See, I don't think the facts are in doubt. Now whether you want to remove the president over this, well, that's the judgment call!

I did love Bumpers -- exactly the right approach to get the teetering, on both sides, off the hook, while preserving self-righteousness.

D.C. mayor's aide quits
after word is taken as racial slur

January 27, 1999, Web posted at: 3:46 a.m. EST (0846 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An aide to the District of Columbia's mayor resigned Tuesday citing pressure from controversy over his use of the word "niggardly," which some deemed a racial slur.

But even as he stepped down, David Howard, who is white, said the word does not have any racial connotation.

"Mr. Howard's resignation was prompted by reports that he made an inappropriate racial comment," newly-elected Mayor Anthony Williams, who is black, said in a statement Tuesday night.

In a separate statement, Howard identified the word he used as "niggardly" in a staff meeting and said he was referring to a fund he administers. Howard said it means "miserly."

Webster's Tenth Edition concurs, defining it as "grudgingly mean about spending or granting." The dictionary dates its use to the late 16th century.

Williams told reporters Tuesday that holding a senior public office required good judgment, adding, "I don't think that the use of this term showed the kind of judgment that I like to see in our top management."

Because the word sounds like a racial epithet, Howard said, he realized other members of the mayor's staff present when he made the remark were offended. He said he quickly apologized.

But he said that since he made the remark on January 15, he has received many angry phone calls from people who thought he made a racist remark. About two-thirds of the capital city's half million population is black.

"I would never think of making a racist remark," said Howard, whose job was to hear the concerns of district residents and bring them to the attention of the mayor and his staff.

"I realize that this rumor has severely compromised my effectiveness as the district's public advocate and, in the best interest of my office, I resigned," he said.

In accepting Howard's resignation, Williams said he is "committed to representing all of the people of our city and making sure my administration truly reflects the city's diversity."

Williams said the issue reflects a "hurt" and "great divide" within the city and that race relations must be talked about openly in the nation's capital.

What if all computer users who aren’t using their preloaded Windows copies tried to get their money back from Microsoft Corp. — all on the same day? This experiment in exploiting a little-known loophole in Microsoft’s End User License Agreement may come to pass on Feb. 15, if a self-appointed "Windows Refund"group has its way.

is that the cat who ate your new shoes?"

I believe you would get considerably more bang for your laughter buck if you put the line back to the way it was originally:

"is that the cat who chewed your new shoes?"

MEMORANDUM

RE: Computer Software Warning

Last year a friend of mine upgraded GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog leaving very little system resources for other applications. He is only now noticing that Wife 1.0 also is spawning Child-Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. He's finding that some applications such as PokerNight 8.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before).

At installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-ins such as Mother-in-Law 55.8, and Brother-in-Law Beta release. Also system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.

Some features he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0. - A "Don't remind me again" button - Minimize button - An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 to be installed with the option to uninstall at anytime without the loss of cache and other system resources. - An option to run the network driver in promiscuous mode that would allow the systems hardware probe feature to be much more useful.

I myself decided to avoid all the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 2.0. Even here, however, I found many problems. Apparently you cannot install GirlFriend 2.0 on top of GirFriend 1.0. You must uninstall GirlFriend 1.0 first. Other users say this is a long-standing bug that I should have been aware of.

Apparently the versions of GirlFriend have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. You think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now.

To make matters worse, the uninstall program for GirlFriend 1.0 doesn't work very well leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system.

Another thing that sucks - all versions of GirlFriend continually pop up little annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.

**************BUG WARNING****************

Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.

January 18, 1 B.C.

Dear Cassius,

Are you still working on the Y zero K problem? This change from BC to AD is giving us a lot of headaches and we haven't much time left. I don't know how people will cope with working the wrong way around. Having been working happily downwards forever, now we have to start thinking upwards. You would think that someone would have thought of it earlier and not left it to us to sort out at the last minute.

I spoke to Caesar the other evening. He was livid that Julius hadn't done something about it when he was sorting out the calendar. He said he could see why Brutus turned nasty. We called in the consulting astrologers, but they simply said that continuing downwards using minus BC won't work. As usual, the consultants charged a fortune for doing nothing useful. As for myself, I just can't see the sand in an hourglass flowing upwards.

We have heard that there are 3 wise guys in the east working on the problem, but unfortunately they won't arrive till it's all over. Some say the world will cease to exist at the moment of transition. Anyway we are continuing to work on this blasted Y zero K problem and I will send you a parchment if anything further develops.

Plutonius.

Re: Vacation

Dear Valued Employee:

Our records indicate that you have not used any vacation time over the past 102 year(s). As I'm sure you are aware, employees are granted 3 weeks of paid leave per year or pay in lieu of time off.

One additional week is granted for every 5 years of service. Please either take 9,430 days off work or notify our office and your next paycheck will reflect payment of $8,277,432.22 that will include all pay and interest for the past 1,224 months.

Sincerely,

Payroll Department

A correction published in last Monday's Houston Chronicle failed to tell the entire story.