If you can tell me where these fortunes are from, please do. %% Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user! %% Our policy is, when in doubt, do the right thing. -- Roy L. Ash, ex-president Litton Industries %% ... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm. One thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition. If somebody gets handed a name like "H. Boyce," he hangs on to it, puts it on his legal stationery, even passes it to his son, rather than do what a lesser person would do, such as get it changed or kill himself. -- Dave Barry, "This Column is Nothing but the Truth!" %% "Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it." -- Alex Schure %% Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. -- General Omar N. Bradley %% OUTCONERR Twas FORTRAN as the doloop goes Did logzerneg the ifthen block All kludgy were the function flows And subroutines adhoc. Beware the runtime-bug my friend squrooneg, the false goto Beware the infiniteloop And shun the inprectoo. %% Over the years, I've developed my sense of deja vu so acutely that now I can remember things that *have* happened before ... %% Overdrawn? But I still have checks left! %% Overflow on /dev/null, please empty the bit bucket. %% Overload -- core meltdown sequence initiated. %% Ozman's Laws: (1) If someone says he will do something "without fail," he won't. (2) The more people talk on the phone, the less money they make. (3) People who go to conferences are the ones who shouldn't. (4) Pizza always burns the roof of your mouth. %% Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic. -- Ambrose Bierce %% panic: can't find / %% panic: kernel trap (ignored) %% Paradise is exactly like where you are right now ... only much, much better. -- Laurie Anderson %% Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them. %% Paranoia is simply an optimistic outlook on life. %% Paranoid schizophrenics outnumber their enemies at least two to one. %% Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too. -- D. J. Hicks %% Pardo's First Postulate: Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. Arnold's Addendum: Everything else causes cancer in rats. %% Pardon this fortune. Database under reconstruction. %% Parker's Law: Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. %% Parkinson's Fifth Law: If there is a way to delay in important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it. %% Parkinson's Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done. %% Parsley is gharsley. -- Ogden Nash %% Parts that positively cannot be assembled in improper order will be. %% "Pascal is not a high-level language." -- Steven Feiner %% "Pascal is Pascal is Pascal is dog meat." -- M. Devine and P. Larson, Computer Science 340 %% Pascal Users: To show respect for the 313th anniversary (tomorrow) of the death of Blaise Pascal, your programs will be run at half speed. %% Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. -- Eric Hoffer %% Patageometry, n.: The study of those mathematical properties that are invariant under brain transplants. %% Paul Revere was a tattle-tale %% Peace, n.: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Peanut Blossoms 4 cups sugar 16 tbsp. milk 4 cups brown sugar 4 tsp. vanilla 4 cups shortening 14 cups flour 8 eggs 4 tsp. soda 4 cups peanut butter 4 tsp. salt Shape dough into balls. Roll in sugar and bake on ungreased cookie sheet at 375 F. for 10-12 minutes. Immediately top each cookie with a Hershey's kiss or star pressing down firmly to crack cookie. Makes a hell of a lot. %% Pecor's Health-Food Principle: Never eat rutabaga on any day of the week that has a "y" in it. %% Pedaeration, n.: The perfect body heat achieved by having one leg under the sheet and one hanging off the edge of the bed. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were. -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82 %% People need good lies. There are too many bad ones. -- Bokonon, "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. %% People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future. %% "People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense." -- Ken Kesey %% People usually get what's coming to them ... unless it's been mailed. %% People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much better press than people who are just funny and smart. -- Howard Simons, "The Washington Post" %% People who claim they don't let little things bother them have never slept in a room with a single mosquito. %% People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they don't want it. -- Ogden Nash %% People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first. %% People will buy anything that's one to a customer. %% People will do tomorrow what they did today because that is what they did yesterday. %% Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt. "Confound those who have said our remarks before us." -- Aelius Donatus %% Perfect day for scrubbing the floor and other exciting things. %% Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery %% Personifiers Unite! You have nothing to lose but Mr. Dignity! %% Peter's Law of Substitution: Look after the molehills, and the mountains will look after themselves. %% Philadelphia is not dull -- it just seems so because it is next to exciting Camden, New Jersey. %% Philogyny recapitulates erogeny; erogeny recapitulates philogyny. %% Philosophy will clip an angel's wings. -- John Keats %% Pick another fortune cookie. %% "Picture the sun as the origin of two intersecting 6-dimensional hyperplanes from which we can deduce a certain transformational sequence which gives us the terminal velocity of a rubber duck ..." %% Pig, n.: An animal (Porcus omnivorous) closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it balks at pig. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% PISCES (Feb. 19 - Mar. 20) You have a vivid imagination and often think you are being followed by the CIA or FBI. You have minor influence over your associates and people resent your flaunting of your power. You lack confidence and you are generally a coward. Pisces people do terrible things to small animals. %% PISCES (Feb. 19 to Mar. 20) Take the high road, look for the good things, carry the American Express card and a weapon. The world is yours today, as nobody else wants it. Your mortgage will be foreclosed. You will probably get run over by a bus. %% Pittsburgh Driver's Test (7) The car directly in front of you has a flashing right tail light but a steady left tail light. This means (a) one of the tail lights is broken; you should blow your horn to call the problem to the driver's attention. (b) the driver is signaling a right turn. (c) the driver is signaling a left turn. (d) the driver is from out of town. The correct answer is (d). Tail lights are used in some foreign countries to signal turns. %% Pittsburgh Driver's Test (8) Pedestrians are (a) irrelevant. (b) communists. (c) a nuisance. (d) difficult to clean off the front grille. The correct answer is (a). Pedestrians are not in cars, so they are totally irrelevant to driving; you should ignore them completely. %% Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. -- Don Marquis %% PL/1, "the fatal disease", belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. -- E. W. Dijkstra %% "Plaese porrf raed." -- Prof. Michael O'Longhlin, S.U.N.Y. Purchase %% Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets. -- Kilgore Trout (Philip J. Farmer) "Venus on the Half Shell" %% Play Rogue, visit exotic locations, meet strange creatures and kill them. %% Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table. -- Dave Barry, "The Snake" %% Please ignore previous fortune. %% Please take note: %% Please try to limit the amount of "this room doesn't have any bazingas" until you are told that those rooms are "punched out". Once punched out, we have a right to complain about atrocities, missing bazingas, and such. -- N. Meyrowitz %% Please, won't somebody tell me what diddie-wa-diddie means? %% Plumbing is one of the easier of do-it-yourself activities, requiring only a few simple tools and a willingness to stick your arm into a clogged toilet. In fact, you can solve many home plumbing problems, such as annoying faucet drip, merely by turning up the radio. But before we get into specific techniques, let's look at how plumbing works. A plumbing system is very much like your electrical system, except that instead of electricity, it has water, and instead of wires, it has pipes, and instead of radios and waffle irons, it has faucets and toilets. So the truth is that your plumbing systems is nothing at all like your electrical system, which is good, because electricity can kill you. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% Pohl's law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it. %% Police: Good evening, are you the host? Host: No. Police: We've been getting complaints about this party. Host: About the drugs? Police: No. Host: About the guns, then? Is somebody complaining about the guns? Police: No, the noise. Host: Oh, the noise. Well that makes sense because there are no guns or drugs here. (An enormous explosion is heard in the background.) Or fireworks. Who's complaining about the noise? The neighbors? Police: No, the neighbors fled inland hours ago. Most of the recent complaints have come from Pittsburgh. Do you think you could ask the host to quiet things down? Host: No Problem. (At this point, a Volkswagon bug with primitive religious symbols drawn on the doors emerges from the living room and roars down the hall, past the police and onto the lawn, where it smashes into a tree. Eight guests tumble out onto the grass, moaning.) See? Things are starting to wind down. %% Political T.V. commercials prove one thing: some candidates can tell all their good points and qualifications in just 30 seconds. %% Politician, n.: An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles, he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Politician, n.: From the Greek "poly" ("many") and the French "tete" ("head" or "face," as in "tete-a-tete": head to head or face to face). Hence "polytetien", a person of two or more faces. -- Martin Pitt %% Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river. -- Nikita Khrushchev %% Politics is like coaching a football team. you have to be smart enough to understand the game but not smart enough to lose interest. %% Pope Goestheveezl was the shortest reigning pope in the history of the Church, reigning for two hours and six minutes on 1 April 1866. The white smoke had hardly faded into the blue of the Vatican skies before it dawned on the assembled multitudes in St. Peter's Square that his name had hilarious possibilities. The crowds fell about, helpless with laughter, singing Half a pound of tuppenny rice Half a pound of treacle That's the way the chimney smokes Pope Goestheveezl The square was finally cleared by armed carabineri with tears of laughter streaming down their faces. The event set a record for hilarious civic functions, smashing the previous record set when Baron Hans Neizant B"ompzidaize was elected Landburgher of K"oln in 1653. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Portable, adj.: Survives system reboot. %% Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth. %% "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat" -- John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy 1981-1987 %% Power corrupts. And atomic power corrupts atomically. %% Power, n: The only narcotic regulated by the SEC instead of the FDA. %% Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming. -- J. P. McEvoy %% Predestination was doomed from the start. %% President Reagan has noted that there are too many economic pundits and forecasters and has decided on an excess prophets tax. %% President Thieu says he'll quit if he doesn't get more than 50% of the vote. In a democracy, that's not called quitting. -- The Washington Post %% Pretend to spank me -- I'm a pseudo-masochist! %% Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning: It's on the other side. %% [Prime Minister Joseph] Chamberlain loves the working man -- he loves to see him work. -- Winston Churchill %% Probable-Possible, my black hen, She lays eggs in the Relative When. She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now Because she's unable to postulate how. -- Frederick Winsor %% Probably the question asked most often is: Do one-celled animals have orgasms? The answer is yes, they have orgasms almost constantly, which is why they don't mind living in pools of warm slime. -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know" %% Prof: So the American government went to IBM to come up with a data encryption standard and they came up with ... Student: EBCDIC!" %% Professor Gorden Newell threw another shutout in last week's Chem. Eng. 130 midterm. Once again no student received a single point on his exam. Newell has now tossed five shutouts this quarter. Newell's earned exam average has now dropped to a phenomenal 30% %% Proof techniques #2: Proof by Oddity. SAMPLE: To prove that horses have an infinite number of legs. (1) Horses have an even number of legs. (2) They have two legs in back and fore legs in front. (3) This makes a total of six legs, which certainly is an odd number of legs for a horse. (4) But the only number that is both odd and even is infinity. (5) Therefore, horses must have an infinite number of legs. Topics is be covered in future issues include proof by: Intimidation Gesticulation (handwaving) "Try it; it works" Constipation (I was just sitting there and ...) Blatant assertion Changing all the 2's to _n's Mutual consent Lack of a counterexample, and "It stands to reason" %% Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: BBW Branch Both Ways BEW Branch Either Way BBBF Branch on Bit Bucket Full BH Branch and Hang BMR Branch Multiple Registers BOB Branch On Bug BPO Branch on Power Off BST Backspace and Stretch Tape CDS Condense and Destroy System CLBR Clobber Register CLBRI Clobber Register Immediately CM Circulate Memory CMFRM Come From -- essential for truly structured programming CPPR Crumple Printer Paper and Rip CRN Convert to Roman Numerals %% Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: DC Divide and Conquer DMPK Destroy Memory Protect Key DO Divide and Overflow EMPC Emulate Pocket Calculator EPI Execute Programmer Immediately EROS Erase Read Only Storage EXCE Execute Customer Engineer HCF Halt and Catch Fire IBP Insert Bug and Proceed INSQSW Insert into queue somewhere (for FINO queues [First in never out]) PBC Print and Break Chain PDSK Punch Disk %% Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: PI Punch Invalid POPI Punch Operator Immediately PVLC Punch Variable Length Card RASC Read And Shred Card RPM Read Programmers Mind RSSC reduce speed, step carefully (for improved accuracy) RTAB Rewind tape and break RWDSK rewind disk RWOC Read Writing On Card SCRBL scribble to disk - faster than a write SLC Search for Lost Chord SPSW Scramble Program Status Word SRSD Seek Record and Scar Disk STROM Store in Read Only Memory TDB Transfer and Drop Bit WBT Water Binary Tree %% "Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together." %% Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're OK, you're it. %% Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool. -- H. L. Mencken %% Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water. -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny" %% Pure drivel tends to drive ordinary drivel off of the TV screen. %% Pushing 40 is exercise enough. %% Put no trust in cryptic comments. %% Put your Nose to the Grindstone! -- Amalgamated Plastic Surgeons and Toolmakers, Ltd. %% Putt's Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand. %% Q: Do you know what the death rate around here is? A: One per person. %% Q: How did you get into artificial intelligence? A: Seemed logical -- I didn't have any real intelligence. %% Q: How many DEC repairman does it take to fix a flat? A: Five; four to hold the car up and one to swap tires. Q: How long does it take? A: It's indeterminate. It will depend upon how many flats they've brought with them. Q: What happens if you've got TWO flats? A: They replace your generator. %% Q: How many existentialists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the lightbulb itself symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a maudlin cosmos of nothingness. %% Q: How many heterosexual males does it take to screw in a light bulb in San Francisco? A: Both of them. %% Q: How many IBM cpu's does it take to do a logical right shift? A: 33. 1 to hold the bits and 32 to push the register. %% Q: How many IBM CPU's does it take to execute a job? A: Four; three to hold it down, and one to rip its head off. %% Q: How many IBM types does it take to change a light bulb? A: 100. Ten to do it, and 90 to write document number GC7500439-0001, Multitasking Incandescent Source System Facility, of which 10% of the pages state only "This page intentionally left blank", and 20% of the definitions are of the form "A ...... consists of sequences of non-blank characters separated by blanks". %% Q: How many journalists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Three. One to report it as an inspired government program to bring light to the people, one to report it as a diabolical government plot to deprive the poor of darkness, and one to win a pulitzer prize for reporting that Electric Company hired a lightbulb assassin to break the bulb in the first place. %% Q: How many Martians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: One and a half. %% Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: One. He gives it to six Californians, thereby reducing the problem to the earlier joke. %% Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three. One to screw in the lightbulb and two to fend off all those Californians trying to share the experience. %% Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? A: Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools. %% Q: How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master stays out of the way. %% Q: What's a light-year? A: One-third less calories than a regular year. %% Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road? A: Because it was on the other side. %% Q: Why do ducks have flat feet? A: To stamp out forest fires. Q: Why do elephants have flat feet? A: To stamp out flaming ducks. %% Q: Why do mountain climbers rope themselves together? A: To prevent the sensible ones from going home. %% Q: Somebody just posted that Roman Polanski directed Star Wars. What should I do? A: Post the correct answer at once! We can't have people go on believing that! Very good of you to spot this. You'll probably be the only one to make the correction, so post as soon as you can. No time to lose, so certainly don't wait a day, or check to see if somebody else has made the correction. And it's not good enough to send the message by mail. Since you're the only one who really knows that it was Francis Coppola, you have to inform the whole net right away! -- Brad Templeton, "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette" %% Quality Control, n.: The process of testing one out of every 1,000 units coming off a production line to make sure that at least one out of 100 works. %% Question: Man Invented Alcohol, God Invented Grass. Who do you trust? %% Quick!! Act as if nothing has happened! %% Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur. (Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.) %% Quigley's Law: Whoever has any authority over you, no matter how small, will atttempt to use it. %% QUOTE OF THE DAY: ` %% "Qvid me anxivs svm?" %% QWERT (kwirt), n. [MW < OW qwertyuiop, a thirteenth]: 1. a unit of weight equal to 13 poiuyt avoirdupois (or 1.69 kiloliks), commonly used in structural engineering; 2. [colloq.] one thirteenth the load that a fully grown sligo can carry; 3. [anat.] a painful irritation of the dermis in the region of the anus; 4. [slang] person who excites in others the symptoms of a qwert. -- Webster's Middle World Dictionary, 4th ed. %% Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives. %% Rattling around the back of my head is a disturbing image of something I saw at the airport ... Now I'm remembering, those giant piles of computer magazines right next to "People" and "Time" in the airport store. Does it bother anyone else that half the world is being told all of our hard-won secrets of computer technology? Remember how all the lawyers cried foul when "How to Avoid Probate" was published? Are they taking no-fault insurance lying down? No way! But at the current rate it won't be long before there are stacks of the "Transactions on Information Theory" at the A&P checkout counters. Who's going to be impressed with us electrical engineers then? Are we, as the saying goes, giving away the store? -- Robert W. Lucky, IEEE President %% Ray's Rule of Precision: Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe. %% Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures. %% Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain %% Real computer scientists admire ADA for its overwhelming aesthetic value but they find it difficult to actually program in it, as it is much too large to implement. Most computer scientists don't notice this because they are still arguing over what else to add to ADA. %% Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O. %% Real computer scientists don't comment their code. The identifiers are so long they can't afford the disk space. %% Real computer scientists don't program in assembler. They don't write in anything less portable than a number two pencil. %% Real computer scientists don't write code. They occasionally tinker with `programming systems', but those are so high level that they hardly count (and rarely count accurately; precision is for applications.) %% Real computer scientists only write specs for languages that might run on future hardware. Nobody trusts them to write specs for anything homo sapiens will ever be able to fit on a single planet. %% Real programmers disdain structured programming. Structured programming is for compulsive neurotics who were prematurely toilet- trained. They wear neckties and carefully line up pencils on otherwise clear desks. %% Real programmers don't bring brown-bag lunches. If the vending machine doesn't sell it, they don't eat it. Vending machines don't sell quiche. %% Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand. %% Real programmers don't draw flowcharts. Flowcharts are, after all, the illiterate's form of documentation. Cavemen drew flowcharts; look how much good it did them. %% Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room. %% Real programmers don't write in BASIC. Actually, no programmers write in BASIC after reaching puberty. %% Real programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks. %% Real Programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN. %% Real Programmers think better when playing Adventure or Rogue. %% Real Programs don't use shared text. Otherwise, how can they use functions for scratch space after they are finished calling them? %% Real software engineers don't debug programs, they verify correctness. This process doesn't necessarily involve execution of anything on a computer, except perhaps a Correctness Verification Aid package. %% Real software engineers don't like the idea of some inexplicable and greasy hardware several aisles away that may stop working at any moment. They have a great distrust of hardware people, and wish that systems could be virtual at *___all* levels. They would like personal computers (you know no one's going to trip over something and kill your DFA in mid-transit), except that they need 8 megabytes to run their Correctness Verification Aid packages. %% Real software engineers work from 9 to 5, because that is the way the job is described in the formal spec. Working late would feel like using an undocumented external procedure. %% Real Time, adj.: Here and now, as opposed to fake time, which only occurs there and then. %% Real Users are afraid they'll break the machine -- but they're never afraid to break your face. %% Real Users find the one combination of bizarre input values that shuts down the system for days. %% Real Users hate Real Programmers. %% Real Users know your home telephone number. %% Real Users never know what they want, but they always know when your program doesn't deliver it. %% Real Users never use the Help key. %% Real World, The n.: 1. In programming, those institutions at which programming may be used in the same sentence as FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, IBM, etc. 2. To programmers, the location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming. 3. A universe in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5. 4. The location of the status quo. 5. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the real world." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the real world is not unlike talking about a deceased person. %% Reality is a cop-out for people who can't handle drugs. %% Reality is an obstacle to hallucination. %% Reality is bad enough, why should I tell the truth? -- Patrick Sky %% Reality is for people who lack imagination. %% Reality is for those who can't face Science Fiction. %% Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity. -- Alvy Ray Smith %% "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". -- Philip K. Dick %% "Really ?? What a coincidence, I'm shallow too!!" %% Receiving a million dollars tax free will make you feel better than being flat broke and having a stomach ache. -- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot" %% Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose your job. These economic downturns are very difficult to predict, but sophisticated econometric modeling houses like Data Resources and Chase Econometrics have successfully predicted 14 of the last 3 recessions. %% Reclaimer, spare that tree! Take not a single bit! It used to point to me, Now I'm protecting it. It was the reader's CONS That made it, paired by dot; Now, GC, for the nonce, Thou shalt reclaim it not. %% "Reintegration complete," ZORAC advised. "We're back in the universe again ..." An unusually long pause followed, "... but I don't know which part. We seem to have changed our position in space." A spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the starfield surrounding the ship. "Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us," ZORAC announced after a short pause. "The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious." -- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star" %% Reisner's Rule of Conceptual Inertia: If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it. %% "Rembrandt's first name was Beauregard, which is why he never used it." -- Dave Barry %% Remember that whatever misfortune may be your lot, it could only be worse in Cleveland. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata" %% Remember, drive defensively! And of course, the best defense is a good offense! %% Remember, even if you win the rat race -- you're still a rat. %% Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. %% Remember: Silly is a state of Mind, Stupid is a way of Life. -- Dave Butler %% Renning's Maxim: Man is the highest animal. Man does the classifying. %% Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea. %% Reporter, n.: A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% REPORTER: Senator, are you for or against the MX missile system? SENATOR: Bob, the MX missile system reminds me of an old saying that the country folk in my state like to say. It goes like this: "You can carry a pig for six miles, but if you set it down it might run away." I have no idea why the country folk say this. Maybe there's some kind of chemical pollutant in their drinking water. That is why I pledge to do all that I can to protect the environment of this great nation of ours, and put prayer back in the schools, where it belongs. What we need is jobs, not empty promises. I realize I'm risking my political career be being so outspoken on a sensitive issue such as the MX, but that's just the kind of straight-talking honest person I am, and I can't help it. -- Dave Barry, "On Presidential Politics" %% Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun %% Resisting temptation is easier when you think you'll probably get another chance later on. %% Review Questions (1) If Nerd on the planet Nutley starts out in his spaceship at 20 KPH, and his speed doubles every 3.2 seconds, how long will it be before he exceeds the speed of light? How long will it be before the Galactic Patrol picks up the pieces of his spaceship? (2) If Roger Rowdy wrecks his car every week, and each week he breaks twice as many bones as before, how long will it be before he breaks every bone in his body? How long will it be before they cut off his insurance? Where does he get a new car every week? (3) If Johnson drinks one beer the first hour (slow start), four beers the next hour, nine beers the next, etc., and stacks the cans in a pyramid, how soon will Johnson's pyramid be larger than King Tut's? When will it fall on him? Will he notice? %% Rhode's Law: When any principle, law, tenet, probability, happening, circumstance, or result can in no way be directly, indirectly, empirically, or circuitously proven, derived, implied, inferred, induced, deducted, estimated, or scientifically guessed, it will always for the purpose of convenience, expediency, political advantage, material gain, or personal comfort, or any combination of the above, or none of the above, be unilaterally and unequivocally assumed, proclaimed, and adhered to as absolute truth to be undeniably, universally, immutably, and infinitely so, until such time as it becomes advantageous to assume otherwise, maybe. %% Rocky's Lemma of Innovation Prevention Unless the results are known in advance, funding agencies will reject the proposal. %% Romeo wasn't bilked in a day. -- Walt Kelly, "Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo" %% ROMEO: Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much. MERCUTIO: No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church- door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve. %% Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London: Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat. %% Rule of Creative Research: (1) Never draw what you can copy. (2) Never copy what you can trace. (3) Never trace what you can cut out and paste down. %% Rule of Defactualization: Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies. %% Rule of Feline Frustration: When your cat has fallen asleep on your lap and looks utterly content and adorable, you will suddenly have to go to the bathroom. %% Rule of the Great: When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch. %% Rules for Academic Deans: (1) HIDE!!!! (2) If they find you, LIE!!!! -- Father Damian C. Fandal %% Rules for driving in New York: (1) Anything done while honking your horn is legal. (2) You may park anywhere if you turn your four-way flashers on. (3) A red light means the next six cars may go through the intersection. %% RULES OF EATING -- THE BRONX DIETER'S CREED (1) Never eat on an empty stomach. (2) Never leave the table hungry. (3) When traveling, never leave a country hungry. (4) Enjoy your food. (5) Enjoy your companion's food. (6) Really taste your food. It may take several portions to accomplish this, especially if subtly seasoned. (7) Really feel your food. Texture is important. Compare, for example, the texture of a turnip to that of a brownie. Which feels better against your cheeks? (8) Never eat between snacks, unless it's a meal. (9) Don't feel you must finish everything on your plate. You can always eat it later. (10) Avoid any wine with a childproof cap. (11) Avoid blue food. -- Richard Smit, "The Bronx Diet" %% Rules: (1) The boss is always right. (2) When the boss is wrong, refer to rule 1. %% Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence Tip #1: How to tell when you are dead. (1) Little things start bothering you: little things like worms, bugs, ants. (2) Something is missing in your personal relationships. (3) Your dog becomes overly affectionate. (4) You have a hard time getting a waiter. (5) Exotic birds flock around you. (6) People ignore you at parties. (7) You have a hard time getting up in the morning. (8) You no longer get off on cocaine. %% Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence (1) Never use an elevator in a building that has been hit by a nuclear bomb; use the stairs. (2) When you're flying through the air, remember to roll when you hit the ground. (3) If you're on fire, avoid gasoline and other flammable materials. (4) Don't attempt communication with dead people; it will only lead to psychological problems. (5) Food will be scarce; you will have to scavenge. Learn to recognize foods that will be available after the bomb: mashed potatoes, shredded wheat, tossed salad, ground beef, etc. (6) Put your hand over your mouth when you sneeze; internal organs will be scarce in the post-nuclear age. (7) Try to be neat; fall only in designated piles. (8) Drive carefully in "Heavy Fallout" areas; people could be staggering illegally. (9) Nutritionally, hundred dollar bills are equal to ones, but more sanitary due to limited circulation. (10) Accumulate mannequins now; spare parts will be in short supply on D-Day. %% SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22 - Dec 21) You are optimistic and enthusiastic. You have a reckless tendency to rely on luck since you lack talent. The majority of Sagittarians are drunks or dope fiends or both. People laugh at you a great deal. %% San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never was. -- Herb Caen %% San Francisco, n.: Marcel Proust editing an issue of Penthouse. %% Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold %% Santa Claus wears a Red Suit, He must be a communist. And a beard and long hair, Must be a pacifist. What's in that pipe that he's smoking? -- Arlo Guthrie %% Satellite Safety Tip #14: If you see a bright streak in the sky coming at you, duck. %% Sattinger's Law: It works better if you plug it in. %% Saturday night in Toledo Ohio, Is like being nowhere at all, All through the day how the hours rush by, You sit in the park and you watch the grass die. -- John Denver, "Saturday Night in Toledo Ohio" %% Sauron is alive in Argentina! %% Save energy: be apathetic. %% Save the Whales -- Harpoon a Honda. %% Save the whales. Collect the whole set. %% "Saw a sign on a restaurant that said Breakfast, any time -- so I ordered French Toast in the Renaissance. -- Steven Wright %% Schapiro's Explanation: The grass is always greener on the other side -- but that's because they use more manure. %% Schizophrenia beats being alone. %% Schlattwhapper, n.: The window shade that allows itself to be pulled down, hesitates for a second, then snaps up in your face. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Schnuffel, n.: A dog's practice of continuously nuzzling in your crotch in mixed company. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Schwiggle, n.: The amusing rotation of one's bottom while sharpening a pencil. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science. -- Henri Poincair'e %% Science is what happens when preconception meets verification. %% Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it. -- William Buckley %% SCORPIO (Oct 23 - Nov 21) You are shrewd in business and cannot be trusted. You will achieve the pinnacle of success because of your total lack of ethics. Most Scorpio people are murdered. %% Scott's second Law: When an error has been detected and corrected, it will be found to have been wrong in the first place. Corollary: After the correction has been found in error, it will be impossible to fit the original quantity back into the equation. %% Scotty: Captain, we din' can reference it! Kirk: Analysis, Mr. Spock? Spock: Captain, it doesn't appear in the symbol table. Kirk: Then it's of external origin? Spock: Affirmative. Kirk: Mr. Sulu, go to pass two. Sulu: Aye aye, sir, going to pass two. %% Screw up your courage! You've screwed up everything else. %% Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency. -- Richard Nixon %% Second Law of Business Meetings: If there are two possible ways to spell a person's name, you will pick the wrong one. Corollary: If there is only one way to spell a name, you will spell it wrong, anyway. %% "Section 2.4.3.5 AWNS (Acceptor Wait for New Cycle State). In AWNS the AH function indicates that it has received a multiline message byte. In AWNS the RFD message must be sent false and the DAC message must be sent passive true. The AH function must exit the AWNS and enter: (1) The ANRS if DAV is false (2) The AIDS if the ATN message is false and neither: (a) The LADS is active (b) Nor LACS is active" -- from the IEEE Standard Digital Interface for Programmable Instrumentation %% Security check: INTRUDER ALERT! %% Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide. -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" %% "See - the thing is - I'm an absolutist. I mean, kind of ... in a way ..." %% Self Test for Paranoia: You know you have it when you can't think of anything that's your own fault. %% Seminars, n.: From "semi" and "arse", hence, any half-assed discussion. %% Sen. Danforth: "There is nothing on the face of the album which would notify you if the record has pornographics material or material glorifying violence?" Tipper Gore: "No, there is nothing that would suggest that to me." Frank Zappa: "I would say that a buzz saw blade between the guy's legs on the album cover is good indication that it's not for little Johnny." -- The Senate Commerce Committee hearing on rock lyrics, from The Village Voice, 6 Oct 1985 %% Senate, n.: A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors. -- Ambrose Bierce %% Serenity through viciousness. %% Serocki's Stricture: Marriage is always a bachelor's last option. %% Serving coffee on aircraft causes turbulence. %% Several years ago, some smart businessmen had an idea: Why not build a big store where a do-it-yourselfer could get everything he needed at reasonable prices? Then they decided, nah, the hell with that, let's build a home center. And before long home centers were springing up like crabgrass all over the United States. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% Sex is a natural bodily process, like a stroke. %% Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer. -- Swami X %% Sex without love is an empty experience, but, as empty experiences go, it's one of the best. -- Woody Allen %% Shamus, n. [Yiddish]: A shamus is a guy who takes care of handyman tasks around the temple, and makes sure everything is in working order. A shamus is at the bottom of the pecking order of synagog functionaries, and there's a joke about that: A rabbi, to show his humility before God, cries out in the middle of a service, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The cantor, not to be bested, also cries out, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The shamus, deeply moved, follows suit and cries, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The rabbi turns to the cantor and says, "Look who thinks he's nobody!" -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent. -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know" %% Shaw's Principle: Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it. %% "She is descended from a long line that her mother listened to." -- Gypsy Rose Lee %% She is not refined. She is not unrefined. She keeps a parrot. -- Mark Twain %% She liked him; he was a man of many qualities, even if most of them were bad. %% She missed an invaluable opportunity to give him a look that you could have poured on a waffle ... %% "She said, `I know you ... you cannot sing'. I said, `That's nothing, you should hear me play piano.'" -- Morrisey %% She's genuinely bogus. %% "Sherry [Thomas Sheridan] is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in Nature." -- Samuel Johnson %% SHIFT TO THE LEFT! SHIFT TO THE RIGHT! POP UP, PUSH DOWN, BYTE, BYTE, BYTE! %% Show me a man who is a good loser and I'll show you a man who is playing golf with his boss. %% Show respect for age. Drink good Scotch for a change. %% Signs of crime: screaming or cries for help. -- from the Brown Security Crime Prevention Pamphlet %% Silverman's Law: If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will. %% Simon's Law: Everything put together falls apart sooner or later. %% Since I hurt my pendulum My life is all erratic. My parrot, who was cordial, Is now transmitting static. The carpet died, a palm collapsed, The cat keeps doing poo. The only thing that keeps me sane Is talking to my shoe. -- My Shoe %% Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're alive. -- John Sloan %% Since we're all here, we must not be all there. -- Bob "Mountain" Beck %% [Sir Stafford Cripps] has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. -- Winston Churchill %% Sixtus V, Pope from 1585 to 1590 authorized a printing of the Vulgate Bible. Taking no chances, the pope issued a papal bull automatically excommunicating any printer who might make an alteration in the text. This he ordered printed at the beginning of the Bible. He personally examined every sheet as it came off the press. Yet the published Vulgate Bible contained so many errors that corrected scraps had to be printed and pasted over them in every copy. The result provoked wry comments on the rather patchy papal infallibility, and Pope Sixtus had no recourse but to order the return and destruction of every copy. %% Skinner's Constant (or Flannagan's Finagling Factor): That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you should have gotten. %% Slang is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes to work. %% Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work ... I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meanings of those rude, and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle, so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension: they were tones, loud, long and deep, breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. -- Frederick Douglass %% Slick's Three Laws of the Universe: (1) Nothing in the known universe travels faster than a bad check. (2) A quarter-ounce of chocolate = four pounds of fat. (3) There are two types of dirt: the dark kind, which is attracted to light objects, and the light kind, which is attracted to dark objects. %% Slowly and surely the unix crept up on the Nintendo user ... %% Slurm, n.: The slime that accumulates on the underside of a soap bar when it sits in the dish too long. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics. -- Fletcher Knebel %% Snacktrek, n.: The peculiar habit, when searching for a snack, of constantly returning to the refrigerator in hopes that something new will have materialized. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% So as your consumer electronics adviser, I am advising you to donate your current VCR to a grate resident, who will laugh sardonically and hurl it into a dumpster. Then I want you to go out and purchase a vast array of 8-millimeter video equipment. ... OK! Got everything? Well, *too bad, sucker*, because while you were gone the electronics industry came up with an even newer format that makes your 8-millimeter VCR look as technologically advanced as toenail dirt. This format is called "3.5 hectare" and it will not be made available until it is outmoded, sometime early next week, by a format called "Elroy", so *order yours now*. -- Dave Barry, "No Surrender in the Electronics Revolution" %% ... so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrranize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. -- Voltarine de Cleyre %% So Richard and I decided to try to catch [the small shark]. With a great deal of strategy and effort and shouting, we managed to maneuver the shark, over the course of about a half-hour, to a sort of corner of the lagoon, so that it had no way to escape other than to flop up onto the land and evolve. Richard and I were inching toward it, sort of crouched over, when all of a sudden it turned around and -- I can still remember the sensation I felt at that moment, primarily in the armpit area -- headed right straight toward us. Many people would have panicked at this point. But Richard and I were not "many people." We were experienced waders, and we kept our heads. We did exactly what the textbook says you should do when you're unarmed and a shark that is nearly two feet long turns on you in water up to your lower calves: We sprinted I would say 600 yards in the opposite direction, using a sprinting style such that the bottoms of our feet never once went below the surface of the water. We ran all the way to the far shore, and if we had been in a Warner Brothers cartoon we would have run right INTO the beach, and you would have seen these two mounds of sand racing across the island until they bonked into trees and coconuts fell onto their heads. -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV" %% "So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street pops its head into the shop. "What! no soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots." -- Samuel Foote %% ... So the documentary-makers stick with sharks. Generally, their procedure is to scatter bleeding fish pieces around their boat, so as to infest the waters. I would estimate that the primary food source of sharks today is bleeding fish pieces scattered by people making documentaries. Once the sharks arrive, they are generally fairly listless. The general shark attitude seems to be: "Oh God, another documentary." So the divers have to somehow goad them into attacking, under the guise of Scientific Research. "We know very little about the effect of electricity on sharks," the narrator will say, in a deeply scientific voice. "That is why Todd is going to jab this Great White in the testicles with a cattle prod." The divers keep this kind of thing up until the shark finally gets irritated and snaps at them, and then they act as though this was a totally unexpected and very dangerous development, although clearly it is what they wanted all along. -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV" %% So, what's with this guy Gideon, anyway? And why can't he ever remember his Bible? %% Sodd's Second Law: Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is bound to occur. %% Software, n.: Formal evening attire for female computer analysts. %% Some don't prefer the pursuit of happiness to the happiness of pursuit. %% Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them. -- Ed Howe %% Some of you ... may have decided that, this year, you're going to celebrate it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on "The Waltons". Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: it would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" %% Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them. -- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22" %% Some people have a way about them that seems to say: "If I have only one life to live, let me live it as a jerk." %% Some people in this department wouldn't recognize subtlety if it hit them on the head. %% Some people live life in the fast lane. You're in oncoming traffic. %% Some performers on television appear to be horrible people, but when you finally get to know them in person, they turn out to be even worse. -- Avery %% Some points to remember [about animals]: (1) Don't go to sleep under big animals, e.g., elephants, rhinoceri, hippopotamuses; (2) Don't put animals with sharp teeth or poisonous fangs down the front of your clothes; (3) Don't pat certain animals, e.g., crocodiles and scorpions or dogs you have just kicked. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Some primal termite knocked on wood. And tasted it, and found it good. And that is why your Cousin May Fell through the parlor floor today. -- Ogden Nash %% Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% Somebody ought to cross ball point pens with coat hangers so that the pens will multiply instead of disappear. %% Someone will try to honk your nose today. %% "Sometimes I simply feel that the whole world is a cigarette and I'm the only ashtray." %% Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world. -- Lily Tomlin %% "Somewhere", said Father Vittorini, "did Blake not speak of the Machineries of Joy? That is, did not God promote environments, then intimidate these Natures by provoking the existence of flesh, toy men and women, such as are we all? And thus happily sent forth, at our best, with good grace and fine wit, on calm noons, in fair climes, are we not God's Machineries of Joy?" "If Blake said that", said Father Brian, "he never lived in Dublin." -- R. Bradbury, "The Machineries of Joy" %% Somewhere, just out of sight, the unicorns are gathering. %% Song Title of the Week: "They're putting dimes in the hole in my head to see the change in me." %% Sooner or later you must pay for your sins. (Those who have already paid may disregard this fortune). %% Sorry, no fortune this time. %% Sorry. I forget what I was going to say. %% Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space. -- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Spark's Sixth Rule for Managers: If a subordinate asks you a pertinent question, look at him as if he had lost his senses. When he looks down, paraphrase the question back at him. %% Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy Because he knows it teases. Wow! wow! wow! I speak severely to my boy, And beat him when he sneezes: For he can thoroughly enjoy The pepper when he pleases! Wow! wow! wow! -- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland" %% Speak roughly to your little VAX, And boot it when it crashes; It knows that one cannot relax Because the paging thrashes! Wow! Wow! Wow! I speak severely to my VAX, And boot it when it crashes; In spite of all my favorite hacks My jobs it always thrashes! Wow! Wow! Wow! %% Speak softly and carry a +6 two-handed sword. %% Speak softly and own a big, mean Doberman. -- Dave Millman %% Speaking as someone who has delved into the intricacies of PL/I, I am sure that only Real Men could have written such a machine-hogging, cycle-grabbing, all-encompassing monster. Allocate an array and free the middle third? Sure! Why not? Multiply a character string times a bit string and assign the result to a float decimal? Go ahead! Free a controlled variable procedure parameter and reallocate it before passing it back? Overlay three different types of variable on the same memory location? Anything you say! Write a recursive macro? Well, no, but Real Men use rescan. How could a language so obviously designed and written by Real Men not be intended for Real Man use? %% Speaking of Godzilla and other things that convey horror: With a purposeful grimace and a Mongo-like flair He throws the spinning disk drives in the air! And he picks up a Vax and he throws it back down As he wades through the lab making terrible sounds! Helpless users with projects due Scream "My God!" as he stomps on the tape drives, too! Oh, no! He says Unix runs too slow! Go, go, DECzilla! Oh, yes! He's gonna bring up VMS! Go, go, DECzilla!" * VMS is a trademark of Digital Equipment Corporation * DECzilla is a trademark of Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death, Inc. -- Curtis Jackson %% Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love; Husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on (and in real life, I might add) spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very _____least he can do is to Shut Up! -- Tom Lehrer, "That Was the Year that Was" %% "Speed is subsittute fo accurancy." %% Speer's 1st Law of Proofreading: The visibility of an error is inversely proportional to the number of times you have looked at it. %% Spelling is a lossed art. %% Spend extra time on hobby. Get plenty of rolling papers. %% Spirtle, n.: The fine stream from a grapefruit that always lands right in your eye. -- Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends" %% Spouse, n.: Someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single. %% "Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains to pur'ee of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!" -- Harlan Ellison %% Stay away from flying saucers today. %% Stay away from hurricanes for a while. %% "Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly." %% Steele's Plagiarism of Somebody's Philosophy: Everybody should believe in something -- I believe I'll have another drink. %% Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming: Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. %% Stop searching. Happiness is right next to you. Now, if they'd only take a bath ... %% Stult's Report: Our problems are mostly behind us. What we have to do now is fight the solutions. %% Stupid, n.: Losing $25 on the game and $25 on the instant replay. %% Stupidity got us into this mess -- why can't it get us out? %% Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud. %% Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. -- Mark Twain %% Subtlety is the art of saying what you think and getting out of the way before it is understood. %% Succumb to natural tendencies. Be hateful and boring. %% Suddenly, Professor Liebowitz realizes he has come to the seminar without his duck ... %% (Sung to the tune of "The Impossible Dream" from MAN OF LA MANCHA) To code the impossible code, To bring up a virgin machine, To pop out of endless recursion, To grok what appears on the screen, To right the unrightable bug, To endlessly twiddle and thrash, To mount the unmountable magtape, To stop the unstoppable crash! %% Support bacteria -- it's the only culture some people have! %% Support wildlife -- vote for an orgy. %% Support your local police force -- steal!! %% Support your local Search and Rescue unit -- get lost. %% Sure he's sharp as a razor ... he's a two-dimensional pinhead! %% Surprise due today. Also the rent. %% Surprise your boss. Get to work on time. %% Surprise! You are the lucky winner of random I.R.S. Audit! Just type in your name and social security number. Please remember that leaving the room is punishable under law: Name # %% Swahili, n.: The language used by the National Enquirer to print their retractions. -- Johnny Hart %% Sweater, n.: A garment worn by a child when its mother feels chilly. %% Swipple's Rule of Order: He who shouts the loudest has the floor. %% Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% System/3! System/3! See how it runs! See how it runs! Its monitor loses so totally! It runs all its programs in RPG! It's made by our favorite monopoly! System/3! %% Systems have sub-systems and sub-systems have sub-systems and so on ad infinitum -- which is why we're always starting over. -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% _ _ / \ o / \ | | o o o | | | | _ o o o o | \_| | / \ o o o \__ | | | o o | | | | ______ ~~~~ _____ | |__/ | / ___--\\ ~~~ __/_____\__ | ___/ / \--\\ \\ \ ___ <__ x x __\ | | / /\\ \\ )) \ ( " ) | | -------(---->>(@)--(@)-------\----------< >----------- | | // | | //__________ / \ ____) (___ \\ | | // __|_| ( --------- ) //// ______ /////\ \\ // | ( \ ______ / <<<< <>-----<<<<< / \\ // ( ) / / \` \__ \\ //-------------------------------------------------------------\\ Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether. -- H.S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" %% T: One big monster, he called TROLL. He don't rock, and he don't roll; Drink no wine, and smoke no stogies. He just Love To Eat Them Roguies. -- The Roguelet's ABC %% Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head. %% Tact, n.: The unsaid part of what you're thinking. %% Take everything in stride. Trample anyone who gets in your way. %% Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting enough cheese -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata" %% Take it easy, we're in a hurry. %% Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man, but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool. -- Kipling %% Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves and the teacher says: "Imagine what it does to your TEETH!" So Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to improve ... -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence" %% Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less advanced life forms, and they'll call you crazy. -- "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul" %% Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. -- Euripides %% Talkers are no good doers. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI" %% Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. -- Friedrich Nietzsche %% TAURUS (Apr 20 - May 20) You are practical and persistent. You have a dogged determination and work like hell. Most people think you are stubborn and bull headed. You are a Communist. %% Tax reform means "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree." -- Russell Long %% Taxes are going up so fast, the government is likely to price itself out of the market. %% Taxes, n.: Of life's two certainties, the only one for which you can get an extension. %% Teach children to be polite and courteous in the home, and, when he grows up, he will never be able to edge his car onto a freeway. %% Teamwork is essential -- it allows you to blame someone else. %% Telephone, n.: An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. -- Ambrose Bierce %% Tell me, O Octopus, I begs, Is those things arms, or is they legs? I marvel at thee, Octopus; If I were thou, I'd call me us. -- Ogden Nash %% Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop writing. -- R. Geis %% "Terence, this is stupid stuff: You eat your victuals fast enough; There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear, To see the rate you drink your beer. But oh, good Lord, the verse you make, It gives a chap the belly-ache. The cow, the old cow, she is dead; It sleeps well the horned head: We poor lads, 'tis our turn now To hear such tunes as killed the cow. Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme Your friends to death before their time. Moping, melancholy mad: Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad." -- A. E. Housman %% "Termiter's argument that God is His own grandmother generated a surprising amount of controversy among Church leaders, who on the one hand considered the argument unsupported by scripture but on the other hand were unwilling to risk offending God's grandmother." -- Len Cool, "American Pie" %% Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 A.D. He was a pagan, and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city until about his 35th year, when he became a Christian .... To him is ascribed the sublime confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). This does not altogether accord with historical fact, for he merely said: "And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it is absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain because it is impossible." Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it. -- C. G. Jung, in Psychological Types (Teruillian was one of the founders of the Catholic Church). %% Test-tube babies shouldn't throw stones. %% Texas law forbids anyone to have a pair of pliers in his possession. %% "Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds." -- J. Finnegan, USC. %% Thank goodness modern convenience is a thing of the remote future. -- Pogo, by Walt Kelly %% "That boy's about as sharp as a pound of wet liver" -- Foghorn Leghorn %% That secret you've been guarding, isn't. %% That woman speaks eight languages and can't say "no" in any of them. -- Dorothy Parker %% The 80's -- when you can't tell hairstyles from chemotherapy. %% The [Ford Foundation] is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some. -- Dwight MacDonald %% The Abrams' Principle: The shortest distance between two points is off the wall. %% The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper -- Thomas Jefferson %% The Advertising Agency Song: When your client's hopping mad, Put his picture in the ad. If he still should prove refractory, Add a picture of his factory. %% "The algorithm to do that is extremely nasty. You might want to mug someone with it." -- M. Devine, Computer Science 340 %% ... The Anarchists' [national] anthem is an international anthem that consists of 365 raspberries blown in very quick succession to the tune of "Camptown Races". Nobody has to stand up for it, nobody has to listen to it, and, even better, nobody has to play it. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The Arkansas legislature passed a law that states that the Arkansas River can rise no higher than to the Main Street bridge in Little Rock. %% The Army has carried the American ... ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability. -- T. Lehrer %% The Army needs leaders the way a foot needs a big toe. -- Bill Murray %% The assertion that "all men are created equal" was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use. -- Abraham Lincoln %% The average income of the modern teenager is about 2 a.m. %% The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think. %% "The bad reputation UNIX has gotten is totally undeserved, laid on by people who don't understand, who have not gotten in there and tried anything." -- Jim Joyce, owner of Jim Joyce's UNIX Bookstore %% The basic idea behind malls is that they are more convenient than cities. Cities contain streets, which are dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in. Malls, on the other hand, have parking lots, which are also dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in, but -- here is the big difference -- in mall parking lots, THERE ARE NO RULES. You're allowed to do anything. You can drive as fast as you want in any direction you want. I was once driving in a mall parking lot when my car was struck by a pickup truck being driven backward by a squat man with a tattoo that said "Charlie" on his forearm, who got out and explained to me, in great detail, why the accident was my fault, his reasoning being that he was violent and muscular, whereas I was neither. This kind of reasoning is legally valid in mall parking lots. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" %% The basic menu item, in fact the ONLY menu item, would be a food unit called the "patty," consisting of -- this would be guaranteed in writing -- "100 percent animal matter of some kind." All patties would be heated up and then cooled back down in electronic devices immediately before serving. The Breakfast Patty would be a patty on a bun with lettuce, tomato, onion, egg, Ba-Ko-Bits, Cheez Whiz, a Special Sauce made by pouring ketchup out of a bottle and a little slip of paper stating: "Inspected by Number 12". The Lunch or Dinner Patty would be any Breakfast Patties that didn't get sold in the morning. The Seafood Lover's Patty would be any patties that were starting to emit a serious aroma. Patties that were too rank even to be Seafood Lover's Patties would be compressed into wads and sold as "Nuggets." -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants" %% The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman. %% The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep. -- W. C. Fields %% The best defense against logic is ignorance. %% The best thing about growing older is that it takes such a long time. %% "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." -- T.H. White, "The Once and Future King" %% The best way to make a fire with two sticks is to make sure one of them is a match. -- Will Rogers %% The bigger the theory the better. %% The birds are singing, the flowers are budding, and it is time for Miss Manners to tell young lovers to stop necking in public. It's not that Miss Manners is immune to romance. Miss Manners has been known to squeeze a gentleman's arm while being helped over a curb, and, in her wild youth, even to press a dainty slipper against a foot or two under the dinner table. Miss Manners also believes that the sight of people strolling hand in hand or arm in arm or arm in hand dresses up a city considerably more than the more familiar sight of people shaking umbrellas at one another. What Miss Manners objects to is the kind of activity that frightens the horses on the street ... %% "The bland leadeth the bland and they both shall fall into the kitsch." %% The bogosity meter just pegged. %% The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get to school. %% The Briggs/Chase Law of Program Development: To determine how long it will take to write and debug a program, take your best estimate, multiply that by two, add one, and convert to the next higher units. %% The buffalo isn't as dangerous as everyone makes him out to be. Statistics prove that in the United States more Americans are killed in automobile accidents than are killed by buffalo. -- Art Buchwald %% The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy. %% "The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language." %% The camel has a single hump; The dromedary two; Or else the other way around. I'm never sure. Are you? -- Ogden Nash %% The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics. -- H. L. Mencken %% The chicken that clucks the loudest is the one most likely to show up at the steam fitters' picnic. %% The chief danger in life is that you may take too may precautions. -- Alfred Adler %% The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I will walk carefully. -- Russian Proverb %% "The climate of Bombay is such that its inhabitants have to live elsewhere." %% "The Computer made me do it." %% The computing field is always in need of new cliches. -- Alan Perlis %% The confusion of a staff member is measured by the length of his memos. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 %% The conservation movement is a breeding ground of Communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird watcher in the country. -- John Mitchell, Atty. General 1969-1972 %% The Consultant's Curse: When the customer has beaten upon you long enough, give him what he asks for, instead of what he needs. This is very strong medicine, and is normally only required once. %% The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: "Of course it is none of my business, but --" is to place a period after the word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love" %% The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity. %% The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going down. %% The cow is nothing but a machine with makes grass fit for us people to eat. -- John McNulty %% The Crown is full of it! -- Nate Harris, 1775 %% The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life. %% The day-to-day travails of the IBM programmer are so amusing to most of us who are fortunate enough never to have been one -- like watching Charlie Chaplin trying to cook a shoe. %% The debate rages on: Is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary? %% The devil finds work for idle circuits to do. %% "The difference between a misfortune and a calamity? If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, it would be a calamity." -- Benjamin Disraeli %% The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship. -- Robert Heinlein %% The distinction between Jewish and goyish can be quite subtle, as the following quote from Lenny Bruce illustrates: "I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. The B'nai Brith is goyish. The Hadassah is Jewish. Marine Corps -- heavy goyish, dangerous. "Kool-Aid is goyish. All Drake's Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes -- goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish. Macaroons are ____very Jewish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O is goyish. Lime soda is ____very goyish. Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won't go near them ..." -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% The District of Columbia has a law forbidding you to exert pressure on a balloon and thereby cause a whistling sound on the streets. %% The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid. -- Gilbert K. Chesterson %% The duck hunter trained his retriever to walk on water. Eager to show off this amazing accomplishment, he asked a friend to go along on his next hunting trip. Saying nothing, he fired his first shot and, as the duck fell, the dog walked on the surface of the water, retrieved the duck and returned it to his master. "Notice anything?" the owner asked eagerly. "Yes," said his friend, "I see that fool dog of yours can't swim." %% The early bird who catches the worm works for someone who comes in late and owns the worm farm. -- Travis McGee %% The earth is like a tiny grain of sand, only much, much heavier. %% The easiest way to figure the cost of living is to take your income and add ten percent. %% The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters. -- Jean-Paul Kauffmann %% "The eleventh commandment was `Thou Shalt Compute' or `Thou Shalt Not Compute' -- I forget which." -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson %% The end of the world will occur at 3:00 p.m., this Friday, with symposium to follow. %% The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. -- G. B. Shaw %% The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forbearance among men. -- Ambrose Bierce %% The fact that it works is immaterial. -- L. Ogborn %% The faster we go, the rounder we get. -- The Grateful Dead %% The Fifth Rule: You have taken yourself too seriously. %% The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it. -- Abbie Hoffman %% The first Great Steward, Parrafin the Climber, was employed in King Chloroplast's kitchen as second scullery boy when the old King met a tragic death. He apparently fell backward by accident on a dozen salad forks. Simultaneously the true heir, his son Carotene, mysteriously fled the city, complaining of some sort of plot and a lot of threatening notes left on his breakfast tray. At the time, this looked suspicious what with his father's death, and Carotene was suspected of foul play. Then the rest of the King's relatives began to drop dead one after the other in an odd fashion. Some were found strangled with dishrags and some succumbed to food poisoning. A few were found drowned in the soup vats, and one was attacked by assailants unknown and beaten to death with a pot roast. At least three appear to have thrown themselves backward on salad forks, perhaps in a noble gesture of grief over the King's untimely end. Finally there was no one left in Minas Troney who was either eligible or willing to wear the accursed crown, and the rule of Twodor was up for grabs. The scullery slave Parrafin bravely accepted the Stewardship of Twodor until that day when a lineal descendant of Carotene's returns to reclaim his rightful throne, conquer Twodor's enemies, and revamp the postal system. -- Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings" %% The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill. -- Robert Heller %% The first riddle I ever heard, one familiar to almost every Jewish child, was propounded to me by my father: "What is it that hangs on the wall, is green, wet -- and whistles?" I knit my brow and thought and thought, and in final perplexity gave up. "A herring," said my father. "A herring," I echoed. "A herring doesn't hang on the wall!" "So hang it there." "But a herring isn't green!" I protested. "Paint it." "But a herring isn't wet." "If its just painted its still wet." "But -- " I sputtered, summoning all my outrage, "-- a herring doesn't whistle!!" "Right, " smiled my father. "I just put that in to make it hard." -- Leo Rosten, "The Joys of Yiddish" %% "The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your hands and hoping when a rock or a club will do." -- McCloctnik the Lucid %% The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet. -- Michael Jackson %% The first time, it's a KLUDGE! The second, a trick. Later, it's a well-established technique! -- Mike Broido, Intermetrics %% The following quote is from page 4-27 of the MSCP Basic Disk Functions Manual which is part of the UDA50 Programmers Doc Kit manuals: As stated above, the host area of a disk is structured as a vector of logical blocks. From a performance viewpoint, however, it is more appropriate to view the host area as a four dimensional hyper-cube, the four dimensions being cylinder, group, track, and sector. . . . Referring to our hyper-cube analogy, the set of potentially accessible blocks form a line parallel to the track axis. This line moves parallel to the sector axis, wrapping around when it reaches the edge of the hyper-cube. %% The fortune program is supported, in part, by user contributions and by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Inanities. %% "The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." -- Dave Barry %% The full impact of parenthood doesn't hit you until you multiply the number of your kids by 32 teeth. %% The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. %% The gentlemen looked one another over with microscopic carelessness. %% The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End. %% The giraffe you thought you offended last week is willing to be nuzzled today. %% The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it. %% The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice. %% The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines. They gave him love and he invented marriage. %% THE GOLDEN RULE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES The one who has the gold makes the rules. %% "The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell." -- St. Augustine %% The good die young -- because they see it's no use living if you've got to be good. %% "The Good Ship Enterprise" (to the tune of "The Good Ship Lollipop") On the good ship Enterprise Every week there's a new surprise Where the Romulans lurk And the Klingons often go berserk. Yes, the good ship Enterprise There's excitement anywhere it flies Where Tribbles play And Nurse Chapel never gets her way. See Captain Kirk standing on the bridge, Mr. Spock is at his side. The weekly menace, ooh-ooh It gets fried, scattered far and wide. It's the good ship Enterprise Heading out where danger lies And you live in dread If you're wearing a shirt that's red. -- Doris Robin and Karen Trimble of The L.A. Filkharmonics %% The government [is] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the _nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases. -- Sir Josiah Stamp %% The grand leap of the whale up the Fall of Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature. -- Benjamin Franklin. %% The Great Bald Swamp Hedgehog: The Gerat Bald Swamp Hedgehog of Billericay displays, in courtship, his single prickle and does impressions of Holiday Inn desk clerks. Since this means him standing motionless for enormous periods of time he is often eaten in full display by The Great Bald Swamp Hedgehog Eater. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis %% The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. -- Albert Einstein %% The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue, a custom whereof the memory of man runneth not howsomever to the contrary, nohow. %% The Heineken Uncertainty Principle: You can never be sure how many beers you had last night. %% The herd instinct among economists makes sheep look like independent thinkers. %% The hieroglyphics are all unreadable except for a notation on the back, which reads "Genuine authentic Egyptian papyrus. Guaranteed to be at least 5000 years old." %% The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of "Ten Best". -- H. Allen Smith %% "The human brain is like an enormous fish -- it is flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see." -- Monty Python %% The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. %% The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein -- it rejects it. -- P. Medawar %% The human race has been fascinated by sharks for as long as I can remember. Just like the bluebird feeding its young, or the spider struggling to weave its perfect web, or the buttercup blooming in spring, the shark reveals to us yet another of the infinite and wonderful facets of nature, namely the facet that it can bite your head off. This causes us humans to feel a certain degree of awe. -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV" %% The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter. -- Mark Twain %% The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner. -- Mark Twain %% The idea is to die young as late as possible. -- Ashley Montagu %% The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic devices, such as television sets and VCR's, to the destruction centers, where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with sledgehammers. With their devices thus permanently destroyed, consumers would then be free to go out and buy new devices, rather than have to fritter away years of their lives trying to have the old ones repaired at so-called "factory service centers," which in fact consist of two men named Lester poking at the insides of broken electronic devices with cheap cigars and going, "Lookit all them WIRES in there!" -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants" %% "The identical is equal to itself, since it is different." -- Franco Spisani %% "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer." -- Henry Kissinger %% The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr. -- Will Rogers %% The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important point to the consumer in this day when individualism is an increasingly important thing to people. -- Donald N. Smith, president of Burger King %% The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with the square of the number of participants. -- Adam Walinsky %% The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member of the group divided by the number of people in the group. %% The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless. So, for guidance, you want to look to big business. Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes... -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes" %% The Kennedy Constant: Don't get mad -- get even. %% The Killer Ducks are coming!!! %% The ladies men admire, I've heard, Would shudder at a wicked word. Their candle gives a single light; They'd rather stay at home at night. They do not keep awake till three, Nor read erotic poetry. They never sanction the impure, Nor recognize an overture. They shrink from powders and from paints ... So far, I've had no complaints. -- Dorothy Parker %% "The last time somebody said, `I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, `They used to say the same thing about drugs.' -- Roy Blount, Jr. %% The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. -- Henry David Thoreau %% The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -- Anatole France %% "The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own." -- H.G. Wells %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #10: SIMPLE SIMPLE is an acronym for Sheer Idiot's Monopurpose Programming Language Environment. This language, developed at the Hanover College for Technological Misfits, was designed to make it impossible to write code with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN, END and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can't make a syntax error. Programs written in SIMPLE do nothing useful. Thus they achieve the results of programs written in other languages without the tedious, frustrating process of testing and debugging. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #12: LITHP This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence of an "S" in its character set; users must substitute "TH". LITHP is said to be useful in protheththing lithtth. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #13: SLOBOL SLOBOL is best known for the speed, or lack of it, of its compiler. Although many compilers allow you to take a coffee break while they compile, SLOBOL compilers allow you to travel to Bolivia to pick the coffee. Forty-three programmers are known to have died of boredom sitting at their terminals while waiting for a SLOBOL program to compile. Weary SLOBOL programmers often turn to a related (but infinitely faster) language, COCAINE. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #17: SARTRE Named after the late existential philosopher, SARTRE is an extremely unstructured language. Statements in SARTRE have no purpose; they just are. Thus SARTRE programs are left to define their own functions. SARTRE programmers tend to be boring and depressed, and are no fun at parties. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #18: C- This language was named for the grade received by its creator when he submitted it as a class project in a graduate programming class. C- is best described as a "low-level" programming language. In fact, the language generally requires more C- statements than machine-code statements to execute a given task. In this respect, it is very similar to COBOL. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #18a: FIFTH FIFTH is a precision mathematical language in which the data types refer to quantity. The data types range from CC, OUNCE, SHOT, and JIGGER to FIFTH (hence the name of the language), LITER, MAGNUM and BLOTTO. Commands refer to ingredients such as CHABLIS, CHARDONNAY, CABERNET, GIN, VERMOUTH, VODKA, SCOTCH, and WHATEVERSAROUND. The many versions of the FIFTH language reflect the sophistication and financial status of its users. Commands in the ELITE dialect include VSOP and LAFITE, while commands in the GUTTER dialect include HOOTCH and RIPPLE. The latter is a favorite of frustrated FORTH programmers who end up using this language. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #2: RENE Named after the famous French philosopher and mathematician Rene DesCartes, RENE is a language used for artificial intelligence. The language is being developed at the Chicago Center of Machine Politics and Programming under a grant from the Jane Byrne Victory Fund. A spokesman described the language as "Just as great as dis [sic] city of ours." The center is very pleased with progress to date. They say they have almost succeeded in getting a VAX to think. However, sources inside the organization say that each time the machine fails to think it ceases to exist. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #5: VALGOL From its modest beginnings in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry. Here is a sample program: LIKE, Y*KNOW(I MEAN)START IF PIZZA = LIKE BITCHEN AND GUY = LIKE TUBULAR AND VALLEY GIRL = LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2 THEN FOR I = LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100 DO*WAH - (DITTY**2) BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT) SURE LIKE BAG THIS PROGRAM REALLY LIKE TOTALLY (Y*KNOW) IM*SURE GOTO THE MALL When the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the message: GAG ME WITH A SPOON!! %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #8: LAIDBACK This language was developed at the Marin County Center for T'ai Chi, Mellowness and Computer Programming (now defunct), as an alternative to the more intense atmosphere in nearby Silicon Valley. The center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs while they worked. Unfortunately few programmers could survive there because the center outlawed Pizza and Coca-Cola in favor of Tofu and Perrier. Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle and non-threatening language since all error messages are in lower case. For example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the message: "i hate to bother you, but i just can't relate to that. can you find the time to try it again?" %% The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching train. %% The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming dragon. %% The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep. -- Woody Allen %% The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself. -- Henry Kissinger %% "The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as we could with both of them." -- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22" %% The makers may make and the users may use, but the fixers must fix with but minimal clues %% The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been. -- Alan Ashley-Pitt %% The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. -- Mark Twain. %% The marvels of today's modern technology include the development of a soda can, when discarded will last forever ... and a $7,000 car which when properly cared for will rust out in two or three years. %% "... the Mayo Clinic, named after its founder, Dr. Ted Clinic ..." -- Dave Barry %% The meek shall inherit the earth -- they are too weak to refuse. %% The men sat sipping their tea in silence. After a while the klutz said, "Life is like a bowl of sour cream." "Like a bowl of sour cream?" asked the other. "Why?" "How should I know? What am I, a philosopher?" %% The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation. -- Lew Mammel, Jr. %% The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its predictive power. -- Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking." %% The modern child will answer you back before you've said anything. -- Laurence J. Peter %% The mome rath isn't born that could outgrabe me. -- Nicol Williamson %% The moon is a planet just like the Earth, only it is even deader. %% The moon may be smaller than Earth, but it's further away. %% "The more data I punch in this card, the lighter it becomes, and the lower the mailing cost." -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" %% The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be. -- Lao Tsu %% The more things change, the more they stay insane. %% The more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right. %% The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey. -- Andy Warhol %% "The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment." -- Theodore H. White %% The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on. %% "... The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes'!" "Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested. "No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is, 'The Aged Aged Man.'" "Then I ought to have said "That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself. "No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways and Means': but that's only what it is called you know!" "Well, what is the song then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. "I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is "A-sitting on a Gate": and the tune's my own invention." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" %% "The National Association of Theater Concessionaires reported that in 1986, 60% of all candy sold in movie theaters was sold to Roger Ebert." -- D. Letterman %% The National Short-Sleeved Shirt Association says: Support your right to bare arms! %% The net of law is spread so wide, No sinner from its sweep may hide. Its meshes are so fine and strong, They take in every child of wrong. O wondrous web of mystery! Big fish alone escape from thee! -- James Jeffrey Roche %% The new Congressmen say they're going to turn the government around. I hope I don't get run over again. %% The New Testament offers the basis for modern computer coding theory, in the form of an affirmation of the binary number system. But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. -- Matthew 5:37 %% "The New York Times is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by the people who think they run the country. The National Enquirer is read by the people who think Elvis is alive and running the country ..." -- Robert J Woodhead %% The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum %% The notion of a "record" is an obsolete remnant of the days of the 80-column card. -- Dennis M. Ritchie %% The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion ... In a free society these institutions must be wholly free -- which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state. -- Alan Barth %% The number of arguments is unimportant unless some of them are correct. -- Ralph Hartley %% The objective of all dedicated employees should be to thoroughly analyze all situations, anticipate all problems prior to their occurrence, have answers for these problems, and move swiftly to solve these problems when called upon. However, When you are up to your ass in alligators it is difficult to remind yourself your initial objective was to drain the swamp. %% The Official MBA Handbook on business cards: Avoid overly pretentious job titles such as "Lord of the Realm, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India" or "Director of Corporate Planning." %% The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy. %% The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath. -- Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart %% The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe. %% The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't. -- Ernest Rutherford %% The only problem with being a man of leisure is that you can never stop and take a rest. %% "The only real way to look younger is not to be born so soon." -- Charles Schulz, "Things I've Had to Learn Over and Over and Over" %% The only really decent thing to do behind a person's back is pat it. %% The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put inside boxes. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself. -- Oscar Wilde %% "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history." -- Hegel "I know guys can't learn from yesterday ... Hegel must be taking the long view." -- John Brunner, "Stand on Zanzibar" %% The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. -- Oscar Wilde %% The opossum is a very sophisticated animal. It doesn't even get up until 5 or 6 p.m. %% The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Bohr %% The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine %% "The other day I put instant coffee in my microwave oven ... I almost went back in time." -- Steven Wright %% The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here. -- Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley) %% The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence. -- H. L. Mencken %% The people of Halifax invented the trampoline. During the Victorian period the tripe-dressers of Halifax stretched tripe across a large wooden frame and jumped up and down on it to `tender and dress' it. The tripoline, as they called it, degenerated into becoming the apparatus for a spectator sport. The people of Halifax also invented the harmonium, a device for castrating pigs during Sunday service. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The Pig, if I am not mistaken, Gives us ham and pork and Bacon. Let others think his heart is big, I think it stupid of the Pig. -- Ogden Nash %% The pitcher wound up and he flang the ball at the batter. The batter swang and missed. The pitcher flang the ball again and this time the batter connected. He hit a high fly right to the center fielder. The center fielder was all set to catch the ball, but at the last minute his eyes were blound by the sun and he dropped it. -- Dizzy Dean %% The plot was designed in a light vein that somehow became varicose. -- David Lardner %% The polite thing to do has always been to address people as they wish to be addressed, to treat them in a way they think dignified. But it is equally important to accept and tolerate different standards of courtesy, not expecting everyone else to adapt to one's own preferences. Only then can we hope to restore the insult to its proper social function of expressing true distaste. -- Judith Martin, "Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior" %% "The porcupine with the sharpest quills gets stuck on a tree more often." %% The Preacher, the Politician, the Teacher, Were each of them once a kiddie. A child, indeed, is a wonderful creature. Do I want one? God Forbiddie! -- Ogden Nash %% The President publicly apologized today to all those offended by his brother's remark, "There's more Arabs in this country than there is Jews!". Those offended include Arabs, Jews, and English teachers. -- Baltimore, Channel 11 News, on Jimmy Carter %% The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us. -- Mario Cuomo %% The primary cause of failure in electrical appliances is an expired warranty. Often, you can get an appliance running again simply by changing the warranty expiration date with a 15/64-inch felt-tipped marker. -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change. -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers %% The primary requisite for any new tax law is for it to exempt enough voters to win the next election. %% The primary theme of SoupCon is communication. The acronym "LEO" represents the secondary theme: Law Enforcement Officials The overall theme of SoupCon shall be: Avoiding Communication with Law Enforcement Officials %% ... the privileged being which we call human is distinguished from other animals only by certain double-edged manifestations which in charity we can only call "inhuman." -- R. A. Lafferty %% The problem ... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with. Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil using other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle Eastern countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats, etc., but so far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous bulldozer-rental bill and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons. None of the animals turned into oil, although most of the laboratory rats developed cancer. -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler" %% The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it. -- Glaser and Way %% The problem with engineers is that they tend to cheat in order to get results. The problem with mathematicians is that they tend to work on toy problems in order to get results. The problem with program verifiers is that they tend to cheat at toy problems in order to get results. %% The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. %% The Psblurtex is an 18-inch long anaconda that hides in the gentlemen's outfitting departments of Amazonian stores and is often bought by mistake since its colors are those of the London Reform Club. Once tied around its victim's neck, it strangles him gently and then claims the insurance before running off to Germany where it lives in hiding. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The qotc (quote of the con) was Liz's: "My brain is paged out to my liver" %% The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president? What is it about the job that makes it worth revealing, on national television, that you have the ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste? -- Dave Barry, "On Presidential Politics" %% The rain it raineth on the just And also on the unjust fella, But chiefly on the just, because The unjust steals the just's umbrella. %% The reader this message encounters not failing to understand is cursed. %% The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much. %% The reason it's called "Grape Nuts" is that it contains "dextrose", which is also sometimes called "grape sugar", and also because "Grape Nuts" is catchier, in terms of marketing, than "A Cross Between Gerbil Food and Gravel", which is what it tastes like. -- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's" %% The revolution will not be televised. %% The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. -- Emerson %% The rhino is a homely beast, For human eyes he's not a feast. Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros, I'll stare at something less prepoceros. -- Ogden Nash %% The right half of the brain controls the left half of the body. This means that only left handed people are in their right mind. %% "The Right Honorable Gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts." -- Sheridan %% The right to revolt has sources deep in our history. -- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas %% "The rights you have are the rights given you by this Committee [the House Un-American Activities Committee]. We will determine what rights you have and what rights you have not got." -- J. Parnell Thomas %% The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And littered with sloppy analysis! %% The Roman Rule The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it. %% The Ruffed Pandanga of Borneo and Rotherham spreads out his feathers in his courtship dance and imitates Winston Churchill and Tommy Cooper on one leg. The padanga is dying out because the female padanga doesn't take it too seriously. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The rule on staying alive as a forcaster is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once. -- Jane Bryant Quinn %% "The Schizophrenic: An Unauthorized Autobiography" %% The Schwine-Kitzenger Institute study of 47 men over the age of 100 showed that all had these things in common: (1) They all had moderate appetites. (2) They all came from middle class homes (3) All but two of them were dead. %% The scum also rises. -- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson %% The seven deadly sins ... Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven milestones from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the milestones are lifted. -- George Bernard Shaw %% The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood as he reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all. The Gray Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in the palace of Gilpkerio Kistomerces. Even though twenty-four parts in twenty-five of him are dead, he is alive. "Now about Lankhmar. She's been invaded, her walls breached everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a fierce host which out-numbers Lankhmar's inhabitants by fifty to one -- and equipped with all modern weapons. Yet you can save the city." "How?" demanded Fafhrd. Ningauble shrugged. "You're a hero. You should know." -- Fritz Leiber, from "The Swords of Lankhmar" %% The sheep that fly over your head are soon to land. %% The Sixth Commandment of Frisbee: The greatest single aid to distance is for the disc to be going in a direction you did not want. (Goes the wrong way = Goes a long way.) -- Dan Roddick %% "The sooner all the animals are dead, the sooner we'll find their money." -- Ed Bluestone, "The National Lampoon" %% "The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up!" %% The sooner you make your first 5000 mistakes, the sooner you will be able to correct them. -- Nicolaides %% The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears. %% The Soviet pre-eminence in chess can be traced to the average Russian's readiness to brood obsessively over anything, even the arrangement of some pieces of wood. Indeed, the Russians' predisposition for quiet reflection followed by sudden preventive action explains why they led the field for many years in both chess and ax murders. It is well known that as early as 1970, the U.S.S.R., aware of what a defeat at Reykjavik would do to national prestige, implemented a vigorous program of preparation and incentive. Every day for an entire year, a team of psychologists, chess analysts and coaches met with the top three Russian grand masters and threatened them with a pointy stick. That these tactics proved fruitless is now a part of chess history and a further testament to the American way, which provides that if you want something badly enough, you can always go to Iceland and get it from the Russians. -- Marshall Brickman, Playboy, April, 1973 %% The STAR WARS Song Sung to the tune of "Lola", by the Kinks: I met him in a swamp down in Dagobah Where it bubbles all the time like a giant cabinet soda S-O-D-A soda I saw the little runt sitting there on a log I asked him his name and in a raspy voice he said Yoda Y-O-D-A Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda Well I've been around but I ain't never seen A guy who looks like a Muppet but he's wrinkled and green Oh my Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda Well I'm not dumb but I can't understand How he can raise me in the air just by raising his hand Oh my Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda, Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo Yoda %% The state law of Pennsylvania prohibits singing in the bathtub. %% The steady state of disks is full. -- Ken Thompson %% THE STORY OF CREATION or THE MYTH OF URK In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and null, and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM was moving over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there be registers"; and there were registers. And DEC saw that they carried; and DEC separated the data from the instructions. DEC called the data Stack, and the instructions they called Code. And there was evening and there was morning, one interrupt ... -- Rico Tudor %% The streets are safe in Philadelphia, it's only the people who make them unsafe. -- Mayor Frank Rizzo %% "The student in question is performing minimally for his peer group and is an emerging underachiever." %% The study of non-linear physics is like the study of non-elephant biology. %% "The subspace _W inherits the other 8 properties of _V. And there aren't even any property taxes." -- J. MacKay, Mathematics 134b %% The sum of the Universe is zero. %% The sun was shining on the sea, Shining with all his might: He did his very best to make The billows smooth and bright -- And this was very odd, because it was The middle of the night. -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" %% The surest protection against temptation is cowardice. -- Mark Twain %% The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that ... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (_H/_E)^4 = 50, where _E is the absolute temperature of the earth (-300K), gives _H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed ... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C. -- From "Applied Optics" vol. 11, A14, 1972 %% The Third Law of Photography: If you did manage to get any good shots, they will be ruined when someone inadvertently opens the darkroom door and all of the dark leaks out. %% The Three Laws of Thermodynamics: The First Law: You can't get anything without working for it. The Second Law: The most you can accomplish by working is to break even. The Third Law: You can only break even at absolute zero. %% The Three Major Kind of Tools * Tools for hittings things to make them loose or to tighten them up or jar their many complex, sophisticated electrical parts in such a manner that they function perfectly. (These are your hammers, maces, bludgeons, and truncheons.) * Tools that, if dropped properly, can penetrate your foot. (Awls) * Tools that nobody should ever use because the potential danger is far greater than the value of any project that could possibly result. (Power saws, power drills, power staplers, any kind of tool that uses any kind of power more advanced than flashlight batteries.) -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" %% The trouble with a kitten is that When it grows up, it's always a cat -- Ogden Nash. %% The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time. %% The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it. -- Franklin P. Jones %% The trouble with being punctual is that people think you have nothing more important to do. %% The trouble with superheros is what to do between phone booths. -- Ken Kesey %% The truth is what is; what should be is a dirty lie. -- Lenny Bruce %% The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks Which practically conceal its sex. I think it clever of the turtle In such a fix to be so fertile. -- Ogden Nash %% The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation. -- Oscar Wilde %% The United States also has its native Fascists who say that they are "100 percent American"... -- U. S. Army (1945) %% The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody and still nobody likes him. -- Jim Samuels %% The universe does not have laws -- it has habits, and habits can be broken. %% The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination -- but the combination is locked up in the safe. -- Peter DeVries %% The University of California Bears announced the signing of Reggie Philbin to a letter of intent to attend Cal next Fall. Philbin is said to make up for no talent by cheating well. Says Philbin of his decision to attend Cal, "I'm in it for the free ride." %% The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together. -- Sir Peter Medawar %% The verdict of a jury is the a priori opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars. -- H. L. Mencken %% The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. -- Mark Twain %% The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views ... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. -- Doctor Who, "Face of Evil" %% "The wages of sin are death; but after they're done taking out taxes, it's just a tired feeling:" %% The wages of sin are high but you get your money's worth. %% "The way to make a small fortune in the commodities market is to start with a large fortune." %% THE WOMBAT The wombat lives across the seas, Among the far Antipodes. He may exist on nuts and berries, Or then again, on missionaries; His distant habitat precludes Conclusive knowledge of his moods. But I would not engage the wombat In any form of mortal combat. %% The world is coming to an end ... SAVE YOUR BUFFERS!!! %% The world is coming to an end! Repent and return those library books! %% The world's as ugly as sin, And almost as delightful -- Frederick Locker-Lampson %% The years of peak mental activity are undoubtedly between the ages of four and eighteen. At four we know all the questions, at eighteen all the answers. %% Then a man said: Speak to us of Expectations. He then said: If a man does not see or hear the waters of the Jordan, then he should not taste the pomegranate or ply his wares in an open market. If a man would not labour in the salt and rock quarries then he should not accept of the Earth that which he refuses to give of himself. Such a man would expect a pear of a peach tree. Such a man would expect a stone to lay an egg. Such a man would expect Sears to assemble a lawnmower. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" %% There *__is* intelligent life on Earth, but I leave for Texas on Monday. %% There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy ... -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% There are many intelligent species in the universe. They all own cats. %% There are no data that cannot be plotted on a straight line if the axis are chosen correctly. %% There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone. -- Gloria Steinem %% There are some goyisha names that just about guarantee that someone isn't Jewish. For example, you'll never meet a Jew named Johnson or Wright or Jones or Sinclair or Ricks or Stevenson or Reid or Larsen or Jenks. But some goyisha names just about guarantee that every other person you meet with that name will be Jewish. Why is this? Who knows? Learned rabbis have pondered this question for centuries and have failed to come up with an answer, and you think ___you can find one? Get serious. You don't even understand why it's forbidden to eat crab -- fresh cold crab with mayonnaise -- or lobster -- soft tender morsels of lobster dipped in melted butter. You don't even understand a simple thing like that, and yet you hope to discover why there are more Jews named Miller than Katz? Fat Chance. -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% "There are some micro-organisms that exhibit characteristics of both plants and animals. When exposed to light they undergo photosynthesis; and when the lights go out, they turn into animals. But then again, don't we all?" %% "There are those who claim that magic is like the tide; that it swells and fades over the surface of the earth, collecting in concentrated pools here and there, almost disappearing from other spots, leaving them parched for wonder. There are also those who believe that if you stick your fingers up your nose and blow, it will increase your intelligence." -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VII %% There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. -- Disraeli %% "There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away from the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; or someone loaded Star Trek 3.2 into our video processor." %% There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted. -- Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior %% "There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain." -- Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800 %% There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent Universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering. %% There are three things I always forget. Names, faces -- the third I can't remember. -- Italo Svevo %% There are three ways to get something done: (1) Do it yourself. (2) Hire someone to do it for you. (3) Forbid your kids to do it. %% There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire someone, or forbid your kids to do it. %% There are times when truth is stranger than fiction and lunch time is one of them. %% There are two kinds of solar-heat systems: "passive" systems collect the sunlight that hits your home, and "active" systems collect the sunlight that hits your neighbors' homes, too. -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler" %% There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more. -- Woody Allen %% "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make is so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C. A. R. Hoare %% "There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope." -- Oscar Wilde %% There are two ways to write error-free programs. Only the third one works. %% There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives. %% There can be no twisted thought without a twisted molecule. -- R. W. Gerard %% There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full. -- Henry Kissinger %% There exist tasks which cannot be done by more than 10 men or fewer than 100. -- Steele's Law %% There has been an alarming increase in the number of things you know nothing about. %% There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature: that of paying literary men by the quantity they do NOT write. %% There is a green, multi-legged creature crawling on your shoulder. %% There is a Massachusetts law requiring all dogs to have their hind legs tied during the month of April. %% There is a natural hootchy-kootchy to a goldfish. -- Walt Disney %% "There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of the Fatherland." -- Adolf Hitler %% There is a theory that states: "If anyone finds out what the universe is for it will disappear and be replaced by something more bazaarly inexplicable." There is another theory that states: "This has already happened ...." -- Douglas Adams, "Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" %% There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum." -- Arthur C. Clarke %% There is no realizable power that man cannot, in time, fashion the tools to attain, nor any power so secure that the naked ape will not abuse it. So it is written in the genetic cards -- only physics and war hold him in check. And also the wife who wants him home by five, of course. -- Encyclopedia Apocryphia, 1990 ed. %% "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, President of DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977 %% There is no substitute for good manners, except, perhaps, fast reflexes. %% There is no such thing as fortune. Try again. %% There is no time like the pleasant. %% There is no time like the present for postponing what you ought to be doing. %% There is no TRUTH. There is no REALITY. There is no CONSISTENCY. There are no ABSOLUTE STATEMENTS I'm very probably wrong. %% "There is nothing which cannot be answered by means of my doctrine," said a monk, coming into a teahouse where Nasrudin sat. "And yet just a short time ago, I was challenged by a scholar with an unanswerable question," said Nasrudin. "I could have answered it if I had been there." "Very well. He asked, 'Why are you breaking into my house in the middle of the night?'" %% There is nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure. -- Ross MacDonald %% There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. -- Oscar Wilde %% There once was a girl named Irene Who lived on distilled kerosene But she started absorbin' A new hydrocarbon And since then has never benzene. %% There once was a member of Mensa Who was a most excellent fencer. The sword that he used Was his -- (line is refused, And has now been removed by the censor). %% There once was an old man from Esser, Who's knowledge grew lesser and lesser. It at last grew so small, He knew nothing at all, And now he's a College Professor. %% "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." -- C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia %% There was a plane crash over mid-ocean, and only three survivors were left in the life-raft: the Pope, the President, and Mayor Daley. Unfortunately, it was a one-man life-raft, and quickly sinking, so they started debating who should be allowed to stay. The Pope pointed out that he was the spiritual leader of millions all over the world, the President explained that if he died then America would be stuck with the Vice-President, and so forth. Then Mayor Daley said, "Look! We're not solving anything like this! The only fair thing to do is to vote on it." So they did, and Mayor Daley won by 97 votes. %% There was a young lady from Hyde Who ate a green apple and died. While her lover lamented The apple fermented And made cider inside her inside. %% There was a young man who said "God, I find it exceedingly odd, That the willow oak tree Continues to be, When there's no one about in the Quad." "Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd, For I'm always about in the Quad; And that's why the tree, Continues to be," Signed "Yours faithfully, God." %% "There was an interesting development in the CBS-Westmoreland trial: both sides agreed that after the trial, Andy Rooney would be allowed to talk to the jury for three minutes about little things that annoyed him during the trial." -- David Letterman %% There were in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double- digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard. The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite. Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business? %% There's a fine line between courage and foolishness. Too bad it's not a fence. %% There's an old proverb that says just about whatever you want it to. %% There's little in taking or giving, There's little in water or wine: This living, this living, this living, Was never a project of mine. Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is The gain of the one at the top, For art is a form of catharsis, And love is a permanent flop, And work is the province of cattle, And rest's for a clam in a shell, So I'm thinking of throwing the battle -- Would you kindly direct me to hell? -- Dorothy Parker %% There's no easy quick way out, we're gonna have to live through our whole lives, win, lose, or draw. -- Walt Kelly %% There's no future in time travel %% There's no real need to do housework -- after four years it doesn't get any worse. %% There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. -- Will Rodgers %% "There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos." -- Jim Hightower, Texas Agricultural Commissioner %% "There's nothing wrong with teenagers that reasoning with them won't aggravate." %% There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again. -- Clint Eastwood %% There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic. -- Lily Tomlin %% These days the necessities of life cost you about three times what they used to, and half the time they aren't even fit to drink. %% They also surf who only stand on waves. %% "They make a desert and call it peace." -- Tacitus (55?-120?) %% They spell it "da Vinci" and pronounce it "da Vinchy". Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce. -- Mark Twain %% "They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them!" %% They told me you had proven it When they discovered our results About a month before. Their hair began to curl The proof was valid, more or less Instead of understanding it But rather less than more. We'd run the thing through PRL. He sent them word that we would try Don't tell a soul about all this To pass where they had failed For it must ever be And after we were done, to them A secret, kept from all the rest The new proof would be mailed. Between yourself and me. My notion was to start again Ignoring all they'd done We quickly turned it into code To see if it would run. %% They're only trying to make me LOOK paranoid! %% "They're unfriendly, which is fortunate, really. They'd be difficult to like." -- Avon %% Things are more like they used to be than they are now. %% Things will be bright in P.M. A cop will shine a light in your face. %% Think big. Pollute the Mississippi. %% Think honk if you're a telepath. %% Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq. cm.! %% Think of your family tonight. Try to crawl home after the computer crashes. %% Think twice before speaking, but don't say "think think click click". %% "Thirty days hath Septober, April, June, and no wonder. all the rest have peanut butter except my father who wears red suspenders." %% This Fortue Examined By INSPECTOR NO. 2-14 %% This fortune cookie program out of order. For those in desperate need, please use the program "________randchar". This program generates random characters, and, given enough time, will undoubtedly come up with something profound. It will, however, take it no time at all to be more profound than THIS program has ever been. %% This fortune intentionally not included. %% This fortune is false. %% This fortune is inoperative. Please try another. %% "This is a country where people are free to practice their religion, regardless of race, creed, color, obesity, or number of dangling keys ..." %% "This is a job for BOB VIOLENCE and SCUM, the INCREDIBLY STUPID MUTANT DOG." -- Bob Violence %% "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this had been an actual emergency, do you really think we'd stick around to tell you?" %% This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has "deregulated" the airline industry. What this means for you, the consumer, is that the airlines are no longer required to follow any rules whatsoever. They can show snuff movies. They can charge for oxygen. They can hire pilots right out of Vending Machine Refill Person School. They can conserve fuel by ejecting husky passengers over water. They can ram competing planes in mid-air. These innovations have resulted in tremendous cost savings which have been passed along to you, the consumer, in the form of flights with amazingly low fares, such as $29. Of course, certain restrictions do apply, the main one being that all these flights take you to Newark, and you must pay thousands of dollars if you want to fly back out. -- Dave Barry, "Iowa -- Land of Secure Vacations" %% This is an unauthorized cybernetic announcement. %% This is for all ill-treated fellows Unborn and unbegot, For them to read when they're in trouble And I am not. -- A. E. Housman %% "This is lemma 1.1. We start a new chapter so the numbers all go back to one." -- Prof. Seager, C&O 351 %% This is National Non-Dairy Creamer Week. %% THIS IS PLEDGE WEEK FOR THE FORTUNE PROGRAM If you like the fortune program, why not support it now with your contribution of a pithy fortune, clean or obscene? We cannot continue without your support. Less than 14% of all fortune users are contributors. That means that 86% of you are getting a free ride. We can't go on like this much longer. Federal cutbacks mean less money for fortunes, and unless user contributions increase to make up the difference, the fortune program will have to shut down between midnight and 8 a.m. Don't let this happen. Mail your fortunes right now to "fortune". Just type in your favorite pithy saying. Do it now before you forget. Our target is 300 new fortunes by the end of the week. Don't miss out. All fortunes will be acknowledged. If you contribute 30 fortunes or more, you will receive a free subscription to "The Fortune Hunter", our monthly program guide. If you contribute 50 or more, you will receive a free "Fortune Hunter" coffee mug .... %% This is the ____LAST time I take travel suggestions from Ray Bradbury! %% This is the first numerical problem I ever did. It demonstrates the power of computers: Enter lots of data on calorie & nutritive content of foods. Instruct the thing to maximize a function describing nutritive content, with a minimum level of each component, for fixed caloric content. The results are that one should eat each day: 1/2 chicken 1 egg 1 glass of skim milk 27 heads of lettuce. -- Rev. Adrian Melott %% This is the story of the bee Whose sex is very hard to see You cannot tell the he from the she But she can tell, and so can he The little bee is never still She has no time to take the pill And that is why, in times like these There are so many sons of bees. %% This is your fortune. %% This land is full of trousers! this land is full of mausers! And pussycats to eat them when the sun goes down! -- Firesign Theater %% This land is made of mountains, This land is made of mud, This land has lots of everything, For me and Elmer Fudd. This land has lots of trousers, This land has lots of mousers, And pussycats to eat them When the sun goes down. %% This login session: $13.99, but for you $11.88 %% This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force. -- Dorothy Parker %% This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. -- Douglas Adams %% "This process can check if this value is zero, and if it is, it does something child-like." -- Forbes Burkowski, Computer Science 454 %% This quote is taken from the Diamondback, the University of Maryland student newspaper, of Tuesday, 3/10/87. One disadvantage of the Univac system is that it does not use Unix, a recently developed program which translates from one computer language to another and has a built-in editing system which identifies errors in the original program. %% This sentence contradicts itself -- no actually it doesn't. -- Hofstadter %% ... This striving for excellence extends into people's personal lives as well. When '80s people buy something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability. Eighties people buy imported dental floss. They buy gourmet baking soda. If an '80s couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent restaurant. If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of excellence-oriented people like themselves waiting, their beepers going off like crickets in the night. An excellent restaurant wouldn't have a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli. -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence" %% This will be a memorable month -- no matter how hard you try to forget it. %% Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does. As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about it. I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily sane. But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians. The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson's disease. I don't have it this morning. It comes and goes. This morning I don't have Hunter Thompson's disease. -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: Excerpt from "A Political Disease", Vonnegut's review of "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" %% Those of you who think you know everything are very annoying to those of us who do. %% Those who can't write, write manuals. %% Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate. %% "Those who do not do politics will be done in by politics." -- French Proverb %% Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well. -- Aristotle %% Those who express random thoughts to legislative committees are often surprised and appalled to find themselves the instigators of law. -- Mark B. Cohen %% Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. -- John F. Kennedy %% Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. -- Frederick Douglass %% Three great scientific theories of the structure of the universe are the molecular, the corpuscular and the atomic. A fourth affirms, with Haeckel, the condensation or precipitation of matter from ether -- whose existence is proved by the condensation or precipitation ... A fifth theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any more about the matter than the others. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. %% Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. %% 'Tis the dream of each programmer, Before his life is done, To write three lines of APL, And make the damn things run. %% (to "The Caissons Go Rolling Along") Scratch the disks, dump the core, Shut it down, pull the plug Roll the tapes across the floor, Give the core an extra tug And the system is going to crash. And the system is going to crash. Teletypes smashed to bits. Mem'ry cards, one and all, Give the scopes some nasty hits Toss out halfway down the hall And the system is going to crash. And the system is going to crash. And we've also found Just flip one switch When you turn the power down, And the lights will cease to twitch You turn the disk readers into trash. And the tape drives will crumble in a flash. Oh, it's so much fun, When the CPU Now the CPU won't run Can print nothing out but "foo," And the system is going to crash. The system is going to crash. %% To A Quick Young Fox: Why jog exquisite bulk, fond crazy vamp, Daft buxom jonquil, zephyr's gawky vice? Guy fed by work, quiz Jove's xanthic lamp -- Zow! Qualms by deja vu gyp fox-kin thrice. -- Lazy Dog %% To be intoxicated is to feel sophisticated but not be able to say it. %% To be is to do. -- I. Kant To do is to be. -- A. Sartre Yabba-Dabba-Doo! -- F. Flinstone %% "To be responsive at this time, though I will simply say, and therefore this is a repeat of what I said previously, that which I am unable to offer in response is based on information available to make no such statement." %% To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and, whatever you hit, call it the target. %% To err is human, to forgive is Not Company Policy. %% "To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System" %% To err is human, to moo bovine. %% To every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D. -- B. Duggan %% To generalize is to be an idiot. -- William Blake %% To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of them absent. %% To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Edison %% To the best of my recollection, Senator, I can't recall. %% To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load. %% To those accustomed to the precise, structured methods of conventional system development, exploratory development techniques may seem messy, inelegant, and unsatisfying. But it's a question of congruence: precision and flexibility may be just as disfunctional in novel, uncertain situations as sloppiness and vacillation are in familiar, well-defined ones. Those who admire the massive, rigid bone structures of dinosaurs should remember that jellyfish still enjoy their very secure ecological niche. -- Beau Sheil, "Power Tools for Programmers" %% To understand this important story, you have to understand how the telephone company works. Your telephone is connected to a local computer, which is in turn connected to a regional computer, which is in turn connected to a loudspeaker the size of a garbage truck on the lawn of Edna A. Bargewater of Lawrence, Kan. Whenever you talk on the phone, your local computer listens in. If it suspects you're going to discuss an intimate topic, it notifies the computer above it, which listens in and decides whether to alert the one above it, until finally, if you really humiliate yourself, maybe break down in tears and tell your closest friend about a sordid incident from your past involving a seedy motel, a neighbor's spouse, an entire religious order, a garden hose and six quarts of tapioca pudding, the top computer feeds your conversation into Edna's loudspeaker, and she and her friends come out on the porch to listen and drink gin and laugh themselves silly. -- Dave Barry, "Won't It Be Just Great Owning Our Own Phones?" %% "To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question ... or is it?" %% Today is a good day to bribe a high-ranking public official. %% Today is National Existential Ennui Awareness Day. %% Today is the first day of the rest of the mess %% Today is the first day of the rest of your lossage. %% Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday %% Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster? -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?" %% "Today's thrilling story has been brought to you by Mushies, the great new cereal that gets soggy even without milk or cream. Join us soon for more spectacular adventure starring ... Tippy, the Wonder Dog." -- Bob & Ray %% "Today, of course, it is considered very poor taste to use the F-word except in major motion pictures." -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!" %% Toilet Toup'ee, n.: Any shag carpet that causes the lid to become top-heavy, thus creating endless annoyance to male users. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Tomorrow will be canceled due to lack of interest. %% Tonight's the night: Sleep in a eucalyptus tree. %% Too clever is dumb. -- Ogden Nash %% Too much of a good thing is WONDERFUL. -- Mae West %% Too much of everything is just enough. -- Bob Wier %% Too often I find that the volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases. -- Governor Jerry Brown %% Top scientists agree that with the present rate of consumption, the earth's supply of gravity will be exhausted before the 24th century. As man struggles to discover cheaper alternatives, we need your help. Please... CONSERVE GRAVITY Follow these simple suggestions: (1) Walk with a light step. Carry helium balloons if possible. (2) Use tape, magnets, or glue instead of paperweights. (3) Give up skiing and skydiving for more horizontal sports like curling. (4) Avoid showers .. take baths instead. (5) Don't hang all your clothes in the closet ... Keep them in one big pile. (6) Stop flipping pancakes %% Travel important today; Internal Revenue men arrive tomorrow. %% Troubled day for virgins over 16 who are beautiful and wealthy and live in eucalyptus trees. %% Truth is the most valuable thing we have -- so let us economize it. -- Mark Twain %% Truth will be out this morning. (Which may really mess things up.) %% Truthful, adj.: Dumb and illiterate. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Try not to have a good time ... This is supposed to be educational. -- Charles Schulz %% Try to be the best of whatever you are, even if what you are is no good. %% Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading: Was it done, is it being done, or is something to be done? Reports are now written in four tenses: past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense. Watch for novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmer), defined by the imperfect past, the insufficient present, and the absolutely perfect future. -- Amrom Katz %% Try to get all of your posthumous medals in advance. %% Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly. %% Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth. -- Alan Watts %% Trying to establish voice contact ... please ____yell into keyboard. %% Turnaucka's Law: The attention span of a computer is only as long as its electrical cord. %% Tussman's Law: Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come. %% TV is chewing gum for the eyes. -- Frank Lloyd Wright %% 'Twas midnight, and the UNIX hacks Did gyre and gimble in their cave All mimsy was the CS-VAX And Cory raths outgrabe. "Beware the software rot, my son! The faults that bite, the jobs that thrash! Beware the broken pipe, and shun The frumious system crash!" %% 'Twas the Night before Crisis 'Twas the night before crisis, and all through the house, Not a program was working not even a browse. The programmers were wrung out too mindless to care, Knowing chances of cutover hadn't a prayer. The users were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of inquiries danced in their heads. When out in the lobby there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my tube to see what was the matter. And what to my wondering eyes should appear, But a Super Programmer, oblivious to fear. More rapid than eagles, his programs they came, And he whistled and shouted and called them by name; On Update! On Add! On Inquiry! On Delete! On Batch Jobs! On Closing! On Functions Complete! His eyes were glazed over, his fingers were lean, From Weekends and nights in front of a screen. A wink of his eye, and a twist of his head, Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread... %% 'Twas the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period preceding the annual Yuletide celebration, And throughout our place of residence, Kinetic activity was not in evidence among the possessors of this potential, including that species of domestic rodent known as Mus musculus. Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward edge of the woodburning caloric apparatus, Pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure regarding an imminent visitation from an eccentric philanthropist among whose folkloric appelations is the honorific title of St. Nicklaus ... %% Twenty Percent of Zero is Better than Nothing. -- Walt Kelly %% Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel %% Two men came before Nasrudin when he was magistrate. The first man said, "This man has bitten my ear -- I demand compensation." The second man said, "He bit it himself." Nasrudin withdrew to his chambers, and spent an hour trying to bite his own ear. He succeeded only in falling over and bruising his forehead. Returning to the courtroom, Nasrudin pronounced, "Examine the man whose ear was bitten. If his forehead is bruised, he did it himself and the case is dismissed. If his forehead is not bruised, the other man did it and must pay three silver pieces." %% Two percent of zero is almost nothing. %% "Two sure ways to tell a sexy male; the first is, he has a bad memory. I forget the second." %% U: There's a U -- a Unicorn! Run right up and rub its horn. Look at all those points you're losing! UMBER HULKS are so confusing. -- The Roguelet's ABC %% "Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex." (Where there is no police, there is no speed limit.) -- Roman Law, trans. Petr Beckmann (1971) %% UFO's are for real: the Air Force doesn't exist. %% "Uncle Cosmo ... why do they call this a word processor?" "It's simple, Skyler ... you've seen what food processors do to food, right?" -- MacNelley, "Shoe" %% Uncle Ed's Rule of Thumb: Never use your thumb for a rule. You'll either hit it with a hammmer or get a splinter in it. %% Under deadline pressure for the next week. If you want something, it can wait. Unless it's blind screaming paroxysmally hedonistic ... %% Underlying Principle of Socio-Genetics: Superiority is recessive. %% Unfair animal names: -- tsetse fly -- bullhead -- booby -- duck-billed platypus -- sapsucker -- Clarence -- Gary Larson %% United Nations, New York, December 25. The peace and joy of the Christmas season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of all the military forces of the world. Panic reigns in the hearts of all the patriots of every persuasion. Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time low over the world. -- Isaac Asimov %% Universe, n.: The problem. %% University, n.: Like a software house, except the software's free, and it's usable, and it works, and if it breaks they'll quickly tell you how to fix it, and ... %% unix soit qui mal y pense %% UNIX was half a billion (500000000) seconds old on Tue Nov 5 00:53:20 1985 GMT (measuring since the time(2) epoch). -- Andy Tannenbaum %% Unnamed Law: If it happens, it must be possible. %% Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. -- H. L. Mencken %% Usage: fortune -P [] -a [xsz] [Q: [file]] [rKe9] -v6[+] dataspec ... inputdir %% USER, n.: The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot." -- Dave Barry, "Claw Your Way to the Top" %% Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach. -- S. C. Johnson %% Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none. -- Doug Larson %% Vail's Second Axiom: The amount of work to be done increases in proportion to the amount of work already completed. %% Valerie: Aww, Tom, you're going maudlin on me ... Tom: I reserve the right to wax maudlin as I wane eloquent ... -- Tom Chapin %% Van Roy's Law: An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys. %% Vanilla, adj.: Ordinary flavor, standard. See FLAVOR. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla extract! For example, "vanilla-flavored won ton soup" (or simply "vanilla won ton soup") means ordinary won ton soup, as opposed to hot and sour won ton soup. %% Velilind's Laws of Experimentation: (1) If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only once. (2) If a straight line fit is required, obtain only two data points. %% Veni, Vidi, Visa. %% "Verily and forsooth," replied Goodgulf darkly. "In the past year strange and fearful wonders I have seen. Fields sown with barley reap crabgrass and fungus, and even small gardens reject their artichoke hearts. There has been a hot day in December and a blue moon. Calendars are made with a month of Sundays and a blue-ribbon Holstein bore alive two insurance salesmen. The earth splits and the entrails of a goat were found tied in square knots. The face of the sun blackens and the skies have rained down soggy potato chips." "But what do all these things mean?" gasped Frito. "Beats me," said Goodgulf with a shrug, "but I thought it made good copy." -- Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings" %% Very few profundities can be expressed in less than 80 characters. %% Vila: "I think I have just made the biggest mistake of my life." Orac: "It is unlikely. I would predict there are far greater mistakes waiting to be made by someone with your obvious talent for it." %% Virginia law forbids bathtubs in the house; tubs must be kept in the yard. %% VIRGO (Aug 23 - Sept 22) You are the logical type and hate disorder. This nitpicking is sickening to your friends. You are cold and unemotional and sometimes fall asleep while making love. Virgos make good bus drivers. %% "Virtual" means never knowing where your next byte is coming from. %% Virtue is its own punishment. %% Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by spontaneously moving from where you left them to where you can't find them. %% Vitamin C deficiency is apauling %% VMS is like a nightmare about RXS-11M. %% Vote anarchist %% VYARZERZOMANIMORORSEZASSEZANSERAREORSES? %%  *** System shutdown message from root *** System going down in 60 seconds %% "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." -- Mark Twain %% Waiter: "Tea or coffee, gentlemen?" 1st customer: "I'll have tea." 2nd customer: "Me, too -- and be sure the glass is clean!" (Waiter exits, returns) Waiter: "Two teas. Which one asked for the clean glass?" %% Walk softly and carry a megawatt laser. %% War hath no fury like a non-combatant. -- Charles Edward Montague %% War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ketchup is a vegetable. %% WARNING TO ALL PERSONNEL: Firings will continue until morale improves. %% WARNING: Reading this fortune can affect the dimensionality of your mind, change the curvature of your spine, cause the growth of hair on your palms, and make a difference in the outcome of your favorite war. %% Warning: Listening to WXRT on April Fools' Day is not recommended for those who are slightly disoriented the first few hours after waking up. -- Chicago Reader 4/22/83 %% Warp 7 -- It's a law we can live with. %% Washington [D.C.] is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm. -- John F. Kennedy %% Waste not, get your budget cut next year. %% Wasting time is an important part of living. %% Watson's Law: The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the number and significance of any persons watching it. %% We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glowworm. -- Winston Churchill %% We ARE as gods and might as well get good at it. -- Whole Earth Catalog %% We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities. -- Walt Kelly, "Pogo" %% We are going to give a little something, a few little years more, to socialism, because socialism is defunct. It dies all by itself. The bad thing is that socialism, being a victim of its ... Did I say socialism? -- Fidel Castro %% "We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem." -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% "We are upping our standards ... so up yours." -- Pat Paulsen for President, 1988. %% We can defeat gravity. The problem is the paperwork involved. %% We can predict everything, except the future. %% We cannot put the face of a person on a stamp unless said person is deceased. My suggestion, therefore, is that you drop dead. -- James E. Day, Postmaster General %% "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company." %% We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish. %% We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand the hardware, but we can *___see* the blinking lights! %% We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids? -- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission %% "We had it tough ... I had to get up at 9 o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of dry poison, work 29 hours down mill, and when we came home our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our grave singing Haleleuia ..." -- Monty Python %% We have only two things to worry about: That things will never get back to normal, and that they already have. %% "We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation." -- Lily Tomlin %% We have the flu. I don't know if this particular strain has an official name, but if it does, it must be something like "Martian Death Flu". You may have had it yourself. The main symptom is that you wish you had another setting on your electric blanket, up past "HIGH", that said "ELECTROCUTION". Another symptom is that you cease brushing your teeth, because (a) your teeth hurt, and (b) you lack the strength. Midway through the brushing process, you'd have to lie down in front of the sink to rest for a couple of hours, and rivulets of toothpaste foam would dribble sideways out of your mouth, eventually hardening into crusty little toothpaste stalagmites that would bond your head permanently to the bathroom floor, which is how the police would find you. You know the kind of flu I'm talking about. -- Dave Barry, "Molecular Homicide" %%