbohydrate and lipid chains on a virus match and the receptors on an antibody, and shared our lives with each other like two covalently bonded atoms share electrons in a diatomic molecule. The warmth of your heart had the kinetic energy to cause hydrogen bonds to break in the amorphous, bacteria resultant, dairy product in a cheese sandwich across the room.

Now my life is darkness. I cannot wait for us to be together again.

The day I lost you was like running into a hard cold wall. The consistency of my heart is nothing without the starch metamucil-like fiber of your love. You stretch my heart strings like the croakies that firmly hold the myopia correcting lenses on to my watermelon shaped head. The cold, harsh world echoes in my ears and dances distorted before my strained eyes. Every day becomes a search for your Venetian beauty; the disappointment, the agony, the defeat when I realize I have missed you again freezes and cracks my heart like a rubber ball in liquid nitrogen. Sadness looms over my soul like a herd of yaks, and God himself seems to laugh at how pathetic a wretch my longing for you has turned me into. My heart smitten and my spirit broken, I drudge on through the day like a marionette dragged through the dirt. The warm love I once had has turned to an absolute void, and can grow no colder, no denser. My universe has collapsed and shrunk into nothingness.

The thought of you reenters my mind, and then, like a cataclysmic collision of a proton and an antiproton, the universe is light again. I remember our love, our undying love, that marches on towards total passion until all energy is dissipated as heat. My thoughts of you abound like fissioning uranium atoms in a supercritical situation. I feel like our love was as powerful as the hydrogen fusion reactions of a billion billion stars raging across the firmament and I ask, how could it have ended?

-Lustful in Lobdell