I sometimes write short stories, but have the bad habit of not saving them. Lucky for me, other people may have some of my junk saved for no apparent reason. So I'm gonna try to collect some of these, and post them here. I may even start saving what I write! Some of these stories are true, others are loosely based on true events, and others are pure fiction, but I ain't telling which one is which. Looney with pipe My left foot knee - Okay, I'm accident-prone. Let me rephrase that. I'm unbelievably accident-prone. I tend to get injured in the most bizzarre ways possible, which leaves not only the injury itself, but some entertaining story to go along with it. So, what does this have to do with my left knee? Well, first read my blowing in the wind by the V.A. Hospital story, followed by my New Year's day in Rio one. Back in early 95 I wrote a little ghost story, and posted it in alt.folklore.ghost-stories. Now I keep on finding copies of the story all over the place, like the official a.f.g-s page, this page in Canada, this one in Austria, and this other one at corporate-excellence.com. Here is a little one about finding a big-assed TV in a pile of trash. Thanks to Laura of Laura's NYC Tales for sending me a copy. Right after I saw the movie "Independence Day", I wrote a little post in rec.arts.movies.current-films about some of the basic physics errors that anyone with high-school level physics under their belts should be able to spot right away. A few months later, some MST3K writers contacted me, and asked if they could use some of my ideas for their MSTified version of the movie. After I agreed, I was surprised to see that they added my name to the credits. Most people I've met outside Brazil tend to have some wild misconceptions about the country. I usually just ignore it, but when I saw this message in the USENET discussion group soc.culture.brazil, I just couldn't resist. I wrote this response, followed by this disclaimer.