In the all-too-brief time that I have been following news traffic, I've come to realize that there's a minor but real flaw in the support given to news and mail. I have sketched out the gist of a utility that I think would save a great deal of time and trouble. I simply don't have the time or resources to work out an implementation, but I think the need for it is clear enough that I would like to renounce whatever claim I might have to the idea, in order not to stand in the way of progress. I've noticed that a major use for both general posting and private mail is to communicate irritation, exasperation, rage, and even nearly terminal pique at something that's appeared in a posting. Much of this is recursive, and indistinguishable across authors, but bears all the marks of having been manually generated. This certainly puts the contributors at risk for repetitive motion trauma, if nothing else. It should be possible to automate the generation and handling of this sort of text. I envisage a utility that could be invoked by typing its name (my working title, an acronym for Vast Acting Phlaming Incoherence Device, is VAPID, but I wouldn't object to another being used). It would prompt for certain items, much as the ordinary mail and posting utilities do. It would then transmit to the receiver not text, but the *instruction to generate text*, of some definite or indefinite length, as the posting was accessed by a reader. Thus, for, example, one could generate a million repetitions of some remark (e.g., "You, sir, are a bounder and a cad, and should preserve what remains of your honor in the only possible way left to you.") on the screen of the reader, without undue use of disk space, band width, and all the other precious things that systems administrators are always laboring to defend. Of course, certain othe features would be necessary. First, senders should have the option not only of drawing on different standard lexicons of epithet and invective, but also of developing their own. A more sophisticated implementation would provide not simply terms and phrases, but formulas that could be filled in automatically in various modes (e.g., piratical ["Avast, ye bucket of sea-slime"], Shakespearian, schoolyard, pious [most religions have rich condemnatory idioms], political, and military). Careful examination of posted invective shows that much of it is appended to the text to which it claims to respond. This suggests another feature. A sender should be able to use a switch to indicate that the text stream is to be linked to some other posting. Instead of just using "reply," for example, the user could type "reply/vapid." The text generator would then sample the stimulus text (as in the cut-up technique of Gysin and Burroughs) and intersperse variable-length random chunks of it with the automatically generated invective text stream (AGITS). Readers must of course have certain options as well. When reading mail, one should be able to see that a message consists of AGITS before actually triggering its display. One could of course choose to delete all AGITS messages without reading them, or to read them selectively. The utility should however also generate an AGITS.LOG file that would allow one to keep track of the distribution of such messages per period of time, per subject, and per sender. Certainly not all readers would object to receiving AGITS messages; examination of news traffic shows that some users seem to post only to reap a harvest of condemnation, and are gravely disappointed when they do not. In the same way that it is now possible to post anonymously, it should be possible to send mail to an anonymous site that would respond either with one or more pure AGITS message of specific length, an AGITS-annotated cut-up of the original message, or a "surprise" choice of one or the other options. This would probably effect a significant reduction in net traffic, and free up a significant amount of disk space. Another option readers could have, in a more sophisticated implementation, would be analogous to the way that word processors reply approximate printer drivers and fonts for a file being read on a system that does not have the drivers and fonts originally specified. Thus the sender might have specified Piratical or Military invective, but the reader might have enabled only Wooster (Upper Class Twit) or Schoolyard lexicons or formulas. By automating the whole process of sending, generating, receiving, and reading this considerable segment of net traffic, we could obtain great economies in all phases of the invective text cycle. In addition, it would be unnecessary to pay any attention to it (systems administrators might wish for a denunciation generation and handling device as well). No one would have to worry that a sufficient amount of invective was not being generated, or that anyone who wanted to read it would be unsatisfied. We would then be able to say, updating the great 19th century French prophet of AI, "As for flaming, our daemons will do that for us."