Re: YASOD: yet another offtopic digression

In article <1191002390@xxxxxxxxx>, Wayne Throop <throopw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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I've seen these creeping into postings quite a bit. They remind me of
the gag I've seen several times, where an actor is reading a script from
a teleprompter and reads the stage directions instead of doing them.

So... anybody know the source of these particular stage directions?
Presumably some particular popular software leaves them in?

They're from Google Groups. If you look at a USENET thread on
Google Groups, frequently quoted text will be hidden -- in order
to save space on the page, I assume -- and you can click on it to
make the quoted text appear.

That it gets back into USENET at all is a bug in the Google
software. I suppose if they got enough complaints they would fix
it, but I don't know if they would. I get the impression that
the Google people don't really realize that USENET doesn't work
the way they do. Certainly a lot of their subscribers don't
realize that these threads aren't original to Google. There's a
file that a couple of us post in reply to people who spam rasf-c
or post something inappropriate, pointing out among other things
that USENET is not a subset of Google.

And what's the earliest appearance of that gag? Plausibly, in ancient
greece, or even hunters reading pictograms from cave walls,
but is there a known lineage for the meme?
No idea. The Greek plays I've read have no stage directions
except "enter" and "exit" and occasionally "The Machine brings in
Iris, in the form of a young girl." Shakespeare doesn't go much
beyond that. "Alarums and excursions." [Meaning, noise off, and
small groups of soldiers fighting, moving on and off stage.]
"Exit, pursued by a bear."

Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx
.

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