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!!!!

- Joel Garreau (garreau@well.com)
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