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Christmas
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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

Jim, it's Grace at the bank.  I checked your Christmas Club account.
You don't have five-hundred dollars.  You have fifty.  Sorry, computer foul-up!
                -- "The Rockford Files"
I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.  I
will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.  The Spirits of all
Three shall strive within me.  I will not shut out the lessons that they
teach.  Oh, tell me that I may sponge away the writing on this stone!
                -- Charles Dickens
Mind!  I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is
particularly dead about a door-nail.  I might have been inclined, myself,
to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.
But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands
shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for.  You will therefore permit
me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
                -- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
Stop!  There was first a game of blindman's buff.  Of course there was.
And I no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he had eyes
in his boots.  My opinion is, that it was a done thing between him and
Scrooge's nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it.  The
way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage
on the credulity of human nature.
What did Mickey Mouse get for Christmas?

A Dan Quayle watch.

-- heard from a Mike Dukakis field worker
Nobody takes a bribe.  Of course at Christmas if you happen to hold out
your hat and somebody happens to put a little something in it, well, that's
different.
                -- New York City Police Commissioner (Ret.) William P.
                   O'Brien, instructions to the force.
United Nations, New York, December 25.  The peace and joy of the Christmas
season was marred by a proclamation of a general strike of all the military
forces of the world.  Panic reigns in the hearts of all the patriots of
every persuasion.  Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all-time
low over the world.
                -- Isaac Asimov
Christmas:
        A day set apart by some as a time for turkey, presents, cranberry
        salads, family get-togethers; for others, noted as having the best
        response time of the entire year.
paycheck:
        The weekly $5.27 that remains after deductions for federal
        withholding, state withholding, city withholding, FICA,
        medical/dental, long-term disability, unemployment insurance,
        Christmas Club, and payroll savings plan contributions.
Well, I think we should get some bricks and some bats, and show him
the *true* meaning of Christmas!'
                -- Bernice, "Designing Women", 12/2/91.
        Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each
other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around
the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors d'oeuvres.

        Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes
to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your
Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "I Gotta Be Me" around the upright
piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres.

        Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with
inanimate objects, singing "I can't get no satisfaction," gulping down
other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and
placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when
the little hammers strike.

        Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over
their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning
Christmas tree.  The piano is missing.

        You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless
you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level
4.  The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog.
FORTUNE'S FAVORITE RECIPES: #8
        Christmas Rum Cake

1 or 2 quarts rum                1 tbsp. baking powder
1 cup butter                        1 tsp. soda
1 tsp. sugar                        1 tbsp. lemon juice
2 large eggs                        2 cups brown sugar
2 cups dried assorted fruit        3 cups chopped English walnuts

Before you start, sample the rum to check for quality.  Good, isn't it?  Now
select a large mixing bowl, measuring cup, etc.  Check the rum again.  It
must be just right.  Be sure the rum is of the highest quality.  Pour one cup
of rum into a glass and drink it as fast as you can.  Repeat. With an electric
mixer, beat one cup butter in a large fluffy bowl.  Add 1 seaspoon of tugar
and beat again.  Meanwhile, make sure the rum teh absolutely highest quality.
Sample another cup.  Open second quart as necessary.  Add 2 orge laggs, 2 cups
of fried druit and beat untill high.  If the fried druit gets stuck in the
beaters, just pry it loose with a screwdriver.  Sample the rum again, checking
for toncisticity.  Next sift 3 cups of baking powder, a pinch of rum, a
seaspoon of toda and a cup of pepper or salt (it really doesn't matter).
Sample some more.  Sift 912 pint of lemon juice.  Fold in schopped butter and
strained chups.  Add bablespoon of brown gugar, or whatever color you have.
Mix mell.  Grease oven and turn cake pan to 350 gredees and rake until
poothtick comes out crean.
Q:        Why is Christmas just like a day at the office?
A:        You do all of the work and the fat guy in the suit
        gets all the credit.
You can always tell the Christmas season is here when you start getting
incredibly dense, tinfoil-and-ribbon- wrapped lumps in the mail. Fruitcakes
make ideal gifts because the Postal Service has been unable to find a way to
damage them.  They last forever, largely because nobody ever eats them.  In
fact, many smart people save the fruitcakes they receive and send them back
to the original givers the next year; some fruitcakes have been passed back
and forth for hundreds of years.

The easiest way to make a fruitcake is to buy a darkish cake, then pound
some old, hard fruit into it with a mallet.  Be sure to wear safety glasses.
                -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"
And I heard Jeff exclaim,
As they strolled out of sight,
"Merry Christmas to all --
You take credit cards, right?"
                -- "Outsiders" comic
Christmas time is here, by Golly;        Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens;
Disapproval would be folly;                Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens;
Deck the halls with hunks of holly;        Even though the prospect sickens,
Fill the cup and don't say when...        Brother, here we go again.

On Christmas day, you can't get sore;        Relations sparing no expense'll,
Your fellow man you must adore;                Send some useless old utensil,
There's time to rob him all the more,        Or a matching pen and pencil,
The other three hundred and sixty-four!        Just the thing I need... how nice.

It doesn't matter how sincere                Hark The Herald-Tribune sings,
It is, nor how heartfelt the spirit;        Advertising wondrous things.
Sentiment will not endear it;                God Rest Ye Merry Merchants,
What's important is... the price.        May you make the Yuletide pay.
                                        Angels We Have Heard On High,
Let the raucous sleighbells jingle;        Tell us to go out and buy.
Hail our dear old friend, Kris Kringle,        Sooooo...
Driving his reindeer across the sky,
Don't stand underneath when they fly by!
                -- Tom Lehrer
Some of you ... may have decided that, this year, you're going to celebrate
it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing
cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on "The Waltons".
Well, you can forget it.  If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt,
the economy would collapse overnight.  The government would have to
intervene: it would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving,
which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls
and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force
jets, killing and maiming thousands.  So, for the good of the nation, you
should go along with the Holiday Program.  This means you should get a large
sum of money and go to a mall.
                -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
The basic idea behind malls is that they are more convenient than cities.
Cities contain streets, which are dangerous and crowded and difficult to
park in.  Malls, on the other hand, have parking lots, which are also
dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in, but -- here is the big
difference -- in mall parking lots, THERE ARE NO RULES.  You're allowed to
do anything.  You can drive as fast as you want in any direction you want.
I was once driving in a mall parking lot when my car was struck by a pickup
truck being driven backward by a squat man with a tattoo that said "Charlie"
on his forearm, who got out and explained to me, in great detail, why the
accident was my fault, his reasoning being that he was violent and muscular,
whereas I was neither.  This kind of reasoning is legally valid in mall
parking lots.
                -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
Brief History Of Linux (#19)
Boy meets operating system

The young Linus Torvalds might have been just another CompSci student if
it wasn't for his experiences in the Univ. of Helsinki's Fall 1990 Unix &
C course. During one class, the professor experienced difficulty getting
Minix to work properly on a Sun box. "Who the heck designed this thing?"
the angry prof asked, and somebody responded, "Andrew Tanenbaum".

The name of the Unix & C professor has already escaped from Linus, but the
words he spoke next remain forever etched in his grey matter:
"Tanenbaum... ah, yes, that Amsterdam weenie who thinks microkernels are
the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, they're not. I would just
love to see somebody create their own superior Unix-like 32-bit operating
system using a monolithic kernel just to show Tanenbaum up!"

His professor's outburst inspired Linus to order a new IBM PC so he could
hack Minix. You can probably guess what happened next. Inspired by his
professor's words, Linus Torvalds hacks together his own superior
Unix-like 32-but operating system using a monolithic kernel just to show
Mr. Christmas Tree up.
> around line mm/vmscan.c:487 that says:

Yeah, yeah, it's 7PM Christmas Eve over there, and you're in the middle of
your Christmas dinner. You might feel that it's unreasonable of me to ask
you to test out my latest crazy idea.

How selfish of you.

Get back there in front of the computer NOW. Christmas can wait.

                Linus "the Grinch" Torvalds
> I can just imagine Xmas at the Torvalds residence, with their annual
> tradition of having the kids scream... But dad, other kids have the l
> lights strung around the trees, not the computer....

I don't think you get the full picture. I suspect what gets strung up on the
trees at Christmas if Linus does too much hacking is ... Linus

        - Alan Cox
A little kid went up to Santa and asked him, "Santa, you know when I'm bad
right?"  And Santa says, "Yes, I do."  The little kid then asks, "And you
know when I'm sleeping?" To which Santa replies, "Every minute." So the
little kid then says, "Well, if you know when I'm bad and when I'm good,
then how come you don't know what I want for Christmas?"
                        -- Gifts for Children --

This is easy.  You never have to figure out what to get for children,
because they will tell you exactly what they want.  They spend months and
months researching these kinds of things by watching Saturday- morning
cartoon-show advertisements.  Make sure you get your children exactly what
they ask for, even if you disapprove of their choices.  If your child thinks
he wants Murderous Bob, the Doll with the Face You Can Rip Right Off, you'd
better get it.  You may be worried that it might help to encourage your
child's antisocial tendencies, but believe me, you have not seen antisocial
tendencies until you've seen a child who is convinced that he or she did not
get the right gift.
                -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
Give your child mental blocks for Christmas.
My boy is a mean kid.  I came home the other day and saw him taping worms
to the sidewalk, he sits there and watches the birds get hernias.  Well,
only last Christmas I gave him a B-B gun and he gave me a sweatshirt with
a bulls-eye on the back.

I told my kids, "Someday, you'll have kids of your own."  One of them
said, "So will you."
                -- Rodney Dangerfield
Why not have an old-fashioned Christmas for your family this year? Just
picture the scene in your living room on Christmas morning as your children
open their old-fashioned presents.

Your 11-year-old son: "What the heck is this?"

You:        "A spinning top!  You spin it around, and then eventually it falls
down.  What fun!  Ha, ha!"

Son:        "Is this a joke?  Jason Thompson's parents got him a computer with
two disk drives and 128 kilobytes of random-access memory, and I get this
cretin TOP?"

Your 8-year-old daughter: "You think that's bad?  Look at this."

You:        "It's figgy pudding!  What a treat!"

Daughter: "It looks like goat barf."
                -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"
<dhd> is there a special christmas pack for quake
<dhd> where you get to be like the santa robot on futurama?
<dunham> dhd: that would be a rather unbalanced game...
<Knghtbrd> dunham: that's the idea.  ;>
        Home centers are designed for the do-it-yourselfer who's willing to
pay higher prices for the convenience of being able to shop for lumber,
hardware, and toasters all in one location.  Notice I say "shop for," as
opposed to "obtain." This is the major drawback of home centers: they are
always out of everything except artificial Christmas trees.  The home center
employees have no time to reorder merchandise because they are too busy
applying little price stickers to every object -- every board, washer, nail
and screw -- in the entire store ...

        Let's say a piece in your toilet tank breaks, so you remove the
broken part, take it to the home center, and ask an employee if he has a
replacement.  The employee, who has never is his life even seen the inside
of a toilet tank, will peer at the broken part in very much the same way
that a member of a primitive Amazon jungle tribe would look at an electronic
calculator, and then say, "We're expecting a shipment of these sometime
around the middle of next week."
                -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
"There is no Father Christmas.  It's just a marketing ploy to make low income
parents' lives a misery."
"... I want you to picture the trusting face of a child, streaked with tears
because of what you just said."
"I want you to picture the face of its mother, because one week's dole won't
pay for one Master of the Universe Battlecruiser!"
                -- Filthy Rich and Catflap
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2024
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