Feeding Fosdic

    In the event anyone is wondering what will happen to all those forms the census enumerators are collecting, this will introduce Fosdic.  Fosdic is an electronic monster who lives in Jeffersonville, Ind.  His full name is Film Output Sensing Device for Input to Computers.

    After the 160,000 enumerators in the United States finish filling out the census forms with a special Fosdic pencil, they turn them in to their local offices, where they are checked.  They are microfilmed, sent to Washington D.C., then shipped home to Indiana, where they are fed to always-hungry Fosdic.

    They way the census people tell it, fearless Fosdic is infallible.  But let's assume  a bunch of careless enumerators in Stubbed Toe, Miss., didn't press hard enough on their pencils in making the final notations and the notations failed to register.  This has happened to billing machines, you know, and could happen to the fearless one.  Conceivably such a  miscalculation could wipe out the entire population of Mississippi.

    WITH THE SET of plastic dinnerware Charlotte Brown bought recently came  a guarantee stating it would not become "chipped, cracked or crazed."  Usage of the word "crazed" is correct, by the way, but Charlotte nevertheless finds comfort in the thought that she is protected against the possible berserk behavior of the cups and saucers.  However, she isn't quite certain what to do if a dish should run away with a spoon.

   
OVERTAXED
April 15th has a special
    meaning,
It being the day when we
    get our spring cleaning.
        RICHARD ARMOUR

    A YOUNG COUPLE discussing someone in the news used the phrase "strip teaser" and Colleen, 9, asked, "What's a strip teaser?"

    Mother, who believes in dealing frankly with such matters, explained, "It's a girl who takes off her clothes in front of people."

    "Why?" Colleen asked.

    Another reason parents get prematurely gray.

    TWO MOTORCYCLE officers went roaring past Bob Lee on Balboa Blvd. in Newport Beach, where the laws are being strictly enforced during the Easter vacation, and Bob assumed another exuberant youngster was about to get his comeuppance or perhaps it should be downance.  When Bob caught up to them, one officer was writing a violation for the middle-aged driver of a sidelined Rolls-Royce.

    A MOVIE executive was overheard saying to a companion in a coffee shop after a preview the other night, "I say westerns are dead.  It's pirates from now on.  I want you to get me 50 pirates."  There's no way of knowing what this might portend, but the man should have no trouble finding the 50.  Hollywood has had an oversupply of pirates for years.

    A REPORTER named Roy described a young lady currently in the news as voluptuous, but an editor named Pete waggled a finger and said there was no evidence to support this often misused adjective, in fact, the young lady's dimensions were positively girlish.  Roy retorted, "Then say she has a half hourglass figure."

    AT RANDOM- The chairman of the national defense committee in the Philippine House of Representatives in Bartoloma Cabangbang, which the proofreaders shouted at each other, meanwhile stabbing index fingers, when a news story so stating came through . . . That's Little Angie inside the Easter bunny costume at POP, cavorting for the kiddies.  Angie, 3ft. 2in. tall, was for years a newsboy landmark at Hollywood Blvd.  and Wilcox and part-time actor, now sells desert real estate . . . John F. Looney writes, "I just mailed a check for quarterly estimate to government, also check to state franchise board.  Where it said list dependents I put U.S. government and State of Cal.  Can they put me in jail for that?"  No, only on relief.