"Nothing off topic can ever be right,
if it's not *Al-related then leave it,"
That's what she said as she logged on tonight
*(though Juber's OK and so's Peter White)
Then she lowered her guard and told me, "It's hard
to enforce rules so tight..."
Saying "oh, you'd better believe it!"


Well, I'm up to my chest in al-stewart-digests
of all that I get from the 'Net
When my mail I checked, this I didn't expect
Though I read every line as a sign of the times
But pulling the jack from the back of my Mac
I thought, "I must go off-line,"
"Oh," I said, "who needs it?"


Well don't get me wrong, now I tried to get on
with the posters that got on my nerves,
And I put on a smiley :) and I tried all the while to be straight
But the mailing list grew all the time and I knew
that I couldn't read all that we say
That I'm sick of downloading, and my eyes are now starting to blur


"Well, nothing that's .com is ever for free,
and you just have to pay the bill sometime"
He said it before, he said it to me
I supposed he believed that I got charged a fee
But my .edu account has not yet run out
and my modem is ultra-high-speed;
I said, "Oh, you just can't mean it"


Well there was never a plan that Muffy or Dan
would be newsgroup-ing or moderate
If it wasn't for them there'd be nowhere to post anymore
No Birchmere reviews, no "for-FAQ"s
Things we thought of, but just couldn't say
And we just couldn't cry o'er the threads that don't die like before...


"Well, nothing that's censored can ever be right-
If you don't like this mailing list leave it"
That's what he said as he logged off tonight
And he may have been wrong and he may have been right
But I wrote out this song, and I feel I belong
In the ASML with you all
I said "Oh, I just can't leave it!"

Tom Gill (tegill@ucdavis.edu)