The documents I’m currently reviewing brought this poem to mind, which was published in Datamation in their 1975 April Fools issue:

On either side the printer lie
Fat stacks of paper six feet high
That stun the mind and blur the eye.
And lo! Still more comes streaming by.
A fresh SYSABEND dump.

Ye printer clacketh merrily.
COMPLETION CODE IS 043
Alack! What can the matter be
That made SYSABEND dump.

My TCAM hath no MCP?
My data cannot OPENed be?
Consult my neighborhood SE?
The devil take thy dam and thee,
Thou vile SYSABEND dump.

Assemble modules on the fly
And link for yet another try.
With SUPERZAP a patch apply
This time: THOU SHALT NOT DUMP!

⋅⋅⋅

On either side the printer lie
Fat stacks of paper twelve feet high
That blow the mind and blast the eye.
Gadzooks! How shrill yon varlet’s cry
As sixteen megabytes go by
In yet another dump.

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Today’s EaterLA brings news of the closure of the last Good Earth restaurant in California. This brings to mind a story…

When I was in college at UCLA in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I used to hang around the UCLA Computer Club (3514 Boelter Hall — we would receive mail addressed to “the messiest room on the 3rd floor, Boelter Hall”). Club members would regularly walk down to Westwood to get dinner — this was when Westwood was a much more vibrant college town than it is today (alas).

At this time, there were two general interest bookstores in Westwood: the Pickwick Bookstore near Westwood and LeConte, and College Books (or was it University Books) near Westwood and Weyburn. College Books originally had a basement from which they sold textbooks, but by the early 1980s they had lease out that space to the Good Earth. The Good Earth was one of the restaurants regularly frequented by clubbies (there was also a Thai place behind Ships, but that’s a different story). The Good Earth seemingly had nuts of some variety in every dish one could order.

One day we went to the Good Earth for dinner. As I recall, someone ordered their meal with no nuts. After this, everyone started requesting no nuts, eventually resulting in our singing “nuts, nuts, nuts, nuts” in the manner of the Monty Python spam routine.

I guess you had to be there.

This entry was originally posted on Observations Along The Road (on cahighways.org) as this entry by cahwyguy. Although you can comment on DW, please make comments on original post at the Wordpress blog using the link below; you can sign in with your LJ, FB, or a myriad of other accounts. There are currently comments on the Wordpress blog. PS: If you see share buttons above, note that they do not work outside of the Wordpress blog.

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