Once there was a girl who was plagued by excess static electricity. Through no fault of her own, it seemed that anyone she touched suffered a painful static shock. Her parents were concerned and asked a child psychologist for advice.

The child psychologist said, "If she were my daughter, she'd be grounded!"

BTW, I recently finished "Singularity Sky" and now I'm into "Iron Sunrise" by Charles Stross. I found his short story "Antibodies" several years ago in the British online SciFi magazine Infinity Plus and it is the best damn short SciFi story every written. Now a lot of his fiction is online but the best way to find it is through WikiPedia. Singularity Sky was good, Iron Sunrise is really REALLY good so far. The last SciFi author I got this excited about was Vernor Vinge, and it's funny, because I hadn't read any VV novels until I read "A Fire Upon the Deep", but eventually I figured out he wrote the great short story "Bookworm Run!", which I read in an Analog SciFi anthology when I was summer camp at Interlochen in eighth grade. First scifi book I ever bought, I think.

Anyway, Vinge and Stross are the berries. Now if I could figure out the origin of this phrase about things "going pear shaped"...