Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 9, 1995                   TAG: 9508090035
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CYBERSPACE JUST AIN'T THE PLACE FOR US OLD CODGERS

I have been shocked recently to learn that people get in there and type messages about SEX to each other.

I understand that HBO - which has all these neat family shows about people with bad diseases and/or habits and has shown "Poltergeist" 5,000 times since 1983 - has a series called "Real Sex."

I understand further that this show recently had a segment in which a partially clothed young woman typed things like "ooooooooooooh!" into her computer.

There was somebody else out in cyberspace typing some very salacious messages, which seemed to delight the partially clothed young lady.

I understand that her boyfriend - who was also partially clothed - became involved and that some typing and other stuff then went on that should have turned them both into pillars of salt.

I want to make it perfectly clear here that the above is information gathered by skilled investigative reporting techniques, and not by actually viewing "Real Sex 12."

Ask anybody. I'm old and distinguished and read the classics a lot.

I'm told by my sources, however, that both the partially clothed young woman and her boy friend apparently had a combined IQ of 34 - although she was a fair typist.

It makes you wonder whatever happened to the obscene phone call. And don't try to tell me you can use your enhanced keyboard or your CD-ROM to do heavy breathing.

(Reminder: Ask some advanced thinker what CD-ROM means, as well as Microsoft - which has always sounded like a high-priced toilet paper to me.)

Compared to this sort of thing those 900 numbers that allow you to talk to Tonya for $2.99 a minute are civilized. I once talked to a girl named Bonita because I dialed her number by mistake.

Bonita said I could stay on the line if I had a credit card number. She seemed a very nice person and she knew a thing or two about heavy breathing. But I didn't give her a credit card number and the conversation was thus very short. Honest.

I expect the day will come when some egghead invents a program in which aged people such as Old Bennie here can type messages to each other about their aches and pains.

It will be clean stuff. You get enough aches and pains and you don't think much about SEX.