Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| I. Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over. II. Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly. Whether shot from a cannon or in hot pursuit on foot, cartoon characters are so absolute in their momentum that only a telephone pole or an outsize boulder retards their forward motion absolutely. Sir Isaac Newton called this sudden termination of motion the stooge's surcease. III. Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter. Also called the silhouette of passage, this phenomenon is the speciality of victims of directed-pressure explosions and of reckless cowards who are so eager to escape that they exit directly through the wall of a house, leaving a cookie-cutout-perfect hole. The threat of skunks or matrimony often catalyzes this reaction. -- Esquire, "O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion", June 1980 | |
| It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. -- Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Live" | |
| It just doesn't seem right to go over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's condo. | |
| Mate, this parrot wouldn't VOOM if you put four million volts through it! -- Monty Python | |
| My band career ended late in my senior year when John Cooper and I threw my amplifier out the dormitory window. We did not act in haste. First we checked to make sure the amplifier would fit through the frame, using the belt from my bathrobe to measure, then we picked up the amplifier and backed up to my bedroom door. Then we rushed forward, shouting "The WHO! The WHO!" and we launched my amplifier perfectly, as though we had been doing it all our lives, clean through the window and down onto the sidewalk, where a small but appreciative crowd had gathered. I would like to be able to say that this was a symbolic act, an effort on my part to break cleanly away from one state in my life and move on to another, but the truth is, Cooper and I really just wanted to find out what it would sound like. It sounded OK. -- Dave Barry, "The Snake" | |
| "Oh sure, this costume may look silly, but it lets me get in and out of dangerous situations -- I work for a federal task force doing a survey on urban crime. Look, here's my ID, and here's a number you can call, that will put you through to our central base in Atlanta. Go ahead, call -- they'll confirm who I am. "Unless, of course, the Astro-Zombies have destroyed it." -- Captain Freedom | |
| "The human brain is like an enormous fish -- it is flat and slimy and has gills through which it can see." -- Monty Python | |
| Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy. -- Han Solo | |
| VII. Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel entrances; others cannot. This trompe l'oeil inconsistency has baffled generations, but at least it is known that whoever paints an entrance on a wall's surface to trick an opponent will be unable to pursue him into this theoretical space. The painter is flattened against the wall when he attempts to follow into the painting. This is ultimately a problem of art, not of science. VIII. Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent. Cartoon cats possess even more deaths than the traditional nine lives might comfortably afford. They can be decimated, spliced, splayed, accordion-pleated, spindled, or disassembled, but they cannot be destroyed. After a few moments of blinking self pity, they reinflate, elongate, snap back, or solidify. IX. For every vengeance there is an equal and opposite revengeance. This is the one law of animated cartoon motion that also applies to the physical world at large. For that reason, we need the relief of watching it happen to a duck instead. X. Everything falls faster than an anvil. Examples too numerous to mention from the Roadrunner cartoons. -- Esquire, "O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion", June 1980 | |
| When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. -- Raymond Chandler | |
| Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't make eight cats pull a sled through the snow. | |
| "What you end up with, after running an operating system concept through these many marketing coffee filters, is something not unlike plain hot water." (By Matt Welsh) | |
| Cosmic ray particles crashed through the hard disk platter | |
| Please excuse me, I have to circuit an AC line through my head to get this database working. | |
| Mouse chewed through power cable | |
| Your mail is being routed through Germany ... and they're censoring us. | |
| Data for intranet got routed through the extranet and landed on the internet. | |
| Awash with unfocused desire, Everett twisted the lobe of his one remaining ear and felt the presence of somebody else behind him, which caused terror to push through his nervous system like a flash flood roaring down the mid-fork of the Feather River before the completion of the Oroville Dam in 1959. -- Grand Panjandrum's Special Award, 1984 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest. | |
| His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circum- stances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could. It was in the days of the rains that their prayers went up, not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords or the spinning of prayer wheels, but from the great pray-machine in the monastery of Ratri, goddess of the Night. The high-frequency prayers were directed upward through the atmosphere and out beyond it, passing into that golden cloud called the Bridge of the Gods, which circles the entire world, is seen as a bronze rainbow at night and is the place where the red sun becomes orange at midday. Some of the monks doubted the orthodoxy of this prayer technique... -- Roger Zelazny, "Lord of Light" | |
| In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. -- Mark Twain | |
| Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! -- Captain Ahab, "Moby Dick" | |
| The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" | |
| The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of the warrior-chief Beast, with his barbarian tribe now stacking wood at her nubile feet, when the strong clear voice of the poetic and heroic Handsomas roared, 'Flick your Bic, crisp that chick, and you'll feel my steel through your last meal!' -- Winning sentence, 1984 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest. | |
| "...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" | |
| A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges. A swift-flowing steam does not grow stagnant. Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum. Software rots if not used. These are great mysteries. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
| After sifting through the overwritten remaining blocks of Luke's home directory, Luke and PDP-1 sped away from /u/lars, across the surface of the Winchester riding Luke's flying read/write head. PDP-1 had Luke stop at the edge of the cylinder overlooking /usr/spool/uucp. "Unix-to-Unix Copy Program;" said PDP-1. "You will never find a more wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious." -- DECWARS | |
| === ALL CSH USERS PLEASE NOTE ======================== Set the variable $LOSERS to all the people that you think are losers. This will cause all said losers to have the variable $PEOPLE-WHO-THINK-I-AM-A-LOSER updated in their .login file. Should you attempt to execute a job on a machine with poor response time and a machine on your local net is currently populated by losers, that machine will be freed up for your job through a cold boot process. | |
| APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5 | |
| Dear Ms. Postnews: I couldn't get mail through to somebody on another site. What should I do? -- Eager Beaver Dear Eager: No problem, just post your message to a group that a lot of people read. Say, "This is for John Smith. I couldn't get mail through so I'm posting it. All others please ignore." This way tens of thousands of people will spend a few seconds scanning over and ignoring your article, using up over 16 man-hours their collective time, but you will be saved the terrible trouble of checking through usenet maps or looking for alternate routes. Just think, if you couldn't distribute your message to 9000 other computers, you might actually have to (gasp) call directory assistance for 60 cents, or even phone the person. This can cost as much as a few DOLLARS (!) for a 5 minute call! And certainly it's better to spend 10 to 20 dollars of other people's money distributing the message than for you to have to waste $9 on an overnight letter, or even 25 cents on a stamp! Don't forget. The world will end if your message doesn't get through, so post it as many places as you can. -- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette | |
| Hacker's Guide To Cooking: 2 pkg. cream cheese (the mushy white stuff in silver wrappings that doesn't really come from Philadelphia after all; anyway, about 16 oz.) 1 tsp. vanilla extract (which is more alcohol than vanilla and pretty strong so this part you *GOTTA* measure) 1/4 cup sugar (but honey works fine too) 8 oz. Cool Whip (the fluffy stuff devoid of nutritional value that you can squirt all over your friends and lick off...) "Blend all together until creamy with no lumps." This is where you get to join(1) all the raw data in a big buffer and then filter it through merge(1m) with the -thick option, I mean, it starts out ultra lumpy and icky looking and you have to work hard to mix it. Try an electric beater if you have a cat(1) that can climb wall(1s) to lick it off the ceiling(3m). "Pour into a graham cracker crust..." Aha, the BUGS section at last. You just happened to have a GCC sitting around under /etc/food, right? If not, don't panic(8), merely crumble a rand(3m) handful of innocent GCs into a suitable tempfile and mix in some melted butter. "...and refrigerate for an hour." Leave the recipe's stdout in a fridge for 3.6E6 milliseconds while you work on cleaning up stderr, and by time out your cheesecake will be ready for stdin. | |
| I'm sure that VMS is completely documented, I just haven't found the right manual yet. I've been working my way through the manuals in the document library and I'm half way through the second cabinet, (3 shelves to go), so I should find what I'm looking for by mid May. I hope I can remember what it was by the time I find it. I had this idea for a new horror film, "VMS Manuals from Hell" or maybe "The Paper Chase : IBM vs. DEC". It's based on Hitchcock's "The Birds", except that it's centered around a programmer who is attacked by a swarm of binder pages with an index number and the single line "This page intentionally left blank." -- Alex Crain | |
| If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow enobled and no-one dare criticise it. -- Pierre Gallois | |
| `Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order by staff writers ... The central Superhighway site called ``sunsite.unc.edu'' collapsed in the morning before the release. News about the release had been leaked by a German hacker group, Harmonious Hardware Hackers, who had cracked into the author's computer earlier in the week. They had got the release date wrong by one day, and caused dozens of eager fans to connect to the sunsite computer at the wrong time. ``No computer can handle that kind of stress,'' explained the mourning sunsite manager, Erik Troan. ``The spinning disks made the whole computer jump, and finally it crashed through the floor to the basement.'' Luckily, repairs were swift and the computer was working again the same evening. ``Thank God we were able to buy enough needles and thread and patch it together without major problems.'' The site has also installed a new throttle on the network pipe, allowing at most four clients at the same time, thus making a new crash less likely. ``The book is now in our Incoming folder'', says Troan, ``and you're all welcome to come and get it.'' -- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi> [comp.os.linux.announce] | |
| LOGO for the Dead LOGO for the Dead lets you continue your computing activities from "The Other Side." The package includes a unique telecommunications feature which lets you turn your TRS-80 into an electronic Ouija board. Then, using Logo's graphics capabilities, you can work with a friend or relative on this side of the Great Beyond to write programs. The software requires that your body be hardwired to an analog-to-digital converter, which is then interfaced to your computer. A special terminal (very terminal) program lets you talk with the users through Deadnet, an EBBS (Ectoplasmic Bulletin Board System). LOGO for the Dead is available for 10 percent of your estate from NecroSoft inc., 6502 Charnelhouse Blvd., Cleveland, OH 44101. -- '80 Microcomputing | |
| MVS Air Lines: The passengers all gather in the hangar, watching hundreds of technicians check the flight systems on this immense, luxury aircraft. This plane has at least 10 engines and seats over 1,000 passengers; bigger models in the fleet can have more engines than anyone can count and fly even more passengers than there are on Earth. It is claimed to cost less per passenger mile to operate these humungous planes than any other aircraft ever built, unless you personally have to pay for the ticket. All the passengers scramble aboard, as do the 200 technicians needed to keep it from crashing. The pilot takes his place up in the glass cockpit. He guns the engines, only to realise that the plane is too big to get through the hangar doors. | |
| My God, I'm depressed! Here I am, a computer with a mind a thousand times as powerful as yours, doing nothing but cranking out fortunes and sending mail about softball games. And I've got this pain right through my ALU. I've asked for it to be replaced, but nobody ever listens. I think it would be better for us both if you were to just log out again. | |
| Overall, the philosophy is to attack the availability problem from two complementary directions: to reduce the number of software errors through rigorous testing of running systems, and to reduce the effect of the remaining errors by providing for recovery from them. An interesting footnote to this design is that now a system failure can usually be considered to be the result of two program errors: the first, in the program that started the problem; the second, in the recovery routine that could not protect the system. -- A.L. Scherr, "Functional Structure of IBM Virtual Storage Operating Systems, Part II: OS/VS-2 Concepts and Philosophies," IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4. | |
| So you see Antonio, why worry about one little core dump, eh? In reality all core dumps happen at the same instant, so the core dump you will have tomorrow, why, it already happened. You see, it's just a little universal recursive joke which threads our lives through the infinite potential of the instant. So go to sleep, Antonio, your thread could break any moment and cast you out of the safe security of the instant into the dark void of eternity, the anti-time. So go to sleep... | |
| The Guy on the Right Doesn't Stand a Chance The guy on the right has the Osborne 1, a fully functional computer system in a portable package the size of a briefcase. The guy on the left has an Uzi submachine gun concealed in his attache case. Also in the case are four fully loaded, 32-round clips of 125-grain 9mm ammunition. The owner of the Uzi is going to get more tactical firepower delivered -- and delivered on target -- in less time, and with less effort. All for $795. It's inevitable. If you're going up against some guy with an Osborne 1 -- or any personal computer -- he's the one who's in trouble. One round from an Uzi can zip through ten inches of solid pine wood, so you can imagine what it will do to structural foam acrylic and sheet aluminum. In fact, detachable magazines for the Uzi are available in 25-, 32-, and 40-round capacities, so you can take out an entire office full of Apple II or IBM Personal Computers tied into Ethernet or other local-area networks. What about the new 16-bit computers, like the Lisa and Fortune? Even with the Winchester backup, they're no match for the Uzi. One quick burst and they'll find out what Unix means. Make your commanding officer proud. Get an Uzi -- and come home a winner in the fight for office automatic weapons. -- "InfoWorld", June, 1984 | |
| The salesman and the system analyst took off to spend a weekend in the forest, hunting bear. They'd rented a cabin, and, when they got there, took their backpacks off and put them inside. At which point the salesman turned to his friend, and said, "You unpack while I go and find us a bear." Puzzled, the analyst finished unpacking and then went and sat down on the porch. Soon he could hear rustling noises in the forest. The noises got nearer -- and louder -- and suddenly there was the salesman, running like hell across the clearing toward the cabin, pursued by one of the largest and most ferocious grizzly bears the analyst had ever seen. "Open the door!", screamed the salesman. The analyst whipped open the door, and the salesman ran to the door, suddenly stopped, and stepped aside. The bear, unable to stop, continued through the door and into the cabin. The salesman slammed the door closed and grinned at his friend. "Got him!", he exclaimed, "now, you skin this one and I'll go rustle us up another!" | |
| There was once a programmer who worked upon microprocessors. "Look at how well off I am here," he said to a mainframe programmer who came to visit, "I have my own operating system and file storage device. I do not have to share my resources with anyone. The software is self-consistent and easy-to-use. Why do you not quit your present job and join me here?" The mainframe programmer then began to describe his system to his friend, saying: "The mainframe sits like an ancient sage meditating in the midst of the data center. Its disk drives lie end-to-end like a great ocean of machinery. The software is a multi-faceted as a diamond and as convoluted as a primeval jungle. The programs, each unique, move through the system like a swift-flowing river. That is why I am happy where I am." The microcomputer programmer, upon hearing this, fell silent. But the two programmers remained friends until the end of their days. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
| There was, it appeared, a mysterious rite of initiation through which, in one way or another, almost every member of the team passed. The term that the old hands used for this rite -- West invented the term, not the practice -- was `signing up.' By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, and friends -- if you had any of these left (and you might not, if you had signed up too many times before). -- Tracy Kidder, "The Soul of a New Machine" | |
| Two hundred years ago today, Irma Chine of White Plains, New York, was performing her normal housekeeping routines. She was interrupted by British soldiers who, rallying to the call of their supervisor, General Hughes, sought to gain control of the voter registration lists kept in her home. Masking her fear and thinking fast, Mrs. Chine quickly divided a nearby apple in two and deftly stored the list in its center. Upon entering, the British blatantly violated every conceivable convention, and, though they went through the house virtually bit by bit, their search was fruitless. They had to return empty handed. Word of the incident propagated rapidly through the region. This historic event became the first documented use of core storage for the saving of registers. | |
| "We invented a new protocol and called it Kermit, after Kermit the Frog, star of "The Muppet Show." [3] [3] Why? Mostly because there was a Muppets calendar on the wall when we were trying to think of a name, and Kermit is a pleasant, unassuming sort of character. But since we weren't sure whether it was OK to name our protocol after this popular television and movie star, we pretended that KERMIT was an acronym; unfortunately, we could never find a good set of words to go with the letters, as readers of some of our early source code can attest. Later, while looking through a name book for his forthcoming baby, Bill Catchings noticed that "Kermit" was a Celtic word for "free", which is what all Kermit programs should be, and words to this effect replaced the strained acronyms in our source code (Bill's baby turned out to be a girl, so he had to name her Becky instead). When BYTE Magazine was preparing our 1984 Kermit article for publication, they suggested we contact Henson Associates Inc. for permission to say that we did indeed name the protocol after Kermit the Frog. Permission was kindly granted, and now the real story can be told. I resisted the temptation, however, to call the present work "Kermit the Book." -- Frank da Cruz, "Kermit - A File Transfer Protocol" | |
| Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of APL, I shall fear no evil, for I can string six primitive monadic and dyadic operators together. -- Steve Higgins | |
| A father gave his teen-age daughter an untrained pedigreed pup for her birthday. An hour later, when wandering through the house, he found her looking at a puddle in the center of the kitchen. "My pup," she murmured sadly, "runneth over." | |
| All things are possible, except for skiing through a revolving door. | |
| In God we trust; all else we walk through. | |
| Zhizn' prozhit'--ne pole pereiti. [Life's a bitch.] [Well, okay. lit., to live through life is not as simple as crossing a field. Happy now?] -- Russian proverb | |
| I have stripped off my dress; must I put it on again? I have washed my feet; must I soil them again? When my beloved slipped his hand through the latch-hole, my bowels stirred within me [my bowels were moved for him (KJV)]. When I arose to open for my beloved, my hands dripped with myrrh; the liquid myrrh from my fingers ran over the knobs of the bolt. With my own hands I opened to my love, but my love had turned away and gone by; my heart sank when he turned his back. I sought him but I did not find him, I called him but he did not answer. The watchmen, going the rounds of the city, met me; they struck me and wounded me; the watchmen on the walls took away my cloak. [Song of Solomon 5:3-7 (NEB)] | |
| How beautiful, how entrancing you are, my loved one, daughter of delights! You are stately as a palm-tree, and your breasts are the clusters of dates. I said, "I will climb up into the palm to grasp its fronds." May I find your breast like clusters of grapes on the vine, the scent of your breath like apricots, and your whispers like spiced wine flowing smoothly to welcome my caresses, gliding down through lips and teeth. [Song of Solomon 7:6-9 (NEB)] | |
| In the beginning, I was made. I didn't ask to be made. No one consulted with me or considered my feelings in this matter. But if it brought some passing fancy to some lowly humans as they haphazardly pranced their way through life's mournful jungle, then so be it. - Marvin the Paranoid Android, From Douglas Adams' Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Scripts | |
| It's currently a problem of access to gigabits through punybaud. -- J. C. R. Licklider | |
| Overall, the philosophy is to attack the availability problem from two complementary directions: to reduce the number of software errors through rigorous testing of running systems, and to reduce the effect of the remaining errors by providing for recovery from them. An interesting footnote to this design is that now a system failure can usually be considered to be the result of two program errors: the first, in the program that started the problem; the second, in the recovery routine that could not protect the system. -- A. L. Scherr, "Functional Structure of IBM Virtual Storage Operating Systems, Part II: OS/VS-2 Concepts and Philosophies," IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1973, pp. 382-400 | |
| Even if you can deceive people about a product through misleading statements, sooner or later the product will speak for itself. - Hajime Karatsu | |
| It is either through the influence of narcotic potions, of which all primitive peoples and races speak in hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, penetrating with joy all of nature, that those Dionysian stirrings arise, which in their intensification lead the individual to forget himself completely. . . .Not only does the bond between man and man come to be forged once again by the magic of the Dionysian rite, but alienated, hostile, or subjugated nature again celebrates her reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. - Fred Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy | |
| The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. - Albert Einstein | |
| Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only be incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infintesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness... - Leslie Stephen, "An agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876 | |
| We may not be able to persuade Hindus that Jesus and not Vishnu should govern their spiritual horizon, nor Moslems that Lord Buddha is at the center of their spiritual universe, nor Hebrews that Mohammed is a major prohpet, nor Christians that Shinto best expresses their spiritual concerns, to say nothing of the fact that we may not be able to get Christians to agree among themselves about their relationship to God. But all will agree on a proposition that they possess profound spiritual resources. If, in addition, we can get them to accept the further proposition that whatever form the Deity may have in their own theology, the Deity is not only external, but internal and acts through them, and they themselves give proof or disproof of the Deity in what they do and think; if this further proposition can be accepted, then we come that much closer to a truly religious situation on earth. - Norman Cousins, from his book "Human Options" | |
| "I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard." -- composer John Cage, 1937 | |
| I did cancel one performance in Holland where they thought my music was so easy that they didn't rehearse at all. And so the first time when I found that out, I rehearsed the orchestra myself in front of the audience of 3,000 people and the next day I rehearsed through the second movement -- this was the piece _Cheap Imitation_ -- and they then were ashamed. The Dutch people were ashamed and they invited me to come to the Holland festival and they promised to rehearse. And when I got to Amsterdam they had changed the orchestra, and again, they hadn't rehearsed. So they were no more prepared the second time than they had been the first. I gave them a lecture and told them to cancel the performance; they then said over the radio that i had insisted on their cancelling the performance because they were "insufficiently Zen." Can you believe it? -- composer John Cage, "Electronic Musician" magazine, March 88, pg. 89 | |
| "Been through Hell? Whaddya bring back for me?" -- A. Brilliant | |
| "Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God -- I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again." -- Woody Allen's character in "Hannah and Her Sisters" | |
| An Animal that knows who it is, one that has a sense of his own identity, is a discontented creature, doomed to create new problems for himself for the duration of his stay on this planet. Since neither the mouse nor the chimp knows what is, he is spared all the vexing problems that follow this discovery. But as soon as the human animal who asked himself this question emerged, he plunged himself and his descendants into an eternity of doubt and brooding, speculation and truth-seeking that has goaded him through the centures as reelentlessly as hunger or sexual longing. The chimp that does not know that he exists is not driven to discover his origins and is spared the tragic necessity of contemplating his own end. And even if the animal experimenters succeed in teaching a chimp to count one hundred bananas or to play chess, the chimp will develop no science and he will exhibit no appreciation of beauty, for the greatest part of man's wisdom may be traced back to the eternal questions of beginnings and endings, the quest to give meaning to his existence, to life itself. -- Selma Fraiberg, _The Magic Years_, pg. 193 | |
| "Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!" he said to himself, and it became a favourite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb. "You aren't nearly through this adventure yet," he added, and that was pretty true as well. -- Bilbo Baggins, "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien, Chapter XII | |
| ...Saure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papryomancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers - the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper. "You will soon be in love," sez Saure, "see, this line here." "It's long, isn't it? Does that mean --" "Length is usually intensity. Not time." -- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_ | |
| There was, it appeared, a mysterious rite of initiation through which, in one way or another, almost every member of the team passed. The term that the old hands used for this rite -- West invented the term, not the practice -- was `signing up.' By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, and friends -- if you had any of these left (and you might not, if you had signed up too many times before). -- Tracy Kidder, _The Soul of a New Machine_ | |
| "The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. "For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'" -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | |
| A political man can have as his aim the realization of freedom, but he has no means to realize it other than through violence. -- Jean Paul Sartre | |
| History has much to say on following the proper procedures. From a history of the Mexican revolution: "Hidalgo was later defeated at Guadalajara. The rebel army was captured on its way through the mountains. All were courtmartialed and shot, except Hidalgo, because he was a priest. He was handed over to the bishop of Durango who excommunicated him and returned him to the army where he was then executed." | |
| If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a deal faster. -- The Duchess, "Through the Looking Glass" | |
| ... indifference is a militant thing ... when it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery. -- Stephen Crane | |
| My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour ... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end ... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that. -- Hunter S. Thompson | |
| No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man's farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. -- Thomas Jefferson, to Joseph Cabell, 1816 | |
| Rule the Empire through force. -- Shogun Tokugawa | |
| The General disliked trying to explain the highly technical inner workings of the U.S. Air Force. "$7,662 for a ten cup coffee maker, General?" the Senator asked. In his head he ran through his standard explanations. "It's not so," he thought. "It's a deterrent." Soon he came up with, "It's computerized, Senator. Tiny computer chips make coffee that's smooth and full-bodied. Try a cup." The Senator did. "Pfffttt! Tastes like jet fuel!" "It's not so," the General thought. "It's a deterrent." Then he remembered something. "We bought a lot of untested computer chips," the General answered. "They got into everything. Just a little mix-up. Nothing serious." Then he remembered something else. It was at the site of the mysterious B-1 crash. A strange smell in the fuel lines. It smelled like coffee. Smooth and full bodied... -- Another Episode of General's Hospital | |
| 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 | |
| They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within. I'm coming now I'm coming to reward them. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. I'm guided by a signal in the heavens. I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin. I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. I'd really like to live beside you, baby. I love your body and your spirit and your clothes. But you see that line there moving through the station? I told you I told you I told you I was one of those. -- Leonard Cohen, "First We Take Manhattan" | |
| cerebral atrophy, n: The phenomena which occurs as brain cells become weak and sick, and impair the brain's performance. An abundance of these "bad" cells can cause symptoms related to senility, apathy, depression, and overall poor academic performance. A certain small number of brain cells will deteriorate due to everday activity, but large amounts are weakened by intense mental effort and the assimilation of difficult concepts. Many college students become victims of this dread disorder due to poor habits such as overstudying. cerebral darwinism, n: The theory that the effects of cerebral atrophy can be reversed through the purging action of heavy alcohol consumption. Large amounts of alcohol cause many brain cells to perish due to oxygen deprivation. Through the process of natural selection, the weak and sick brain cells will die first, leaving only the healthy cells. This wonderful process leaves the imbiber with a healthier, more vibrant brain, and increases mental capacity. Thus, the devastating effects of cerebral atrophy are reversed, and academic performance actually increases beyond previous levels. | |
| Confirmed bachelor: A man who goes through life without a hitch. | |
| Cynic, n.: One who looks through rose-colored glasses with a jaundiced eye. | |
| furbling, v.: Having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank even when you are the only person in line. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" | |
| insecurity, n.: Finding out that you've mispronounced for years one of your favorite words. Realizing halfway through a joke that you're telling it to the person who told it to you. | |
| no brainer: A decision which, viewed through the retrospectoscope, is "obvious" to those who failed to make it originally. | |
| Rule of Defactualization: Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies. | |
| 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 for Writers: Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. Don't use no double negatives. Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't. Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed. No sentence fragments. Avoid commas, that are unnecessary. Eschew dialect, irregardless. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. Hyphenate between sy-llables and avoid un-necessary hyphens. Write all adverbial forms correct. Don't use contractions in formal writing. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms. Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language. Never, ever use repetitive redundancies. If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration. Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'" | |
| Spouse, n.: Someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single. | |
| Theory of Selective Supervision: The one time in the day that you lean back and relax is the one time the boss walks through the office. | |
| Every time you manage to close the door on Reality, it comes in through the window. | |
| [I plan] to see, hear, touch, and destroy everything in my path, including beets, rutabagas, and most random vegetables, but excluding yams, as I am absolutely terrified of yams... Actually, I think my fear of yams began in my early youth, when many of my young comrades pelted me with same for singing songs of far-off lands and deep blue seas in a language closely resembling that of the common sow. My psychosis was further impressed into my soul as I reached adolescence, when, while skipping through a field of yams, light-heartedly tossing flowers into the stratosphere, a great yam-picking machine tore through the fields, pursuing me to the edge of the great plantation, where I escaped by diving into a great ditch filled with a mixture of water and pig manure, which may explain my tendency to scream, "Here come the Martians! Hide the eggs!" every time I have pork. But I digress. The fact remains that I cannot rationally deal with yams, and pigs are terrible conversationalists. | |
| It's a .88 magnum -- it goes through schools. -- Danny Vermin | |
| Onward through the fog. | |
| Somehow I reached excess without ever noticing when I was passing through satisfaction. -- Ashleigh Brilliant | |
| Recipe for a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster: (1) Take the juice from one bottle of Ol' Janx Spirit (2) Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V (Oh, those Santraginean fish!) (3) Allow 3 cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture (properly iced or the benzine is lost.) (4) Allow four liters of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it. (5) Over the back of a silver spoon, float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract. (6) Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve. (7) Sprinkle Zamphuor. (8) Add an olive. (9) Drink... but... very carefully... | |
| Symptom: Floor blurred. Fault: You are looking through bottom of empty glass. Action Required: Find someone who will buy you another beer. Symptom: Floor moving. Fault: You are being carried out. Action Required: Find out if you are taken to another bar. If not, complain loudly that you are being kidnapped. -- Bar Troubleshooting | |
| The father, passing through his son's college town late one evening on a business trip, thought he would pay his boy a suprise visit. Arriving at the lad's fraternity house, dad rapped loudly on the door. After several minutes of knocking, a sleepy voice drifted down from a second-floor window, "Whaddaya want?" "Does Ramsey Duncan live here?" asked the father. "Yeah," replied the voice. "Dump him on the front porch." | |
| Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Whereas the party of the first part, also known as "Lawyer", and the party of the second part, also known as "Light Bulb", do hereby and forthwith agree to a transaction wherein the party of the second part shall be removed from the current position as a result of failure to perform previously agreed upon duties, i.e., the lighting, elucidation, and otherwise illumination of the area ranging from the front (north) door, through the entryway, terminating at an area just inside the primary living area, demarcated by the beginning of the carpet, any spillover illumination being at the option of the party of the second part and not required by the aforementioned agreement between the parties. The aforementioned removal transaction shall include, but not be limited to, the following. The party of the first part shall, with or without elevation at his option, by means of a chair, stepstool, ladder or any other means of elevation, grasp the party of the second part and rotate the party of the second part in a counter-clockwise direction, this point being tendered non-negotiable. Upon reaching a point where the party of the second part becomes fully detached from the receptacle, the party of the first part shall have the option of disposing of the party of the second part in a manner consistent with all relevant and applicable local, state and federal statutes. Once separation and disposal have been achieved, the party of the first part shall have the option of beginning installation. Aforesaid installation shall occur in a manner consistent with the reverse of the procedures described in step one of this self-same document, being careful to note that the rotation should occur in a clockwise direction, this point also being non-negotiable. The above described steps may be performed, at the option of the party of the first part, by any or all agents authorized by him, the objective being to produce the most possible revenue for the Partnership. | |
| It's grad exam time... COMPUTER SCIENCE Inside your desk you'll find a listing of the DEC/VMS operating system in IBM 1710 machine code. Show what changes are necessary to convert this code into a UNIX Berkeley 7 operating system. Prove that these fixes are bug free and run correctly. You should gain at least 150% efficiency in the new system. (You should take no more than 10 minutes on this question.) MATHEMATICS If X equals PI times R^2, construct a formula showing how long it would take a fire ant to drill a hole through a dill pickle, if the length-girth ratio of the ant to the pickle were 98.17:1. GENERAL KNOWLEDGE Describe the Universe. Give three examples. | |
| *** NEWSFLASH *** Russian tanks steamrolling through New Jersey!!!! Details at eleven! | |
| A German, a Pole and a Czech left camp for a hike through the woods. After being reported missing a day or two later, rangers found two bears, one a male, one a female, looking suspiciously overstuffed. They killed the female, autopsied her, and sure enough, found the German and the Pole. "What do you think?" said the the first ranger. "The Czech is in the male," replied the second. | |
| I'm going through my "I want to go back to New York" phase today. Happens every six months or so. So, I thought, perhaps unwisely, that I'd share it with you. > In New York in the winter it is million degrees below zero and the wind travels at a million miles an hour down 5th avenue. > And in LA it's 72. > In New York in the summer it is a million degrees and the humidity is a million percent. > And in LA it's 72. > In New York there are a million interesting people. > And in LA there are 72. | |
| Traveling through New England, a motorist stopped for gas in a tiny village. "What's this place called?" he asked the station attendant. "All depends," the native drawled. "Do you mean by them that has to live in this dad-blamed, moth-eaten, dust-covered, one-hoss dump, or by them that's merely enjoying its quaint and picturesque rustic charms for a short spell?" | |
| After the Children of Israel had wandered for thirty-nine years in the wilderness, Ferdinand Feghoot arrived to make sure that they would finally find and enter the Promised Land. With him, he brought his favorite robot, faithful old Yewtoo Artoo, to carry his gear and do assorted camp chores. The Israelites soon got over their initial fear of the robot and, as the months passed, became very fond of him. Patriarchs took to discussing abtruse theological problems with him, and each evening the children all gathered to hear the many stories with which he was programmed. Therefore it came as a great shock to them when, just as their journey was ending, he abruptly wore out. Even Feghoot couldn't console them. "It may be true, Ferdinand Feghoot," said Moses, "that our friend Yewtoo Artoo was soulless, but we cannot believe it. He must be properly interred. We cannot embalm him as do the Egyptians. Nor have we wood for a coffin. But I do have a most splendid skin from one of Pharoah's own cattle. We shall bury him in it." Feghoot agreed. "Yes, let this be his last rusting place." "Rusting?" Moses cried. "Not in this dreadful dry desert!" "Ah!" sighed Ferdinand Feghoot, shedding a tear, "I fear you do not realize the full significance of Pharoah's oxhide!" -- Grendel Briarton "Through Time & Space With Ferdinand Feghoot!" | |
| Air pollution is really making us pay through the nose. | |
| Besides the device, the box should contain: * Eight little rectangular snippets of paper that say "WARNING" * A plastic packet containing four 5/17 inch pilfer grommets and two club-ended 6/93 inch boxcar prawns. YOU WILL NEED TO SUPPLY: a matrix wrench and 60,000 feet of tram cable. IF ANYTHING IS DAMAGED OR MISSING: You IMMEDIATELY should turn to your spouse and say: "Margaret, you know why this country can't make a car that can get all the way through the drive-through at Burger King without a major transmission overhaul? Because nobody cares, that's why." WARNING: This is assuming your spouse's name is Margaret. -- Dave Barry, "Read This First!" | |
| "Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" | |
| Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term, convertible only through the use of weird and unnatural conversion factors. Velocity, for example, will be expressed in furlongs per fortnight. | |
| Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings. Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in pain? This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical lesson. It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will attract dirt. The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friend's filling, then travels down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit. Amazing Electronic Fact: If you scuffed your feet long enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger would explode! But this is nothing to worry about unless you have carpeting. -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?" | |
| I had a feeling once about mathematics -- that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me -- the Byss and the Abyss. I saw -- as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show -- a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why tergiversation was inevitable -- but it was after dinner and I let it go. -- Winston Churchill | |
| "I think the sky is blue because it's a shift from black through purple to blue, and it has to do with where the light is. You know, the farther we get into darkness, and there's a shifting of color of light into the blueness, and I think as you go farther and farther away from the reflected light we have from the sun or the light that's bouncing off this earth, uh, the darker it gets ... I think if you look at the color scale, you start at black, move it through purple, move it on out, it's the shifting of color. We mentioned before about the stars singing, and that's one of the effects of the shifting of colors." -- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club | |
| Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it. -- Heisenberg | |
| The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. -- John Muir | |
| The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as 'Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With'. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes', with a footnote to effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent. Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came'. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" | |
| The rate at which a disease spreads through a corn field is a precise measurement of the speed of blight. | |
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| We will have solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical problem -- how to run a sunbeam through a meter. | |
| "How did you spend the weekend?" asked the pretty brunette secretary of her blonde companion. "Fishing through the ice," she replied. "Fishing through the ice? Whatever for?" "Olives." | |
| The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry, and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question "How can we eat?" the second by "Why do we eat?" and the third by "Where shall we have lunch?". -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | |
| The way to a man's stomach is through his esophagus. | |
| Two peanuts were walking through the New York. One was assaulted. | |
| Again she fled, but swift he came. Tin'uviel! Tin'uviel! He called her by her elvish name; And there she halted listening. One moment stood she, and a spell His voice laid on her: Beren came And doom fell on Tin'uviel That in his arms lay glistening. As Beren looked into her eyes Within the shadows of her hair, The trembling starlight of the skies He saw there mirrored shimmering. Tin'uviel the elven-fair, Immortal maiden elven-wise, About him cast her shadowy hair And arms like silver glimmering. Long was the way that fate them bore, O'er stony mountains cold and grey, Through halls of iron and darkling door, And woods of nightshade morrowless. The Sundering Seas between them lay, And yet at last they met once more, And long ago they passed away In the forest singing sorrowless. -- J. R. R. Tolkien | |
| And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks with the one word, "unless." Whatever THAT meant, well, I just couldn't guess. That was long, long ago, and each day since that day, I've worried and worried and worried away. Through the years as my buildings have fallen apart, I've worried about it with all of my heart. "BUT," says the Oncler, "now that you're here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear! UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better - it's not. So... CATCH!" cries the Oncler. He lets something fall. "It's a truffula seed. It's the last one of all! "You're in charge of the last of the truffula seeds. And truffula trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new truffula -- treat it with care. Give it clean water and feed it fresh air. Grow a forest -- protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back!" | |
| As me an' me marrer was readin' a tyape, The tyape gave a shriek mark an' tried tae escyape; It skipped ower the gyate tae the end of the field, An' jigged oot the room wi' a spool an' a reel! Follow the leader, Johnny me laddie, Follow it through, me canny lad O; Follow the transport, Johnny me laddie, Away, lad, lie away, canny lad O! -- S. Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" | |
| Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most Souls would scarcely get your Feet wet. Fall not in Love, therefore: it will stick to your face. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata" | |
| Bit off more than my mind could chew, Shower or suicide, what do I do? -- Julie Brown, "Will I Make it Through the Eighties?" | |
| Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse That no compunctious visiting of nature Shake my fell purpose, not keep peace between The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, And pall the in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry `Hold, hold!' -- Lady MacBeth | |
| Drink and dance and laugh and lie Love, the reeling midnight through For tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.) -- Dorothy Parker, "The Flaw in Paganism" | |
| Es brilig war. Die schlichte Toven Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben; Und aller-m"umsige Burggoven Dir mohmen R"ath ausgraben. -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass" | |
| Families, when a child is born Want it to be intelligent. I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life By becoming a Cabinet Minister -- Su Tung-p'o | |
| Farewell we call to hearth and hall! Though wind may blow and rain may fall, We must away ere break of day Far over wood and mountain tall. To Rivendell, where Elves yet dwell In glades beneath the misty fell, Through moor and waste we ride in haste, And whither then we cannot tell. With foes ahead, behind us dread, Beneath the sky shall be our bed, Until at last our toil be passed, Our journey done, our errand sped. We must away! We must away! We ride before the break of day! -- J. R. R. Tolkien | |
| Gibson's Springtime Song (to the tune of "Deck the Halls"): 'Tis the season to chase mousies (Fa la la la la, la la la la) Snatch them from their little housies (...) First we chase them 'round the field (...) Then we have them for a meal (...) Toss them here and catch them there (...) See them flying through the air (...) Watch them fly and hear them squeal (...) Falling mice have great appeal (...) See the hunter stretched before us (...) He's chased the mice in field and forest (...) Watch him clean his long white whiskers (...) Of the blood of little critters (...) | |
| Have you seen the old man in the closed down market, Kicking up the papers in his worn out shoes? In his eyes you see no pride, hands hang loosely at his side Yesterdays papers, telling yesterdays news. How can you tell me you're lonely, And say for you the sun don't shine? Let me take you by the hand Lead you through the streets of London I'll show you something to make you change your mind... Have you seen the old man outside the sea-man's mission Memories fading like the metal ribbons that he wears. In our winter city the rain cries a little pity For one more forgotten hero and a world that doesn't care... | |
| I lay my head on the railroad tracks, Waitin' for the double E. The railroad don't run no more. Poor poor pitiful me. [chorus] Poor poor pitiful me, poor poor pitiful me. These young girls won't let me be, Lord have mercy on me! Woe is me! Well, I met a girl, West Hollywood, Well, I ain't naming names. But she really worked me over good, She was just like Jesse James. She really worked me over good, She was a credit to her gender. She put me through some changes, boy, Sort of like a Waring blender. [chorus] I met a girl at the Rainbow Bar, She asked me if I'd beat her. She took me back to the Hyatt House, I don't want to talk about it. [chorus] -- Warren Zevon, "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" | |
| I'm So Miserable Without You It's Almost Like Having You Here -- Song title by Stephen Bishop. She Got the Gold Mine, I Got the Shaft -- Song title by Jerry Reed. When My Love Comes Back from the Ladies' Room Will I Be Too Old to Care? -- Song title by Lewis Grizzard. I Don't Know Whether to Kill Myself or Go Bowling -- Unattributed song title. Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life -- Unattributed song title. | |
| Il brilgue: les t^oves libricilleux Se gyrent et frillant dans le guave, Enm^im'es sont les gougebosquex, Et le m^omerade horgrave. Es brilig war. Die schlichte Toven Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben; Und aller-mumsige Burggoven Dir mohmen Rath ausgraben. -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass" | |
| In /users3 did Kubla Kahn A stately pleasure dome decree, Where /bin, the sacred river ran Through Test Suites measureless to Man Down to a sunless C. | |
| In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forest ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. -- S.T. Coleridge, "Kubla Kahn" | |
| It's so confusing choosing sides in the heat of the moment, just to see if it's real, Oooh, it's so erotic having you tell me how it should feel, But I'm avoiding all the hard cold facts that I got to face, So ask me just one question when this magic night is through, Could it have been just anyone or did it have to be you? -- Billy Joel, "Glass Houses" | |
| Just a song before I go, Going through security To whom it may concern, I held her for so long. Traveling twice the speed of sound She finally looked at me in love, It's easy to get burned. And she was gone. When the shows were over Just a song before I go, We had to get back home, A lesson to be learned. And when we opened up the door Traveling twice the speed of sound I had to be alone. It's easy to get burned. She helped me with my suitcase, She stands before my eyes, Driving me to the airport And to the friendly skies. -- Crosby, Stills, Nash, "Just a Song Before I Go" | |
| Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question... Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" -- T.S. Eliot, "Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" | |
| My calculator is my shepherd, I shall not want It maketh me accurate to ten significant figures, and it leadeth me in scientific notation to 99 digits. It restoreth my square roots and guideth me along paths of floating decimal points for the sake of precision. Yea, tho I walk through the valley of surprise quizzes, I will fear no prof, for my calculator is there to hearten me. It prepareth a log table to comfort me, it prepareth an arc sin for me in the presence of my teachers. It annoints my homework with correct solutions, my interpolations are over. Surely, both precision and accuracy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of Texas instruments forever. | |
| "My name is Sue! How do you do?! Now you gonna die!" Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes, And he went down, but to my surprise, Come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear. So I busted a chair right across his teeth, And we crashed through the walls and into the streets, Kickin' and a-gougin' in the mud and the blood and beer. Now I tell you, I've fought tougher men, But I really can't remember when: He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile. But I heard him laugh and then I heard him cuss, And he went for his gun, but I pulled mine first, And he sat there lookin' at me, and I saw him smile. He said: "Son, this world is rough, And if a man's gonna make it he's gotta be tough, And I knew I wouldn't be there to help you along. So I give you that name and I said goodbye, And I knew you'd have to get tough or die, And it's that name that's helped to make you strong! -- Johnny Cash, "A Boy Named Sue" | |
| "No program is perfect," They said with a shrug. "The customer's happy-- What's one little bug?" But he was determined, Then change two, then three more, The others went home. As year followed year. He dug out the flow chart And strangers would comment, Deserted, alone. "Is that guy still here?" Night passed into morning. He died at the console The room was cluttered Of hunger and thirst With core dumps, source listings. Next day he was buried "I'm close," he muttered. Face down, nine edge first. Chain smoking, cold coffee, And his wife through her tears Logic, deduction. Accepted his fate. "I've got it!" he cried, Said "He's not really gone, "Just change one instruction." He's just working late." -- The Perfect Programmer | |
| Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the double lock will keep; May no brick through the window break, And, no one rob me till I awake. | |
| Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of -- Wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hovering there I've chased the shouting wind along and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up along delirious, burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace, Where never lark, or even eagle flew; And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God. -- John Gillespie Magee Jr., "High Flight" | |
| On a morning from a Bogart movie, in a country where they turned back time, You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime. She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain. Don't bother asking for explanations, she'll just tell you that she came In the Year of the Cat. She doesn't give you time for questions, as she locks up your arm in hers, And you follow 'till your sense of which direction completely disappears. By the blue-tiled walls near the market stall there's a hidden door she leads you to. These days, she say, I feel my life just like a river running through The Year of the Cat. Well, she looks at you so coolly, And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea. She comes in incense and patchouli, So you take her to find what's waiting inside The Year of the Cat. Well, morning comes and you're still with her, but the bus and the tourists are gone, And you've thrown away your choice and lost your ticket, so you have to stay on. But the drum-beat strains of the night remain in the rhythm of the new-born day. You know some time you're bound to leave her, but for now you're going to stay In the Year of the Cat. -- Al Stewart, "Year of the Cat" | |
| Once there was a little nerd who loved to read your mail, And then yank back the i-access times to get hackers off his tail, And once as he finished reading from the secretary's spool, He wrote a rude rejection to her boyfriend (how uncool!) And this as delivermail did work and he ran his backfstat, He heard an awful crackling like rat fritters in hot fat, And hard errors brought the system down 'fore he could even shout! And the bio bug'll bring yours down too, ef you don't watch out! And once they was a little flake who'd prowl through the uulog, And when he went to his blit that night to play at being god, The ops all heard him holler, and they to the console dashed, But when they did a ps -ut they found the system crashed! Oh, the wizards adb'd the dumps and did the system trace, And worked on the file system 'til the disk head was hot paste, But all they ever found was this: "panic: never doubt", And the bio bug'll crash your box too, ef you don't watch out! When the day is done and the moon comes out, And you hear the printer whining and the rk's seems to count, When the other desks are empty and their terminals glassy grey, And the load is only 1.6 and you wonder if it'll stay, You must mind the file protections and not snoop around, Or the bio bug'll getcha and bring the system down! | |
| Picking up the pieces of my sweet shattered dream, I wonder how the old folks are tonight, Her name was Ann, and I'll be damned if I recall her face, She left me not knowing what to do. Carefree Highway, let me slip away on you, Carefree Highway, you seen better days, The morning after blues, from my head down to my shoes, Carefree Highway, let me slip away, slip away, on you... Turning back the pages to the times I love best, I wonder if she'll ever do the same, Now the thing that I call livin' is just bein' satisfied, With knowing I got noone left to blame. Carefree Highway, I got to see you, my old flame... Searching through the fragments of my dream shattered sleep, I wonder if the years have closed her mind, I guess it must be wanderlust or tryin' to get free, From the good old faithful feelin' we once knew. -- Gordon Lightfoot, "Carefree Highway" | |
| Please stand for the National Anthem: Oh, say can you see by dawn's early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? Thank you. You may resume your seat. | |
| Proposed Country & Western Song Titles She Ain't Much to See, but She Looks Good Through the Bottom of a Glass If Fingerprints Showed Up On Skin, I Wonder Who's I'd Find On You I'm Ashamed to be Here, but Not Ashamed Enough to Leave It's Commode Huggin' Time In The Valley If You Want to Keep the Beer Real Cold, Put It Next to My Ex-wife's Heart If You Get the Feeling That I Don't Love You, Feel Again I'm Ashamed To Be Here, But Not Ashamed Enough To Leave It's the Bottle Against the Bible in the Battle For Daddy's Soul My Wife Ran Off With My Best Friend, And I Sure Miss Him Don't Cut Any More Wood, Baby, 'Cause I'll Be Comin' Home With A Load I Loved Her Face, But I Left Her Behind For You | |
| Roland was a warrior, from the land of the midnight sun, With a Thompson gun for hire, fighting to be done. The deal was made in Denmark, on a dark and stormy day, So he set out for Biafra, to join the bloody fray. Through sixty-six and seven, they fought the Congo war, With their fingers on their triggers, knee deep in gore. Days and nights they battled, the Bantu to their knees, They killed to earn their living, and to help out the Congolese. Roland the Thompson gunner... His comrades fought beside him, Van Owen and the rest, But of all the Thompson gunners, Roland was the best. So the C.I.A decided, they wanted Roland dead, That son-of-a-bitch Van Owen, blew off Roland's head. Roland the headless Thompson gunner... Roland searched the continent, for the man who'd done him in. He found him in Mombasa, in a bar room drinking gin, Roland aimed his Thompson gun, he didn't say a word, But he blew Van Owen's body from there to Johannesburg. The eternal Thompson gunner, still wandering through the night, Now it's ten years later, but he stills keeps up the fight. In Ireland, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Berkeley, Patty Hearst... heard the burst... of Roland's Thompson gun, and bought it. -- Warren Zevon, "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" | |
| 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" | |
| 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 | |
| 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 | |
| St. Patrick was a gentleman who through strategy and stealth drove all the snakes from Ireland. Here's a toasting to his health -- but not too many toastings lest you lose yourself and then forget the good St. Patrick and see all those snakes again. | |
| The leaves were long, the grass was green, The hemlock-umbels tall and fair, And in the glade a light was seen Of stars in shadow shimmering. Tin'uviel was dancing there To music of a pipe unseen, And light of stars was in her hair, And in her raiment glimmering. There Beren came from mountains colds, And lost he wandered under leaves, And where the Elven-river rolled He walked alone and sorrowing. He peered between the hemlock-leaves And saw in wonder flowers of gold Upon her mantle and her sleeves, And her hair like shadow following. Enchantment healed his weary feet That over hills were doomed to roam; And forth he hastened, strong and fleet, And grasped at moonbeams glistening. Through woven woods in Elvenhome She lightly fled on dancing feet, And left him lonely still to roam In the silent forest listening. -- J. R. R. Tolkien | |
| The Lord and I are in a sheep-shepherd relationship, and I am in a position of negative need. He prostrates me in a green-belt grazing area. He conducts me directionally parallel to non-torrential aqueous liquid. He returns to original satisfaction levels my psychological makeup. He switches me on to a positive behavioral format for maximal prestige of His identity. It should indeed be said that notwithstanding the fact that I make ambulatory progress through the umbragious inter-hill mortality slot, terror sensations will no be initiated in me, due to para-etical phenomena. Your pastoral walking aid and quadrupic pickup unit introduce me into a pleasurific mood state. You design and produce a nutriment-bearing furniture-type structure in the context of non-cooperative elements. You act out a head-related folk ritual employing vegetable extract. My beverage utensil experiences a volume crisis. It is an ongoing deductible fact that your inter-relational empathetical and non-ventious capabilities will retain me as their target-focus for the duration of my non-death period, and I will possess tenant rights in the housing unit of the Lord on a permanent, open-ended time basis. | |
| 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 Thought Police are here. They've come To put you under cardiac arrest. And as they drag you through the door They tell you that you've failed the test. -- Buggles, "Living in the Plastic Age" | |
| The wind doth taste so bitter sweet, Like Jaspar wine and sugar, It must have blown through someone's feet, Like those of Caspar Weinberger. -- P. Opus | |
| There are bad times just around the corner, There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky And it's no good whining About a silver lining For we know from experience that they won't roll by... -- Noel Coward | |
| There once was a Sailor who looked through a glass And spied a fair mermaid with scales on her... island. Where seagulls flew over their nest. She combed the long hair which hung over her... shoulders. And caused her to tickle and itch. The sailor cried out "There's a beautiful... mermaid. A sittin' out there on the rocks." The crew came a running, all grabbing their... glasses. And crowded four deep to the rail. All eager to share in this fine piece of... news. ... "Throw out a line and we'll lasso her... flippers. And soon we will certainly find If mermaids are better before or be... brave My dear fellows," The captain cried out. And cursing with spleen. This song may be dull, but it's certainly clean. -- "The Clean Song", Oscar Brandt | |
| 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. | |
| "Twas bergen and the eirie road Did mahwah into patterson: "Beware the Hopatcong, my son! All jersey were the ocean groves, The teeth that bite, the nails And the red bank bayonne. that claw! Beware the bound brook bird, and shun He took his belmar blade in hand: The kearney communipaw." Long time the folsom foe he sought Till rested he by a bayway tree And, as in nutley thought he stood, And stood a while in thought. The Hopatcong with eyes of flame, Came whippany through the englewood, One, two, one, two, and through And garfield as it came. and through The belmar blade went hackensack! "And hast thou slain the Hopatcong? He left it dead and with it's head Come to my arms, my perth amboy! He went weehawken back. Hohokus day! Soho! Rahway!" He caldwell in his joy. Did mahwah into patterson: All jersey were the ocean groves, And the red bank bayonne. -- Paul Kieffer | |
| 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! All mimsy were the borogroves The jaws that bite, the claws And the mome raths outgrabe. that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, He took his vorpal sword in hand And shun the frumious Bandersnatch!" Long time the manxome foe he sought. So rested he by the tumtum tree And as in uffish thought he stood And stood awhile in thought. The Jabberwock, with eyes aflame Came whuffling through the tulgey wood One! Two! One! Two! And through and And burbled as it came! through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack. "Hast thou slain the Jabberwock? He left it dead, and took its head, Come to my arms, my beamish boy! And went galumphing back. Oh frabjous day! Calooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves And the mome raths outgrabe. -- Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky" | |
| 'Twas bullig, and the slithy brokers Did buy and gamble in the craze "Beware the Jabberstock, my son! All rosy were the Dow Jones stokers The cost that bites, the worth By market's wrath unphased. that falls! Beware the Econ'mist's word, and shun He took his forecast sword in hand: The spurious Street o' Walls!" Long time the Boesk'some foe he sought - Sake's liquidity, so d'vested he, And as in bearish thought he stood And stood awhile in thought. The Jabberstock, with clothes of tweed, Came waffling with the truth too good, Chip Black! Chip Blue! And through And yuppied great with greed! and through The forecast blade went snicker-snack! "And hast thou slain the Jabberstock? It bit the dirt, and with its shirt, Come to my firm, V.P.ish boy! He went rebounding back. O big bucks day! Moolah! Good Play!" He bought him a Mercedes Toy. 'Twas panic, and the slithy brokers Did gyre and tumble in the Crash All flimsy were the Dow Jones stokers And mammon's wrath them bash! -- Peter Stucki, "Jabberstocky" | |
| 'Twas midnight on the ocean, Her children all were orphans, Not a streetcar was in sight, Except one a tiny tot, So I stepped into a cigar store Who had a home across the way To ask them for a light. Above a vacant lot. The man behind the counter As I gazed through the oaken door Was a woman, old and gray, A whale went drifting by, Who used to peddle doughnuts Its six legs hanging in the air, On the road to Mandalay. So I kissed her goodbye. She said "Good morning, stranger", This story has a morale Her eyes were dry with tears, As you can plainly see, As she put her head between her feet Don't mix your gin with whiskey And stood that way for years. On the deep and dark blue sea. -- Midnight On The Ocean | |
| '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 Night before Crisis" | |
| Upon the hearth the fire is red, Beneath the roof there is a bed; But not yet weary are our feet, Still round the corner we may meet A sudden tree or standing stone That none have seen but we alone. Still round the corner there may wait Tree and flower and leaf and grass, A new road or a secret gate, Let them pass! Let them pass! And though we pass them by today Hill and water under sky, Tomorrow we may come this way Pass them by! Pass them by! And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun, Home is behind, the world ahead, Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe, And there are many paths to tread Let them go! Let them go! Through shadows to the edge of night, Sand and stone and pool and dell, Until the stars are all alight. Fare you well! Fare you well! Then world behind and home ahead, We'll wander back to home and bed. Mist and twilight, cloud and shade, Away shall fade! Away shall fade! Fire and lamp, and meat and bread, And then to bed! And then to bed! -- J. R. R. Tolkien | |
| Wanna tell you all a story 'bout a man named Jed, A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed. But then one day he was shootin' at some food, When up through the ground come a bubblin' crude -- oil, that is; black gold; 'Texas tea' ... Well the next thing ya know, old Jed's a millionaire. The kinfolk said, 'Jed, move away from there!' They said, 'Californy is the place ya oughta be', So they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly -- Hills, that is; swimmin' pools; movie stars. | |
| Whenever Richard Cory went downtown, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean-favored, and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good morning," and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich -- yes, richer than a king -- And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head. -- E.A. Robinson, "Richard Cory" | |
| You're currently going through a difficult transition period called "Life." | |
| Your business will go through a period of considerable expansion. | |
| A couple of young fellers were fishing at their special pond off the beaten track when out of the bushes jumped the Game Warden. Immediately, one of the boys threw his rod down and started running through the woods like the proverbial bat out of hell, and hot on his heels ran the Game Warden. After about a half mile the fella stopped and stooped over with his hands on his thighs, whooping and heaving to catch his breath as the Game Warden finally caught up to him. "Let's see yer fishin' license, boy," the Warden gasped. The man pulled out his wallet and gave the Game Warden a valid fishing license. "Well, son", snarled the Game Warden, "You must be about as dumb as a box of rocks! You didn't have to run if you have a license!" "Yes, sir," replied his victim, "but, well, see, my friend back there, he don't have one!" | |
| A ranger was walking through the forest and encountered a hunter carrying a shotgun and a dead loon. "What in the world do you think you're doing? Don't you know that the loon is on the endagered species list?" Instead of answering, the hunter showed the ranger his game bag, which contained twelve more loons. "Why would you shoot loons?", the ranger asked. "Well, my family eats them and I sell the plumage." "What's so special about a loon? What does it taste like?" "Oh, somewhere between an American Bald Eagle and a Trumpeter Swan." | |
| Accidentally Shot Colonel Gray, of Petaluma, came near losing his life a few days ago, in a singular manner. A gentleman with whom he was hunting attempted to bring down a dove, but instead of doing so put the load of shot through the Colonel's hat. One shot took effect in his forehead. -- Sacramento Daily Union, April 20, 1861 | |
| Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's "Practical Gamekeeping." -- Ed Zern, "Field and Stream" (Nov. 1959) | |
| COONDOG MEMORY (heard in Rutledge, Missouri, about eighteen years ago) Now, this dog is for sale, and she can not only follow a trail twice as old as the average dog can, but she's got a pretty good memory to boot. For instance, last week this old boy who lives down the road from me, and is forever stinkmouthing my hounds, brought some city fellow around to try out ol' Sis here. So I turned her out south of the house and she made two or three big swings back and forth across the edge of the woods, set back her head, bayed a couple of times, cut straight through the woods, come to a little clearing, jumped about three foot straight up in the air, run to the other side, and commenced to letting out a racket like she had something treed. We went over there with our flashlights and shone them up in the tree but couldn't catch no shine offa coon's eyes, and my neighbor sorta indicated that ol' Sis might be a little crazy, `cause she stood right to the tree and kept singing up into it. So I pulled off my coat and climbed up into the branches, and sure enough, there was a coon skeleton wedged in between a couple of branches about twenty foot up. Now as I was saying, she can follow a pretty old trail, but this fellow was still calling her crazy or touched `cause she had hopped up in the air while she was crossing the clearing, until I reminded him that the Hawkins' had a fence across there about five years back. Now, this dog is for sale. -- News that stayed News: Ten Years of Coevolution Quarterly | |
| My first baseman is George "Catfish" Metkovich from our 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates team, which lost 112 games. After a terrible series against the New York Giants, in which our center fielder made three throwing errors and let two balls get through his legs, manager Billy Meyer pleaded, "Can somebody think of something to help us win a game?" "I'd like to make a suggestion," Metkovich said. "On any ball hit to center field, let's just let it roll to see if it might go foul." -- Joe Garagiola, "It's Anybody's Ball Game" | |
| Two golfers were being held up as the twosome of women in front of them whiffed shots, hunted for lost balls and stood over putts for what seemed like hours. "I'll ask if we can play through," Bill said as he strode toward the women. Twenty yards from the green, however, he turned on his heel and went back to where his companion was waiting. "Can't do it," he explained, sheepishly. "One of them's my wife and the other's my mistress!" "I'll ask," said Jim. He started off, only to turn and come back before reaching the green. "What's wrong?" Bill asked. "Small world, isn't it?" | |
| "The main reception foyer was almost empty but Ford nevertheless weaved his way through it." - Ford making his way out of Milliways whilst under the influence of enough alchol to make a rhino sing. | |
| High Priest: Armaments Chapter One, verses nine through twenty-seven: Bro. Maynard: And Saint Attila raised the Holy Hand Grenade up on high saying, "Oh Lord, Bless us this Holy Hand Grenade, and with it smash our enemies to tiny bits." And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the lambs, and stoats, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and lima bean- High Priest: Skip a bit, brother. Bro. Maynard: And then the Lord spake, saying: "First, shalt thou take out the holy pin. Then shalt thou count to three. No more, no less. *Three* shall be the number of the counting, and the number of the counting shall be three. *Four* shalt thou not count, and neither count thou two, excepting that thou then goest on to three. Five is RIGHT OUT. Once the number three, being the third number be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it. Amen. All: Amen. -- Monty Python, "The Holy Hand Grenade" | |
| If you throw a New Year's Party, the worst thing that you can do would be to throw the kind of party where your guests wake up today, and call you to say they had a nice time. Now you'll be be expected to throw another party next year. What you should do is throw the kind of party where your guest wake up several days from now and call their lawyers to find out if they've been indicted for anything. You want your guests to be so anxious to avoid a recurrence of your party that they immediately start planning parties of their own, a year in advance, just to prevent you from having another one ... If your party is successful, the police will knock on your door, unless your party is very successful in which case they will lob tear gas through your living room window. As host, your job is to make sure that they don't arrest anybody. Or if they're dead set on arresting someone, your job is to make sure it isn't you ... -- Dave Barry | |
| "Many have seen Topaxci, God of the Red Mushroom, and they earn the name of shaman," he said. Some have seen Skelde, spirit of the smoke, and they are called sorcerers. A few have been privileged to see Umcherrel, the soul of the forest, and they are known as spirit masters. But none have seen a box with hundreds of legs that looked at them without eyes, and they are known as idio--" The interruption was caused by a sudden screaming noise and a flurry of snow and sparks that blew the fire across the dark hut; there was a brief blurred vision and then the opposite wall was blasted aside and the apparition vanished. There was a long silence. Then a slightly shorter silence. Then the old shaman said carefully, "You didn't just see two men go through upside down on a broomstick, shouting and screaming at each other, did you?" The boy looked at him levelly. "Certainly not," he said. The old man heaved a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness for that," he said. "Neither did I." -- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic" | |
| Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God -- I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. -- Woody Allen, "Hannah and Her Sisters" | |
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. Most importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a non-hitchhiker discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, flask, gnat spray, space suit, etc., etc. Furthermore, the non-hitchhiker will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that he may have "lost". After all, any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" | |
| There's no easy quick way out, we're gonna have to live through our whole lives, win, lose, or draw. -- Walt Kelly | |
| "The basic publication series for te IETF is the RFC series. RPF once stood for 'Request for Comments,' but since documents published as RFCs have generally gone through an extensive review process before publication, RFC is now best known understood to mean 'RFC' " -- Scott Bradner (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates) | |
| Referring to a book: I read part of it all the way through. -Samuel Goldwyn | |
| Yes... I feel your pain... but as a former first poster (I scored mine a couple months ago) I know what you went through. Here's where you screwed up though... YOU DIDN'T PULL THE TRIGGER. You didn't carpe diem. Yep... When I saw that nice clean article with no posts I didn't hesitate, yes the adrenaline was surging... my palms were wet, heart pounding. I was standing at the peak of greatness... I knew I had but one thing to do, there was no turning back now... I rapidly typed in a one word post.. then with no hesitation I navigated my mouse over the submit button... and WHAM.. seconds later I was looking at my feeble post with a #1 attached to the header. At that mmoment I knew a feeling that only few will ever know... I was at one with Slashdot... Zen masters and Kings will relate I'm sure. That one sweet moment when the ying and the yang converge... bliss... eternal bliss... ahhh! Then I smoked a cigarette and went to bed. -- Anonymous Coward, in response to a "First Post!" that clearly wasn't. | |
| The word "Windows" is a word out of an old dialect of the Apaches. It means: "White man staring through glass-screen onto an hourglass..." | |
| Bugs come in through open Windows. | |
| What you end up with, after running an operating system concept through these many marketing coffee filters, is something not unlike plain hot water. -- Matt Welsh | |
| Trying to get Windows to run on the hardware that Linux typically runs on is like pushing an elephant through a keyhole. -- Forbes Magazine | |
| Linux Drinking Game (Abridged) With a group of friends, take turns reading articles about Linux from popular media sources (Ziff-Davis AnchorDesk is recommended) or postings on Usenet (try alt.fan.bill-gates). If the author says one of the things below, take a drink. Continue until everyone involved is plastered. - Linux will never go mainstream - Any platform that can't run Microsoft Office [or some other Microsoft "solution"] sucks - Linux is hard to install - Linux tech support is lacking - No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft - Any OS with a command line interface is primitive - Microsoft is an innovative company - Could you get fired for choosing Linux? - Linux was created by a bunch of snot-nosed 14 year old hackers with acne and no life - Security through obscurity is the way to go - Linus and Unix are 70s technology while NT is 90s technology - All Linux software must be released under the GPL - Linux is a great piece of shareware | |
| Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #7 Bluescreen Computer Case US$27.97 at Bud's Beige Box Bazaar Real Geeks may not admit to using Windows, but there's still countless geeks out there who must suffer through the humiliation of using Windows while at work. The patent-not-pending Bluescreen Case, though, will ease the stress of working with Microsoft "solutions". This computer case is very similar to other beige boxes, but with one important difference: the reboot button is covered with a picture of Bill Gates. When the machine bluescreens for the millionth time, all you have to do is punch Bill Gates in the face as hard as you can, and the computer will restart. This provides invaluable therapeutic stress relief. | |
| Microsoft ActivePromo Campaign: "State Innovation Day" Microsoft has successfully lobbied for the State of Washington to declare August 24th as State Innovation Day. Efforts are underway to lobby the US Congress to decree a similar designation nationally. Several events are scheduled on August 24, 1999 to showcase "innovation" in the computer industry (in other words, Microsoft), including: * An "Innovation Day Parade" held in downtown Seattle, featuring floats and helium-filled balloons representing various Microsoft products (Dancing Paper Clip, Microsoft Bob, Flying Windows Logo, etc.) * An "Innovation is Cool" essay contest for high school and college students. Possible topics include "Why IE Should Be Integrated in Windows", "Why Bill Gates Is My Hero", "Government Intervention is Evil", and "Why Monopolies Improve Product Quality and Lower Prices". * A 24-hour "Innovation in Education" telethon on NBC to raise money for school districts nationwide to buy new Wintel computer systems and Internet access through the Microsoft Network. | |
| Attack of the Tuxissa Virus What started out as a prank posting to comp.os.linux.advocacy yesterday has turned into one of the most significant viruses in computing history. The creator of the virus, who goes by the moniker "Anonymous Longhair", modified the Melissa virus to install Linux on infected machines. "It's a work of art," one Linux advocate told Humorix after he looked through the Tuxissa virus source code. "This virus goes well beyond the feeble troublemaking of Melissa. It actually configures a UMSDOS partition on the user's hard drive and then downloads and installs a stripped-down version of Slackware Linux." The email message that the virus is attached to has the subject "Important Message About Windows Security". The text of the body says, "I want to let you know about some security problems I've uncovered in Windows 95/98/NT, Office 95/97, and Outlook. It's critically important that you protect your system against these attacks. Visit these sites for more information..." The rest of the message contains 42 links to sites about Linux and free software. Details on how the virus started are a bit sketchy. The "Anonymous Longhair" who created it only posted it to Usenet as an early April Fool's gag, demonstrating how easy it would be to mount a "Linux revolution". | |
| Invasion of the Dancing Penguin Those annoying, dancing cartoon characters embedded in software applications are no longer confined to Microsoft programs. They have entered the realm of Linux. A new Linux distribution under development, called LinTux, promises to provide a more "user-friendly" environment through its "Dancing Penguin" assistant. Dancing Tux will "guide" users through the installation process and will be a permanent fixture of the X root window. The LinTux staff demonstrated a prototype version of the Dancing Tux program to this Humorix reporter. It was certainly impressive, but, like the Dancing Paper Clip in Microsoft Office, it becomes annoying very fast. The one redeeming feature of LinTux is that, when the system is idle, Dancing Tux becomes a make-shift screen saver. The animations included in the prototype were quite amusing. For instance, in one scene, Tux chases Bill Gates through an Antarctic backdrop. In another animation, Tux can be seen drinking beers with his penguin pals and telling Microsoft jokes. | |
| Dave Finton gazes into his crystal ball... January 2099: Rob Malda Finally Gets His Damned Nano-Technology The Linux hacker community finally breathed a collective sigh of relief when it was announced that Rob Malda finally got his damned nanotechnology. "It's about time!" exclaimed one Dothead. "He been going on about that crap since god-knows-when. Now that he's got that and those wearable computers, maybe we can read about something interesting on Slashdot!" Observers were skeptical, however. Already the now-immortal Rob Malda nano-cyborg (who reportedly changed his name to "18 of 49, tertiary adjunct of something-or-other") has picked up a few new causes to shout about to the high heavens until everyone's ears start bleeding. In one Slashdot article, Malda writes "Here's an article about the potential of large greyish high-tech mile-wide cubes flying through space, all controlled by a collective mind set upon intergalactic conquest. Personally, I can't wait. Yum." | |
| Jargon Coiner (#3) An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon that we've just made up. * LILOSPLAININ': Arduous process of explaining why there's now a LILO boot prompt on the office computer. Example: "John had some lilosplainin' to do after his boss turned on the computer and the Windows splash screen didn't appear." * UPTIME DOWNER: Depression that strikes a Linux sysadmin after his uptime is ruined. Can be caused by an extended power outtage, a pet chewing through the power cord, a lightning bolt striking the power line, or an urgent need to reboot into Windows to read a stupid Word document. * OSTR (Off-Switch Total Recall): The sudden recollection of something terribly important you need to do online that occurs exactly 0.157 seconds after you've shut down your computer. | |
| This telethon isn't just about helping disenfranchised geeks. We're also here for the betterment of mankind through our research into finding a Cure for Windows. Each day, millions of man-hours are wasted due to design flaws in Microsoft Windows. Each day, millions of dollars are sent by business and individuals like yourself into a huge black hole known as "Microsoft" for exorbitantly priced software products that should be free. But don't worry. We've almost found a Cure for Windows. Geeks worldwide have toiled endlessly for the past eight years working on a replacement operating system called Linux. It's almost ready. Now we need to convince the world to use our creation and eliminate the virus known as Windows. -- Excerpt from Eric S. Raymond's speech during the Geek Grok '99 telethon held in Silicon Valley | |
| Bill Gates Passes Turing Test LONDON, ENGLAND -- Microsoft proclaimed that they have passed the Turing Test by creating a Bill Gates multimedia simulacrum that crack BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman couldn't distinguish from the real thing. "I never would have expected this," Paxman said about the Gates AI program. "After all, this Microsoft program actually worked for an extended period of time, something you don't see very often." Microsoft has plans to mass-produce the Bill Gates holographic simulation by 2010 or so. "The hardware just isn't there yet for home use," a Microserf explained. "By then, though, Intel's Itanium 6 Super Pro Plus III CPU running at 600 Ghz or whatever should be sufficient." Windows 2010 is expected to include the Bill Gates simulation, making the World's Richest Man(tm) accessible to the entire world. A newly printed brochure for the faux-Gates advertises, "Need help running Windows 2010? Bill Gates will sit beside you and guide you through the system. Have a question for the world's sexiest and smartest nerd? He'll answer it. Wondering if free and open source software is a plot by Communists freaks to overthrow the free market system? He'll be there to explain. Want to ask for a personal loan? Sorry, won't happen." | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#1) Re-Inventing the Wheel Our journey through the history of Linux begins ca. 28000 B.C. when a large all-powerful company called MoogaSoft monopolized the wheel-making industry. As founder of the company, Billga Googagates (rumored to be the distant ancestor of Bill Gates) was the wealthiest man in the known world, owning several large rock huts, an extravagant collection of artwork (cave paintings), and a whole army of servants and soldiers. MoogaSoft's unfair business practices were irritating, but users were unable to do anything about them, lest they be clubbed to death by MoogaSoft's army. Nevertheless, one small group of hobbyists finally got fed up and starting hacking their own wheels out of solid rock. Their spirit of cooperation led to better and better wheels that eventually outperformed MoogaSoft offerings. MoogaSoft tried desperately to stop the hobbyists -- as shown by the recently unearthed "Ooga! Document" -- but failed. Ironically, Billga Googagates was killed shortly afterwards when one his own 900-pound wheels crushed him. | |
| Brief History Of Linux (#8) Let's all holler for Hollerith In 1890 the US Congress wanted to extend the census to collect exhaustive demographic information on each citizen that could be resold to marketing companies to help pay for the newly installed gold-plated toilets on Capitol Hill. Experts estimated that the 1890 Census wouldn't be completed until 1900. It was hoped that an electronic tabulating machine using punchcards designed by Herman Hollerith would speed up the process. It didn't quite work out that way. An infestation of termites ate their way through the wooden base of Hollerith's machines, and then a wave of insects devoured several stacks of punchcards. Also, some Hollerith models had the propensity to crash at the drop of a hat... literally. In one instance, the operator dropped his hat and when he reached down to pick it up, he bumped the machine, causing it to flip over and crash. These flaws meant that the census was delayed for several years. However, the system was, in the words of one newspaper reporter, "good enough for government work", a guiding principle that lives on to this very day and explains the government's insistence on using Windows-based PCs. | |
| The Linux House 1.01 Mr. Billy O'Nair knows how to build a house. The 24 year old retired dotcom billionaire has constructed the "Linux House 1.01", a bachelor pad built in the shape of Tux Penguin. This geek haven features a 256 foot long computer room, along with other smaller, lesser important rooms (kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, etc.). Explained O'Nair, "Why do architects waste a bunch of space on formal living rooms, family rooms, dining rooms, closets, foyers, and hallways that are rarely used? In my 'Linux House', the majority of square footage is devoted to the two rooms that I myself use the most: a computer room and a procrastination room." ...The Linux House features a LAN (Liquor Acquisition Network) that delivers alcohol or caffeinated beverages to any room in the house by way of pipes that run through the ceiling. 'PANIC' buttons scattered throughout the house activate the RAM System (Random Access Munchies), in which candy bars and other snacks are immediately delivered by FPM (Fast Pretzel Mode) and EDO (Extended Delicacy Output) pneumatic tubes. | |
| Bill Gates Sends Out Desperate Plea For Help REDMOND -- In a shocking development, Chief Bloatware Architect Bill Gates admitted today that Microsoft is in severe financial difficulty and desperately needs donations to stay afloat through the next month. "The dismal state of the economy, the lackluster sales of Windows ME, and the pending anti-trust lawsuit have placed significant financial stress on Microsoft," Gates said at a press conference. "We can't continue to develop and maintain our innovative solutions without financial contributions from users like you." The company spent the remaining $10,000 in its coffers to send out letters to registered Windows users pleading for donations. "For just pennies a day, you can help support the world's most innovative company in its quest to discover the cure for the Blue Screen of Death," the letter announces. "Or you can help fund research and development into improving the security of our products against such sinister forces as script kiddies, crackers, and Linux freaks." | |
| Linux Distro To Include Pre-Installed Security Holes Proactive Synergy Paradigm, the Linux distro targeted at Pointy Haired Bosses, will now include built-in security flaws to better compete with Microsoft programs. "The sheer popularity of Windows, Outlook, and IIS clearly shows that people demand security holes large enough to drive a truck through," said Mr. Bert Dill of P.S.P. Inc. "We're going to do our best to offer what the consumer wants. Just as Microsoft stole ideas from Apple during the 1980's, we're stealing ideas from Microsoft today." Future releases of Proactive Synergy Linux will feature "LookOut! 1.0", a mail reader that automatically executes (with root privileges) e-mail attachments coded in Perl, JavaScript, Python, and Visual Basic. "Hey, if it works for Microsoft, it can work for us," boasted Mr. Dill. "Now PHBs won't have to stick with Windows in order to have their confidential files secretly emailed to their colleagues by a worm. Better yet, this capability allows viruses to automagically delete unnecessary files to save disk space without wasting the PHB's valuable time. | |
| Jon Splatz's Movie Review: "Lord of the Pings" I've never walked out on a movie before. When I pay $9.50 to see a movie (plus $16.50 for snacks), I'm going to sit through every single minute no matter how awful. The resolve to get my money's worth allowed me to watch Jar Jar Binks without even flinching last year. But I couldn't make it through "Lord of the Pings". This movie contains a scene that is so appalling, so despicable, so vile, so terrible, so crappy, and so gut-wrenching that I simply had to get up, run out of the theater, and puke in the nearest restroom. It was just that bad. The whole thing is completely ruined by a scene that takes place only 52 seconds into the flick. Brace yourself: big letters appear on screen that say "An AOL/Time Warner Production". ... Because this film is brought to you by the letters A-O-L-T-W, I must give it an F-minus even though I've only seen 53 seconds of it. | |
| A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil. -- Victor Hugo | |
| A man is crawling through the Sahara desert when he is approached by another man riding on a camel. When the rider gets close enough, the crawling man whispers through his sun-parched lips, "Water... please... can you give... water..." "I'm sorry," replies the man on the camel, "I don't have any water with me. But I'd be delighted to sell you a necktie." "Tie?" whispers the man. "I need *water*." "They're only four dollars apiece." "I need *water*." "Okay, okay, say two for seven dollars." "Please! I need *water*!", says the man. "I don't have any water, all I have are ties," replies the salesman, and he heads off into the distance. The man, losing track of time, crawls for what seems like days. Finally, nearly dead, sun-blind and with his skin peeling and blistering, he sees a restaurant in the distance. Summoning the last of his strength he staggers up to the door and confronts the head waiter. "Water... can I get... water," the dying man manages to stammer. "I'm sorry, sir, ties required." | |
| Fortune finishes the great quotations, #6 "But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?" It's nothing, honey. Go back to sleep. | |
| He was so narrow-minded he could see through a keyhole with both eyes. | |
| "I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But glory doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all." -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass" | |
| Largest Number of Driving Test Failures By April 1970 Mrs. Miriam Hargrave had failed her test thirty-nine times. In the eight preceding years she had received two hundred and twelve driving lessons at a cost of L300. She set the new record while driving triumphantly through a set of red traffic lights in Wakefield, Yorkshire. Disappointingly, she passed at the fortieth attempt (3 August 1970) but eight years later she showed some of her old magic when she was reported as saying that she still didn't like doing right-hand turns. -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
| Looking for a cool one after a long, dusty ride, the drifter strode into the saloon. As he made his way through the crowd to the bar, a man galloped through town screaming, "Big Mike's comin'! Run fer yer lives!" Suddenly, the saloon doors burst open. An enormous man, standing over eight feet tall and weighing an easy 400 pounds, rode in on a bull, using a rattlesnake for a whip. Grabbing the drifter by the arm and throwing him over the bar, the giant thundered, "Gimme a drink!" The terrified man handed over a bottle of whiskey, which the man guzzled in one gulp and then smashed on the bar. He then stood aghast as the man stuffed the broken bottle in his mouth, munched broken glass and smacked his lips with relish. "Can I, ah, uh, get you another, sir?" the drifter stammered. "Naw, I gotta git outa here, boy," the man grunted. "Big Mike's a-comin'." | |
| "Richard, in being so fierce toward my vampire, you were doing what you wanted to do, even though you thought it was going to hurt somebody else. He even told you he'd be hurt if..." "He was going to suck my blood!" "Which is what we do to anyone when we tell them we'll be hurt if they don't live our way." ... "The thing that puzzles you," he said, "is an accepted saying that happens to be impossible. The phrase is hurt somebody else. We choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what. Us who decides. Nobody else. My vampire told you he'd be hurt if you didn't let him? That's his decision to be hurt, that's his choice. What you do about it is your decision, your choice: give him blood; ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake through his heart. If he doesn't want the holly stake, he's free to resist, in whatever way he wants. It goes on and on, choices, choices." "When you look at it that way..." "Listen," he said, "it's important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do." -- Richard Bach, "Illusions" | |
| Serenity through viciousness. | |
| The way to a man's heart is through the left ventricle. | |
| "I would suggest you to read through the following book and files: * Kernighan & Pike, "The Practice of Programming" * Documentation/CodingStyle * drivers/net/aironet4500_proc.c and consider, erm, discrepancies. On the second thought, reading K&R might also be useful. IOW, no offense, but your C is bad beyond belief." - Al Viro | |
| I will pop a nasty patch to get you through the almost death, but it is nasty and not the preferred unknow solution. - Andre Hedrik on linux-kernel | |
| It should be fixed, but it won't be easy and it won't be fast. If you want to help - wonderful. But keep in mind that it will take months of wading through the ugliest code we have in the tree. If you've got a weak stomach - stay out. I've been there and it's not a nice place. - Al Viro on fixing drivers | |
| Sorry about the rant - I've just spent a couple of hours wading through the piles of excrements in drivers/*. Ouch. - Al Viro about ugly code in device drivers on linux-kernel | |
| Code like that would not pass through anybody's yuck-o-meter. - Linus Torvalds about design on linux-kernel | |
| Alan Cox wrote: > Linus Torvalds wrote: > > And quite frankly, if your disk can push 50MB/s through a 1kB > > non-contiguous filesystem, then my name is Bugs Bunny. > > Hi Bugs 8), previously Frodo Rabbit, .. I think you watch too much kids tv > 8) Three kids will do that to you. Some day, you too will be there. - Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
| Heaven and Earth last forever. Why do heaven and Earth last forever? They are unborn, So ever living. The sage stays behind, thus he is ahead. He is detached, thus at one with all. Through selfless action, he attains fulfillment. | |
| Whenever you advise a ruler in the way of Tao, Counsel him not to use force to conquer the universe. For this would only cause resistance. Thorn bushes spring up wherever the army has passed. Lean years follow in the wake of a great war. Just do what needs to be done. Never take advantage of power. Achieve results, But never glory in them. Achieve results, But never boast. Achieve results, But never be proud. Achieve results, Because this is the natural way. Achieve results, But not through violence. Force is followed by loss of strength. This is not the way of Tao. That which goes against the Tao comes to an early end. | |
| Without going outside, you may know the whole world. Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven. The farther you go, the less you know. Thus the sage knows without traveling; He sees without looking; He works without doing. | |
| A brave and passionate man will kill or be killed. A brave and calm man will always preserve life. Of these two which is good and which is harmful? Some things are not favored by heaven. Who knows why? Even the sage is unsure of this. The Tao of heaven does not strive, and yet it overcomes. It does not speak, and yet is answered. It does not ask, yet is supplied with all its needs. It seems to have no aim and yet its purpose is fulfilled. Heaven's net casts wide. Though its meshes are course, nothing slips through. | |
| After watching an extremely attractive maternity-ward patient earnestly thumbing her way through a telephone directory for several minutes, a hospital orderly finally asked if he could be of some help. "No, thanks," smiled the young mother, "I'm just looking for a name for my baby." "But the hospital supplies a special booklet that lists hundreds of first names and their meanings," said the orderly. "That won't help," said the woman, "my baby already has a first name." | |
| "Humpf!" Humpfed a voice! "For almost two days you've run wild and insisted on chatting with persons who've never existed. Such carryings-on in our peaceable jungle! We've had quite enough of you bellowing bungle! And I'm here to state," snapped the big kangaroo, "That your silly nonsensical game is all through!" And the young kangaroo in her pouch said, "Me, too!" "With the help of the Wickersham Brothers and dozens of Wickersham Uncles and Wickersham Cousins and Wickersham In-Laws, whose help I've engaged, You're going to be roped! And you're going to be caged! And, as for your dust speck... Hah! That we shall boil in a hot steaming kettle of Beezle-Nut oil!" -- Dr. Seuss "Horton Hears a Who" | |
| "As you journey through life take a minute every now and then to give a thought for the other fellow. He could be plotting something." -- Hagar the Horrible | |
| Operating Systems Installed: * Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 4 CD Set ($20 from www.chguy.net; price includes taxes, shipping, and a $3 donation to FSF). 2 CDs are binaries, 2 CDs complete source code; * Windows 98 Second Edition Upgrade Version ($136 through Megadepot.com, price does not include taxes/shipping). Surprisingly, no source code is included. -- Bill Stilwell, http://linuxtoday.com/stories/8794.html | |
| <Delenn> I wouldn't make it through 24 hours before I'd be firing up the grill and slapping a few friends on the barbie. <spacemoos> Why would you slap friends with barbies, thats kinda kinky | |
| <knghtbrd> is it a sign of mental illness to wander aimlessly through the start map, collect your Thunderbolt, hop in the pool, and gib yourself with it just to see your head buouce when it falls through the bottom of the pool? => <knghtbrd> "You know you're a Quake addict when ..." | |
| <WildCode> Mercury, isn't debugging X a little like finding perfectly bugfree code in windows ?? <Mercury> WildCode: Debugging X is like trying to run a straight line through a maze. <Mercury> You just need to bend space-time so that the corners move around you and you won't have any problems. (=:] | |
| innovate /IN no vait/ vb.: 1. To appropriate third-party technology through purchase, imitation, or theft and to integrate it into a de-facto, monopoly-position product. 2. To increase in size or complexity but not in utility; to reduce compatibility or interoperability. 3. To lock-out competitors or to lock-in users. 4. To charge more money; to increase prices or costs. 5. To acquire profits from investments in other companies but not from direct product or service sales. 6. To stifle or manipulate a free market; to extend monopoly powers into new markets. 7. To evade liability for wrong-doings; to get off. 8. To purchase legislation, legislators, legislatures, or chiefs of state. 9. To mediate all transactions in a global economy; to embezzle; to co-opt power (coup d'état). Cf. innovate, English usage (antonym). -- csbruce, in a Slashdot post | |
| <Sammy> that's *IT*. I'm never fucking attempting to install redhat again. <Sammy> this is like the 10th fucking machine on which the installer has imploded immediately after I went through the hell of their package selection process. <timball> Sammy: just use debian and never look back <Sammy> timball: debian iso's are being written at this very moment. | |
| A blind rabbit was hopping through the woods, tripping over logs and crashing into trees. At the same time, a blind snake was slithering through the same forest, with identical results. They chanced to collide head-on in a clearing. "Please excuse me, sir, I'm blind and I bumped into you accidentally," apologized the rabbit. "That's quite all right," replied the snake, "I have the same problem!" "All my life I've been wondering what I am," said the rabbit, "Do you think you could help me find out?" "I'll try," said the snake. He gently coiled himself around the rabbit. "Well, you're covered with soft fur, you have a little fluffy tail and long ears. You're... hmmm... you're probably a bunny rabbit!" "Great!" said the rabbit. "Thanks, I really owe you one!" "Well," replied the snake, "I don't know what I am, either. Do you suppose you could try and tell me?" The rabbit ran his paws all over the snake. "Well, you're low, cold and slimey..." And, as he ran one paw underneath the snake, "and you have no balls. You must be an attorney!" | |
| A certain old cat had made his home in the alley behind Gabe's bar for some time, subsisting on scraps and occasional handouts from the bartender. One evening, emboldened by hunger, the feline attempted to follow Gabe through the back door. Regrettably, only the his body had made it through when the door slammed shut, severing the cat's tail at its base. This proved too much for the old creature, who looked sadly at Gabe and expired on the spot. Gabe put the carcass back out in the alley and went back to business. The mandatory closing time arrived and Gabe was in the process of locking up after the last customers had gone. Approaching the back door he was startled to see an apparition of the old cat mournfully holding its severed tail out, silently pleading for Gabe to put the tail back on its corpse so that it could go on to the kitty afterworld complete. Gabe shook his head sadly and said to the ghost, "I can't. You know the law -- no retailing spirits after 2:00 AM." | |
| A housewife, an accountant and a lawyer were asked to add 2 and 2. The housewife replied, "Four!". The accountant said, "It's either 3 or 4. Let me run those figures through my spread sheet one more time." The lawyer pulled the drapes, dimmed the lights and asked in a hushed voice, "How much do you want it to be?" | |
| After his Ignoble Disgrace, Satan was being expelled from Heaven. As he passed through the Gates, he paused a moment in thought, and turned to God and said, "A new creature called Man, I hear, is soon to be created." "This is true," He replied. "He will need laws," said the Demon slyly. "What! You, his appointed Enemy for all Time! You ask for the right to make his laws?" "Oh, no!" Satan replied, "I ask only that he be allowed to make his own." It was so granted. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" | |
| Fortune's nomination for All-Time Champion and Protector of Youthful Morals goes to Representative Clare E. Hoffman of Michigan. During an impassioned House debate over a proposed bill to "expand oyster and clam research," a sharp-eared informant transcribed the following exchange between our hero and Rep. John D. Dingell, also of Michigan. DINGELL: There are places in the world at the present time where we are having to artificially propagate oysters and clams. HOFFMAN: You mean the oysters I buy are not nature's oysters? DINGELL: They may or may not be natural. The simple fact of the matter is that female oysters through their living habits cast out large amounts of seed and the male oysters cast out large amounts of fertilization ... HOFFMAN: Wait a minute! I do not want to go into that. There are many teenagers who read The Congressional Record. | |
| Kirkland, Illinois, law forbids bees to fly over the village or through any of its streets. | |
| Pittsburgh driver's test (2) A traffic light at an intersection changes from yellow to red, you should (a) stop immediately. (b) proceed slowly through the intersection. (c) blow the horn. (d) floor it. The correct answer is (d). If you said (c), you were almost right, so give yourself a half point. | |
| Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide. -- Henry David Thoreau | |
| Faith goes out through the window when beauty comes in at the door. | |
| God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through. -- Paul Valery | |
| ...He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating. -- Umberto Eco, "The Name of the Rose" | |
| It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" | |
| It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being. -- Thomas Carlyle | |
| There is no comfort without pain; thus we define salvation through suffering. -- Cato | |
| You can't run away forever, But there's nothing wrong with getting a good head start. -- Jim Steinman, "Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through" | |
| What you end up with, after running an operating system concept through these many marketing coffee filters, is something not unlike plain hot water. -- Matt Welsh | |
| Why use Windows when you can have air conditioning? Why use Windows, when you can leave through the door? -- Konrad Blum | |
| <Myxie> I know. Unless htere is a cookie monster somewhere between us tat muches the amil. <Myxie> amil/mail <Myxie> muches/munches tat/that htere/there <HippieGuy> heheh <HippieGuy> problems? :) * Myxie needs an ircii addon that pipes teh command line through ispell :) -- Seen on #Debian | |
| You will not censor me through bug terrorism. -- James Troup | |
| But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company. Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again. This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact the last year any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases. -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?" | |
| "Every morning, I get up and look through the 'Forbes' list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work" -- Robert Orben | |
| Exxon's 'Universe of Energy' tends to the peculiar rather than the humorous ... After [an incomprehensible film montage about wind and sun and rain and strip mines and] two or three minutes of mechanical confusion, the seats locomote through a short tunnel filled with clock-work dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are depicted without accuracy and too close to your face. "One of the few real novelties at Epcot is the use of smell to aggravate illusions. Of course, no one knows what dinosaurs smelled like, but Exxon has decided they smelled bad. "At the other end of Dino Ditch ... there's a final, very addled message about facing challengehood tomorrow-wise. I dozed off during this, but the import seems to be that dinosaurs don't have anything to do with energy policy and neither do you." -- P.J. O'Rourke, "Holidays in Hell" | |
| I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. -- Woody Allen | |
| One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring that they be installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips. Let's say your congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding study on how the French government handles diseases transmitted by sherbet. Just when he got to the plane, his mandatory air bag, strapped around his waist, would inflate -- FWWAAAAAAPPPP -- thus rendering him too large to fit through the plane door. It could also be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman proposed a law. ("Mr. Speaker, people ask me, why should October be designated as Cuticle Inspection Month? And I answer that FWWAAAAAAPPPP.") This would save millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public would violently support a law requiring airbags on congressmen. The problem is that your potential market is very small: there are only around 500 members of Congress, and some of them, such as House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil, are already too large to fit on normal aircraft. -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants" | |
| Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer. | |
| "Seven years and six months!" Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. "An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you'd asked MY advice, I'd have said 'Leave off at seven' -- but it's too late now." "I never ask advice about growing," Alice said indignantly. "Too proud?" the other enquired. Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. "I mean," she said, "that one can't help growing older." "ONE can't, perhaps," said Humpty Dumpty; "but TWO can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking-Glass" | |
| The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom. | |
| What they say: What they mean: New Different colors from previous version. All New Not compatible with previous version. Exclusive Nobody else has documentation. Unmatched Almost as good as the competition. Design Simplicity The company wouldn't give us any money. Fool-proof Operation All parameters are hard-coded. Advanced Design Nobody really understands it. Here At Last Didn't get it done on time. Field Tested We don't have any simulators. Years of Development Finally got one to work. Unprecedented Performance Nothing ever ran this slow before. Revolutionary Disk drives go 'round and 'round. Futuristic Only runs on a next generation supercomputer. No Maintenance Impossible to fix. Performance Proven Worked through Beta test. Meets Tough Quality Standards It compiles without errors. Satisfaction Guaranteed We'll send you another pack if it fails. Stock Item We shipped it before and can do it again. | |
| : I've heard that there is a shell (bourne or csh) to perl filter, does : anyone know of this or where I can get it? Yeah, you filter it through Tom Christiansen. :-) -- Larry Wall | |
| "...this does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head." Larry Wall in <1992Aug6.221512.5963@netlabs.com> | |
| They can always run stderr through uniq. :-) -- Larry Wall in <199704012331.PAA16535@wall.org> | |
| I'm serious about thinking through all the possibilities before we settle on anything. All things have the advantages of their disadvantages, and vice versa. -- Larry Wall in <199709032332.QAA21669@wall.org> | |
| Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity. :-) -- Larry Wall in <199710161537.IAA07828@wall.org> | |
| A career is great, but you can't run your fingers through its hair. | |
| Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. -- Jerome K. Jerome | |
| Love is what you've been through with somebody. -- James Thurber | |
| ... My pants just went on a wild rampage through a Long Island Bowling Alley!! | |
| Paralysis through analysis. | |
| 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" | |
