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* "Infinity" by J.M. (sexual satire) 10, 10, 10
* "Infinity" by J.M. (LlIIllII). {Story link: Educators consider it to be a good thing when their students integrate their school knowledge with their real lives. That's why math teachers would be impressed with this story. The narrator of this story had a custom of rating a particular part of a girl's anatomy on a numerical scale based on how many months he could keep its image clearly in his head while masturbating. He rated Naomi's tits a 2 and Betsy's underpants a 1. Maybe someday, he fantasized, he'd see an Infinity - something so hot, so sexy, that even if he were shipwrecked on a desert island, he'd be able to jerk off thinking about it for the rest of his life. Hence, the title of this story. His old record was a six for Mrs. Patterson; but that's another story The young narrator has liberal, progressive parents - the kind Drs. Spock and Ruth would be proud of. When they found him masturbating at age 10, they explained to him that masturbation was normal, as long as he did not do it publicly or too often. The term "too often" set a high upper limit. It was like telling him not to have too much fun or not to fuck a girl who's too sexy - there ain't no such thing! With his parents' approval the kid used to jerk off every morning before breakfast. One morning the poor lad was having trouble - the mental imagery just wasn't working; and so his mom stepped into the room and gave him a boost. Things worked themselves out quickly, so to speak. Coincidentally, that very day Mr. Dulles (also known as Mr. Dullest) discussed Infinity in math class. Because of his pre-breakfast adventures, our hero understood the concept better than most of the other students. Dad met Eternity shortly after his son discovered Infinity. He died in a traffic accident. He lost control of the car and crashed into an abutment because he got a little too excited while masturbating behind the wheel. MAMD - Mothers Against Masturbating Drivers - would not like that part of the story; or maybe they WOULD like it, since it shows what can happen to guys who let masturbation get out of hand. MAROP - Mothers Against Really Old Puns - wouldn't like that last sentence at all. The story has a surprise ending, which I won't disclose to you. My main difficulty with the story was with some of the strange characteristics in the text I downloaded. There was a large O with two or three dots, which I think stood for ellipses. There was an I with an accident mark, which I think was a fancy apostrophe - except that in some chapters the apostrophes were omitted completely. I have seen these characters before, and I have been told that they occur because the author is using "higher ASCII characters," which do not automatically occur on all word processors. My problem is this: even though my word processor (Word 6.0) CAN deal with them, they get lost in the translation somewhere on the Internet. My advice to authors is to avoid using these characters. Since authors will ignore this perfectly sensible advice, my recommendation to readers is to use a global change strategy to get rid of these unintelligible characters. For example, you could load all five parts of this story into a single file, move your cursor to the beginning, select the "i" with the accent mark, copy it, go into your replace function, paste the strange sample into the "replace what" area, type an ordinary apostrophe into the "replace with" area, and then choose "replace all." By doing this with about five weird characters - actually I think I reviewed a story recently about somebody doing something else with about five weird characters - by doing this with about five weird textual characters you can make the text readable. I spontaneously interpreted this story as satire - kind of like "Cat Ballou" or "Naked Gun 69." The author has a really interesting style. He pulls absolutely outlandish ideas out of nowhere. In the past I have speculated about authors being someone else reincarnated. It is not necessary to conjure up reincarnation to explain the true authorship of this story. If you really want to know about it, this story is obviously written by J.D. Salinger, who is now 77 years old, living in New England (where this story takes place), and reliving his further adolescent fantasies through cyberspace on alt.sex.stories. I think that if Zeno would have had access to this story, he would have had another paradox about Infinity. Approach this story as excellent satire, and have fun. Ratings for "Infinity" Athena (technical quality): 10 Venus (plot & character): 10 Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10 |