QUESTION: Where do the
characters go when I use my backspace or delete them on my PC?
ANSWER: The characters go to
different places, depending on whom you ask:
The Catholic Church's approach to
characters: The nice characters go to Heaven, where they are bathed in the light of
happiness. The naughty characters are punished for their sins. Naughty characters are
those involved in the creation of naughty words, such as "breast,"
"sex" and "contraception."
The Buddhist explanation: If a
character has lived rightly, and its karma is good, then after it has been deleted it will
be reincarnated as a different, higher character. Those funny characters above the numbers
on your keyboard will become numbers, numbers will become letters, and lower-case letters
will become upper-case.
The 20th-century bitter cynical
nihilist explanation: Who cares? It doesn't really matter if they're on the page, deleted,
undeleted, underlined, etc. It's all the same.
The Mac user's explanation: All the
characters written on a PC and then deleted go to straight to PC hell. If you're using a
PC, you can probably see the deleted characters, because you're in PC hell also.
Stephen King's explanation: Every
time you hit the (Del) key you unleash a tiny monster inside the cursor, who tears the
poor unsuspecting characters to shreds, drinks their blood, then eats them, bones and all.
Hah, hah, hah!
Dave Barry's explanation: The deleted
characters are shipped to Battle Creek, Michigan, where they're made into Pop-Tart
filling; this explains why Pop-Tarts are so flammable, while cheap imitations are not
flammable. I'm not making this up.
IBM's explanation: The characters are
not real. They exist only on the screen when they are needed, as concepts, so to delete
them is merely to de-conceptualize them. Get a life.
PETA's (People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals) explanation: You've been DELETING them??? Can't you hear them
SCREAMING??? Why don't you go CLUB some BABY SEALS while wearing a MINK, you pig!!!!