Re: CIA Contra Crack and LA Gangs (fwd)

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 5:13 PM -0400 8/20/96, Brad Dolan wrote:

> p.s. Donna Rice has lately been running point for a regulate-the-internet 
> front group.  I wouldn't put anything past her.

Which reminds me of a story. 

First, however, a joke, which in hindsight taught me about the propagation of information across geodesic networks, that is, capital market trading rooms, long before I had ever heard of either Peter Huber or geodesic networks. 


To wit, 

Q: What did Donna Rice say to the press when they caught her leaving Gary Hart's house?  

A: She said she was taking a poll. <"Pole", get it? Hyuk!>


The reason I remember this paragon of modern political humor is that I heard it no more the 30 minutes after the story broke on the AP wire machine in the Morgan Stanley branch where I was clerking at the time. I heard the joke from trading assistant, who in turn had heard it over the "hoot & holler" line which wired Morgan's various trading desks together with a bunch of permanently open-miked full-duplex speakerphones. The joke originated somewhere else, and was probably told to someone at Morgan's New York office over a direct "ring-down" line linking one company's trading desk to another.

I thought at the time that someone should do a study of the velocity of information flow in the markets, using jokes as information proxies. I've since outgrown such foolishness, though I keep expecting to hear about someone's Ph.D thesis on the topic someday. :-). 


But, of course, that's not the story I *wanted* to tell. *This* one, of course, has absolutely no crypto relevance whatever...

All these conspiracy theories about Donna Rice and George Bush got me to remember something. Brian Smith, who shot that famous Pulitzer-winning(!) picture of Gary Hart with Ms. Rice seated on his lap and the "Monkey Business" lifering in the background, was a friend of mine at Missouri. 

Clever boy, Brian was. When he graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism (Missouri's most famous, er, "professional" school [God help us all], with alums like Carl Rowan, and Dan Rather, and John Chancellor, etc.), he managed to produce, out from under his graduation robes, his entire motor-driven Nikon SLR outfit, complete with strobe apparatus, and took a series of pictures of himself graduating, right down to the handshake from Van Gorton Sauter, the President of CBS News. 


I always wondered what that masonic pyramid, with the eyeball on top, was doing tattooed on Brian's forehead. Now I know. Beware the Illuminati.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga







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Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
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