ASKING PERMISSION
By; Gerald A. Polley

Lieutenant Davison heard Sgt. Harrison's "Oh no!" and looked up. Senator Rivermore was coming down the corridor again. "Can you take him this time?" the sergeant asked.
"Sure thing! the lieutenant sighed. "Senator!" he piped, "How may I help you today?"
"The same as always," the senator began. "I am more convinced than ever that my son's death was not a tragic accident. I've been talking to the coroner down state where there's been another unfortunate mishap with street racers. Again somehow despite all precautions the racers took a car got in their way, and a mother and three of her children were killed. It seems that mother and her children had serious medical problems that were draining their family's resources. The settlement that I'm sure her husband will eventually get, will be enough for him to care for the two remaining children quite comfortably. I know there is a conspiracy attacking street racers. Somebody is deliberately setting up these accidents to kill them. I know my son was breaking the law, but he and his friends had done nothing worthy of death. I would like the body exhumed of the man that hit my son and his friends, and to see if he had any serious medical conditions. This is all too much just to be coincidence."
"Well, I can put in the paperwork," the detective answered, "but I don't know if a judge will go for it simply on your suspicions. The public isn't too sympathetic with street racers getting killed, but I'll see what I can do."
The senator rose and winced, grabbing his leg. "Good!" he snapped, "Good! I would like to make some headway in this. If I can, find out who is behind it. As always, I appreciate your efforts, lieutenant."
The lieutenant smiled. The senator quickly left, and the lieutenant sighed. "Did you hear that?" he asked the sergeant. "Yeah!" the sergeant answered.
"Put in the paperwork," the lieutenant ordered, "but take your time about it. Let the clerk of courts know we want it in the works but we're not in a real hurry for it."
"Gotcha!" the sergeant answered with a big grin.
The lieutenant finished up some other work, and as there was no emergency clocked out for the day. On his way home he stopped by the cemetery. As he knelt by his wife's grave someone walked out of the shadows.
"Hello, lieutenant!" the man remarked.

Some of the things you read give you an absolute chuckle! Of course you understand that some people have very little scientific knowledge, and anything to do with atoms absolutely terrifies them. But the theory going around on some of the talk shows that the super atom smasher in Meyrin, Switzerland, could create a black hole that would gobble up the Earth is just so ridiculous that you really wonder why the people putting out these stories aren't giving a scientific explanation why this is impossible. A black hole is created when a sun collapses and its mass is so great that it sucks everything down into oblivion with it. A collider smashes atoms, it does not create incredibly dense mass, just the opposite. It disperses mass. On some really freak occasion there is a very small possibility that an explosion might occur while atoms are being split, but even this would be highly unlikely. Responsible people should be calming the public's fears and telling them this machine could never create a black hole. It can't gobble up the Earth. This is just scientifically impossible!

This stupid Vista system is driving Gerald crazy! One of our good friends who is a computer whiz loves it. But the more we use it the more Gerald hates it. The other morning he was trying to rename some of his files in the magazine folder, something he does all the time without a problem. All of a sudden he would be about half way through renaming the file when the Vista system would shut off what he was doing, make a copy of the file, and put it up. After four or five times of this Gerald was getting very frustrated. Then he noticed that three files had the same code in front of them. He asked Linda what was going on, why she'd put in three files with the same name, and she said she hadn't. When she'd put them away they'd all had different names. And she never put a page number on anything, she left that to Gerald when the page was finished, so we'd know what ones were done. The expert might love Vista but us poor people that can barely use these computers can't stand it! And we wish very much Microsoft would just junk the whole thing and send out a free disc that would wipe the Vista system from your computers and put in something that would work! Because no matter what they say, Vista doesn't work!