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Dear Family and Friends of Jean and Henry,
Ho, hum Ho, Ho! It’s time again for the
annual Halff’s Impersonal Christmas Form Letter, brought to you
by moi, the official Halff family historian, hired to give you, dear
readers, an objective account of the rather boring events in this
rather boring family’s past year. Ah, well, the pay is good, and
you can’t beat the San Antonio for Mexican food. If you find
this letter offensive in any way, please contact my employers: Henry
Halff (henry@texas.net), Jean
Halff (jeanw@texas.net), and
Cady (http://www.quiensabe.com).
"So, what have we here," say I, thumbing through an illegible and far from complete diary, "mainly madness and misfortune."
Mr. Halff’s already tenuous hold on a productive professional life rests mainly on a small project to produce a computer program that makes it easy for knowledgeable just plain folk to make other computer programs that not-so-knowledgeable just plain folk can use to become knowledgeable, in whatever the knowledgeable just plain folk are knowledgeable. Are you with me?* So, suppose you know something about neuroanatomy, like maybe the cranial nerves, and you get a job where you have to teach 600,000 people the cranial nerves. (This happens all the time&emdash;really.) Now you know that you can’t give a lecture to 600,000 people, so you use this first computer program to make another computer program that people can use to learn the cranial nerves, and you give the second program (the one on the cranial nerves) to the 600,000 people, like maybe they can download it from the Internet, and they run the program on their personal computers and it teaches them the cranial nerves. Cool, eh? Or maybe you know how to fix Philco tube radios and some guy in Borneo … . "Book?"you say, "Why not just write a book?" How the hell do I know; I’m just the family historian.
Mr. Halff has spent most of his year presenting the explanation given above to various audiences, none of which seem to grasp the essential concepts. Nonetheless a prototype of his marvelous program has been well received, probably because teachers and their students can use it to play with computers while appearing to be engaged in productive work. We only wish that the six dozen research proposals that Mr. Halff sent to various funding agencies had been equally well received.
Having discharged my duty to misrepresent Mr.
Halff as a practicing researcher, I can now turn to more important
events of the past year.
Mr. Halff’s decision to abandon his post-modern radical feminist deconstructionist pagan stance has had certain unfortunate consequences on his life. He has, in particular, taken up many of the habits associated with the male of the species, including beer-drinking, football-watching, and wife-ignoring. This last brand of peccadillo has paid off handsomely for the ignored wife since she has been able to extract two (2) cruises by way of penance.
One cruise, to the Caribbean, provided a interesting view of a new-age institution known as "The Inner Voyage." Participants in the The Inner Voyage experience are of three classes: (1) Guests, about 800 individuals of the New Age persuasion who pay a premium of $1,000 to sit in a darkened auditorium on a cruise ship and listen to Class 2 participants instead of enjoying the Caribbean; (2) Guest Speakers, who, in the darkened auditorium, regale Class 1 participants with blatant but comforting new-age lies, in order to sell these Class 1 participants books with more blatant but comforting new-age lies; and (3) Promoters who stay in port and plot ways of avoiding taxes on $800,000. Worth noting is that Class 1 participants try to defray the $1,000 premium by peddling noxious smelling oils, Chinese backscratchers, inspirational tapes and other New-Age paraphernalia to other Class 1 participants. Class 1 participants are known to be economically challenged. It is not known, however, whether, on cruise ships, they have qualify for consideration through the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The second cruise, to Alaska, afforded an excellent view of that state (or some small portion of it) from a safe distance. Guests were wisely prevented from approaching such hazards as grizzly bears, moose, and avalanche-prone areas. Nonetheless, the cruise offered plenty of opportunities for adventure in the form of excursions to the state’s most dangerous regions&emdash;the shopping districts of its coastal towns and cities. Pictures of the adventure can be found at http://www.quiensabe.com/gallery/alaska/.
While not cruising, the Halffs occupied themselves in the customary ways&emdash;surfing the internet, biking, swimming, and attending lectures sponsored by the oxymoronical Mind Science Foundation.
On the biking front, the elite Mei Technology triathlon team lost two runners and a swimmer to attrition this year and was reduced to participation as a two-person team in a sponsored century bike ride in October. The team, Mr. Halff and Ms. Brenda Wenzel, did what none of the previous Mei teams had managed to do; they came in last&emdash;way last, 3.5-hours-after-the-event-closed last. This historian suspects that their record will stand a long, long time, or at least until the same team tries the same stunt again.
The Mind Science Foundation also broke with tradition this year. Amid the usual parade of mind readers and guru wannabes, they sponsored (probably unintentionally) a speaker who actually presented factual information and data (on demography, if you must know). Judging from the reception given to the speaker by both people in the audience, the Foundation will never make that mistake again. We look forward to next year to the return of psychic psychiatrists, UFOlogists, gullible anthropologists, and other comedic personalities.
Mr. Halff’s son, Larry, continues his meteoric rise (Don’t meteors fall?) in the Internet business. Bitmovers, Inc. (http://www.bitmovers.com) is expected to purchase America On-Line next year in preparation for a hostile takeover of Microsoft in 1900**.
The Halffs, as is their occasional habit, are spending Christmas in San Diego this year, leaving me here with nothing but a laptop computer, a plate of nachos and a bottle of Herradura. On that note, I close with the Halffs’ recommendation that the rest of you feast on tamales, wash them down with a couple of Celis Dubbels, two-step around the Christmas tree, and keep the spirit of Christmas going as long as we possibly can.
Three big blondes |
Christmas |
Bro Halff, from the volume a winter garden. San Diego: Simpler Gifts Press, 1992.
* Ross Perot, 1980.** Automatic Date Insertion System, Copyright Microsoft Corporation, 1998 (pat. pending).
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