(FORTUNE Magazine) – We dreamed the other night about Miss Newton, our fifth-grade teacher, and awoke wondering what was wrong with the subject she assigned for our first composition. Judging the answer to be nada, we begin by noting that the two weeks in August featured much less rappelling and hang-gliding than indoor sitting, and the surfing, at least in our generation, was strictly cyber. Your servant and Madame Keeping Up and our kids and their kids had taken over a sizable beach house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which was marvelous in every respect except one: There was only one phone line in the place. This meant that neither of our group's computers could get on-line without queering incoming messages on the fax machine we had also brought along. We needed the fax because our son's family was both buying and selling a house and had endless forms to transmit to endless agents, and we needed to get on-line for several reasons. One was that Misha (oldest grandson) was hot to play Scramble, a word game that comes with the Delphi communications package, and another was that Grandpa was deep into joke deciphering on the Internet. We previously (August 22) calumniated the jokes in the Net's rec.humor.funny database but omitted to mention that many of them appear in cipher form. This is because their humor, if any, has been judged by the database monitors to have scaled impermissible heights of offensiveness, which raises the possibility that some cybersurfers will sue or something, all of which is presumably harder to do if you are not only forewarned but required to make a real effort to figure out what's being said. Encrypted jokes are accompanied by a warning that "You take full responsibility for decrypting the joke, and you give up all right to complain about its offensiveness," a thought that is additionally pounded home in a document titled Offensive Jokes Policy Sheet. One awaits the lawsuit arguing that the encryption is much too simple -- as we ultimately figured out, it involves simply transposing the first 13 and last 13 letters of the alphabet -- and therefore does not constitute a meaningful barrier to reading the joke and suffering urticaria attacks from the resultant shock. One learned on the Outer Banks that it is possible and in many ways even desirable to read the New York Times on-line. One has, of course, used Nexis for many years to search stories in the Times (and in several thousand other publications). But only when it materialized that the world's arguably greatest paper was not available in our area did it occur to one to try reading the paper -- the previous day's edition -- from a standing start on a computer monitor. It's really quite neat. You can start by asking Nexis to display all the front-page stories, or the whole news index, or all the stories in any one of the paper's sections, or stories featuring any particular key words you care to begin with. To be sure, onscreen readers will have trouble doing all this at breakfast; also, Nexis is evidently unable to do anything about the Times's politically correct editorials. One never made it to the beach.