Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
A hard-luck actor who appeared in one coloossal disaster after another finally got a break, a broken leg to be exact. Someone pointed out that it's the first time the poor fellow's been in the same cast for more than a week. | |
After a few boring years, socially meaningful rock 'n' roll died out. It was replaced by disco, which offers no guidance to any form of life more advanced than the lichen family. -- Dave Barry, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly Do" | |
An artist should be fit for the best society and keep out of it. | |
Hollywood is where if you don't have happiness you send out for it. -- Rex Reed | |
I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk. -- Sidney Greenstreet, "The Maltese Falcon" | |
I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya. -- Stravinsky | |
I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. -- Stephen King | |
I saw Lassie. It took me four shows to figure out why the hairy kid never spoke. I mean, he could roll over and all that, but did that deserve a series? | |
I stick my neck out for nobody. -- Humphrey Bogart, "Casablanca" | |
I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can't help it. It's the truth. -- Charlie Chaplin | |
I'm not a real movie star -- I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago. -- Will Rogers | |
If you think the pen is mightier than the sword, the next time someone pulls out a sword I'd like to see you get up there with your Bic. | |
In Hollywood, if you don't have happiness, you send out for it. -- Rex Reed | |
It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was just a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning, they shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid general applause from all the wits, who believe that it is a joke. | |
It proves what they say, give the public what they want to see and they'll come out for it. -- Red Skelton, surveying the funeral of Hollywood mogul Harry Cohn | |
Leslie West heads for the sticks, to Providence, Rhode Island and tries to hide behind a beard. No good. There are still too many people and too many stares, always taunting, always smirking. He moves to the outskirts of town. He finds a place to live -- huge mansion, dirt cheap, caretaker included. He plugs in his guitar and plays as loud as he wants, day and night, and there's no one to laugh or boo or even look bored. Nobody's cut the grass in months. What's happened to that caretaker? What neighborhood people there are start to talk, and what kids there are start to get curious. A 13 year-old blond with an angelic face misses supper. Before the summer's end, four more teenagers have disappeared. The senior class president, Barnard-bound come autumn, tells Mom she's going out to a movie one night and stays out. The town's up in arms, but just before the police take action, the kids turn up. They've found a purpose. They go home for their stuff and tell the folks not to worry but they'll be going now. They're in a band. -- Ira Kaplan | |
Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends. | |
Might as well be frank, monsieur. It would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca and the Germans have outlawed miracles. -- Casablanca | |
My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it. -- The Dragon to Grendel, in John Gardner's "Grendel" | |
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 | |
Some performers on television appear to be horrible people, but when you finally get to know them in person, they turn out to be even worse. -- Avery | |
The Great Movie Posters: HOT STEEL BETWEEN THEIR LEGS! -- The Cycle Savages (1969) The Hand that Rocks the Cradle... Has no Flesh on It! -- Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) TWO GREAT BLOOD HORRORS TO RIP OUT YOUR GUTS! -- I Eat Your Skin & I Drink Your Blood (1971 double-bill) They Went In People and Came Out Hamburger! -- The Corpse Grinders (1971) | |
The Great Movie Posters: They hungered for her treasure! And died for her pleasure! SEE Man-Fish Battle Shark-Man-Killer! -- The Golden Mistress (1954) See Jane Russell in 3-D; She'll Knock Both Your Eyes Out! -- The French Line (1954) See Jane Russell Shake Her Tamborines... and Drive Cornel WILDE! -- Hot Blood (1956) | |
The Worst Musical Trio There are few bad musicians who have a chance to give a recital at a famous concert hall while still learning the rudiments of their instrument. This happened about thirty years ago to the son of a Rumanian gentleman who was owed a personal favour by Georges Enesco, the celebrated violinist. Enesco agreed to give lessons to the son who was quite unhampered by great musical talent. Three years later the boy's father insisted that he give a public concert. "His aunt said that nobody plays the violin better than he does. A cousin heard him the other day and screamed with enthusiasm." Although Enesco feared the consequences, he arranged a recital at the Salle Gaveau in Paris. However, nobody bought a ticket since the soloist was unknown. "Then you must accompany him on the piano," said the boy's father, "and it will be a sell out." Reluctantly, Enesco agreed and it was. On the night an excited audience gathered. Before the concert began Enesco became nervous and asked for someone to turn his pages. In the audience was Alfred Cortot, the brilliant pianist, who volunteered and made his way to the stage. The soloist was of uniformly low standard and next morning the music critic of Le Figaro wrote: "There was a strange concert at the Salle Gaveau last night. The man whom we adore when he plays the violin played the piano. Another whom we adore when he plays the piano turned the pages. But the man who should have turned the pages played the violin." -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
There are two jazz musicians who are great buddies. They hang out and play together for years, virtually inseparable. Unfortunately, one of them is struck by a truck and killed. About a week later his friend wakes up in the middle of the night with a start because he can feel a presence in the room. He calls out, "Who's there? Who's there? What's going on?" "It's me -- Bob," replies a faraway voice. Excitedly he sits up in bed. "Bob! Bob! Is that you? Where are you?" "Well," says the voice, "I'm in heaven now." "Heaven! You're in heaven! That's wonderful! What's it like?" "It's great, man. I gotta tell you, I'm jamming up here every day. I'm playing with Bird, and 'Trane, and Count Basie drops in all the time! Man it is smokin'!" "Oh, wow!" says his friend. "That sounds fantastic, tell me more, tell me more!" "Let me put it this way," continues the voice. "There's good news and bad news. The good news is that these guys are in top form. I mean I have *never* heard them sound better. They are *wailing* up here." "The bad news is that God has this girlfriend that sings..." | |
There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out. The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well. It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully. -- Ellen Goodman | |
We don't like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out. -- Decca Recording Company, turning down the Beatles, 1962 | |
What did you bring that book I didn't want to be read to out of about Down Under up for? | |
What no spouse of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window. | |
Would it help if I got out and pushed? -- Princess Leia Organa | |
A little dog goes into a saloon in the Wild West, and beckons to the bartender. "Hey, bartender, gimme a whiskey." The bartender ignores him. "Hey bartender, gimme a whiskey!" Still ignored. "HEY BARMAN!! GIMME A WHISKEY!!" The bartender takes out his six-shooter and shoots the dog in the leg, and the dog runs out the saloon, howling in pain. Three years later, the wee dog appears again, wearing boots, jeans, chaps, a Stetson, gun belt, and guns. He ambles slowly into the saloon, goes up to the bar, leans over it, and says to the bartender, "I'm here t'git the man that shot muh paw." | |
If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation, does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions. You must make it clear that you will not attend, but you do not have to let fly at cats. The writer of the letter asked a civil question; attack cats, then, only if you can do so with good humor, good taste, and in such a way that your answer will be courteous as well as responsive. Since you are out of sympathy with cats, you may quite properly give this as a reason for not appearing at the dedication ceremonies of a cat hospital. But bear in mind that your opinion of cats was not sought, only your services as a speaker. Try to keep things straight. -- Strunk and White, "The Elements of Style" | |
> : Any porters out there should feel happier knowing that DEC is shipping > : me an AlphaPC that I intend to try getting linux running on: this will > : definitely help flush out some of the most flagrant unportable stuff. > : The Alpha is much more different from the i386 than the 68k stuff is, so > : it's likely to get most of the stuff fixed. > > It's posts like this that almost convince us non-believers that there > really is a god. (A follow-up by alovell@kerberos.demon.co.uk, Anthony Lovell, to Linus's remarks about porting) | |
+#if defined(__alpha__) && defined(CONFIG_PCI) + /* + * The meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Plus + * this makes the year come out right. + */ + year -= 42; +#endif (From the patch for 1.3.2: (kernel/time.c), submitted by Marcus Meissner) | |
Now I know someone out there is going to claim, "Well then, UNIX is intuitive, because you only need to learn 5000 commands, and then everything else follows from that! Har har har!" (Andy Bates in comp.os.linux.misc, on "intuitive interfaces", slightly defending Macs.) | |
Once upon a time there was a DOS user who saw Unix, and saw that it was good. After typing cp on his DOS machine at home, he downloaded GNU's unix tools ported to DOS and installed them. He rm'd, cp'd, and mv'd happily for many days, and upon finding elvis, he vi'd and was happy. After a long day at work (on a Unix box) he came home, started editing a file, and couldn't figure out why he couldn't suspend vi (w/ ctrl-z) to do a compile. (By ewt@tipper.oit.unc.edu (Erik Troan) | |
"...very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two noted exceptions: being struck by lightning, or worse, your *computer* being struck by lightning." (By Matt Welsh) | |
What's this script do? unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; gasp ; yes ; umount ; sleep Hint for the answer: not everything is computer-oriented. Sometimes you're in a sleeping bag, camping out. (Contributed by Frans van der Zande.) | |
nesting roaches shorted out the ether cable | |
You're out of memory | |
The electrician didn't know what the yellow cable was so he yanked the ethernet out. | |
The rolling stones concert down the road caused a brown out | |
Root nameservers are out of sync | |
Flourescent lights are generating negative ions. If turning them off doesn't work, take them out and put tin foil on the ends. | |
The MGs ran out of gas. | |
The lines are all busy (busied out, that is -- why let them in to begin with?). | |
Unfortunately we have run out of bits/bytes/whatever. Don't worry, the next supply will be coming next week. | |
We've run out of licenses | |
The Usenet news is out of date | |
We ran out of dial tone and we're and waiting for the phone company to deliver another bottle. | |
The Token fell out of the ring. Call us when you find it. | |
The data on your hard drive is out of balance. | |
The POP server is out of Coke | |
The ATM board has run out of 10 pound notes. We are having a whip round to refill it, care to contribute ? | |
Your parity check is overdrawn and you're out of cache. | |
Out of cards on drive D: | |
We're out of slots on the server | |
Mouse has out-of-cheese-error | |
Trojan horse ran out of hay | |
As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" | |
Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar | |
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. -- William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost" | |
He hath eaten me out of house and home. -- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV" | |
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. -- J.R.R. Tolkien | |
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" | |
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 | |
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. -- Mark Twain | |
Let him choose out of my files, his projects to accomplish. -- Shakespeare, "Coriolanus" | |
"Not Hercules could have knock'd out his brains, for he had none." -- Shakespeare | |
So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street pops its head into the shop. "What! no soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots. -- Samuel Foote | |
The fashion wears out more apparel than the man. -- William Shakespeare, "Much Ado About Nothing" | |
The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. -- Mark Twain | |
The Priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go. A voice, sweetened and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. A sleek brown head, a seal's, far out on the water, round. Usurper. -- James Joyce, "Ulysses" | |
There is always one thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out. -- Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" | |
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stay there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. -- Mark Twain | |
Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive women. There, that's it: 24 words. But the guy who wrote the book took *thousands* of words to say it. Or consider "The Brothers Karamazov", by the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's about these two brothers who kill their father. Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It's impossible to tell because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talk as much as the Karamazovs did, I don't see how they found time to become a major world power. I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me." Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words: * "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you. * "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy. -- Dave Barry | |
What no spouse of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window. | |
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar" | |
You see, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet" | |
A morgue is a morgue is a morgue. They can paint the walls with aggressively cheerful primary colors and splashy bold graphics, but it's still a holding place for the dead until they can be parted out to organ banks. Not that I would have cared normally but my viewpoint was skewed. The relentless pleasance of the room I sat in seemed only grotesque. -- Pat Cadigan, "Mindplayers" | |
"What's this? Trix? Aunt! Trix? You? You're after the prize! What is it?" He picked up the box and studied the back. "A glow-in-the-dark squid! Have you got it out of there yet?" He tilted the box, angling the little colored balls of cereal so as to see the bottom, and nearly spilling them onto the table top. "Here it is!" He hauled out a little cream-colored, glitter-sprinkled squid, three-inches long and made out of rubbery plastic. -- James P. Blaylock, "The Last Coin" | |
"Good afternoon, madam. How may I help you?" "Good afternoon. I'd like a FrintArms HandCannon, please." "A--? Oh, now, that's an awfully big gun for such a lovely lady. I mean, not everybody thinks ladies should carry guns at all, though I say they have a right to. But I think... I might... Let's have a look down here. I might have just the thing for you. Yes, here we are! Look at that, isn't it neat? Now that is a FrintArms product as well, but it's what's called a laser -- a light-pistol some people call them. Very small, as you see; fits easily into a pocket or bag; won't spoil the line of a jacket; and you won't feel you're lugging half a tonne of iron around with you. We do a range of matching accessories, including -- if I may say so -- a rather saucy garter holster. Wish I got to do the fitting for that! Ha -- just my little joke. And there's *even*... here we are -- this special presentation pack: gun, charged battery, charging unit, beautiful glider-hide shoulder holster with adjustable fitting and contrast stitching, and a discount on your next battery. Full instructions, of course, and a voucher for free lessons at your local gun club or range. Or there's the *special* presentation pack; it has all the other one's got but with *two* charged batteries and a night-sight, too. Here, feel that -- don't worry, it's a dummy battery -- isn't it neat? Feel how light it is? Smooth, see? No bits to stick out and catch on your clothes, *and* beautifully balanced. And of course the beauty of a laser is, there's no recoil. Because it's shooting light, you see? Beautiful gun, beautiful gun; my wife has one. Really. That's not a line, she really has. Now, I can do you that one -- with a battery and a free charge -- for ninety-five; or the presentation pack on a special offer for one-nineteen; or this, the special presentation pack, for one-forty-nine." "I'll take the special." "Sound choice, madam, *sound* choice. Now, do--?" "And a HandCannon, with the eighty-mill silencer, five GP clips, three six-five AP/wire-fl'echettes clips, two bipropellant HE clips, and a Special Projectile Pack if you have one -- the one with the embedding rounds, not the signalers. I assume the night-sight on this toy is compatible?" "Aah... yes, And how does madam wish to pay?" She slapped her credit card on the counter. "Eventually." -- Iain M. Banks, "Against a Dark Background" | |
A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, "The medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam's rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat." The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that the Garden and the world were created. So God must have been an architect." The computer scientist, who'd listened carefully to all of this, then commented, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?" | |
A man from AI walked across the mountains to SAIL to see the Master, Knuth. When he arrived, the Master was nowhere to be found. "Where is the wise one named Knuth?" he asked a passing student. "Ah," said the student, "you have not heard. He has gone on a pilgrimage across the mountains to the temple of AI to seek out new disciples." Hearing this, the man was Enlightened. | |
A novice asked the master: "In the east there is a great tree-structure that men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice-presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying 'Go, Hence!' or 'Go, Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity exist?" The master replies: "You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?" -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
A programmer from a very large computer company went to a software conference and then returned to report to his manager, saying: "What sort of programmers work for other companies? They behaved badly and were unconcerned with appearances. Their hair was long and unkempt and their clothes were wrinkled and old. They crashed out hospitality suites and they made rude noises during my presentation." The manager said: "I should have never sent you to the conference. Those programmers live beyond the physical world. They consider life absurd, an accidental coincidence. They come and go without knowing limitations. Without a care, they live only for their programs. Why should they bother with social conventions?" "They are alive within the Tao." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensible answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place. -- IEEE Grid newsmagazine | |
A sheet of paper crossed my desk the other day and as I read it, realization of a basic truth came over me. So simple! So obvious we couldn't see it. John Knivlen, Chairman of Polamar Repeater Club, an amateur radio group, had discovered how IC circuits work. He says that smoke is the thing that makes ICs work because every time you let the smoke out of an IC circuit, it stops working. He claims to have verified this with thorough testing. I was flabbergasted! Of course! Smoke makes all things electrical work. Remember the last time smoke escaped from your Lucas voltage regulator Didn't it quit working? I sat and smiled like an idiot as more of the truth dawned. It's the wiring harness that carries the smoke from one device to another in your Mini, MG or Jag. And when the harness springs a leak, it lets the smoke out of everything at once, and then nothing works. The starter motor requires large quantities of smoke to operate properly, and that's why the wire going to it is so large. Feeling very smug, I continued to expand my hypothesis. Why are Lucas electronics more likely to leak than say Bosch? Hmmm... Aha!!! Lucas is British, and all things British leak! British convertible tops leak water, British engines leak oil, British displacer units leak hydrostatic fluid, and I might add Brititsh tires leak air, and the British defense unit leaks secrets... so naturally British electronics leak smoke. -- Jack Banton, PCC Automotive Electrical School [Ummm ... IC circuits? Integrated circuit circuits?] | |
=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ======================== CAR and CDR now return extra values. The function CAR now returns two values. Since it has to go to the trouble to figure out if the object is carcdr-able anyway, we figured you might as well get both halves at once. For example, the following code shows how to destructure a cons (SOME-CONS) into its two slots (THE-CAR and THE-CDR): (MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND (THE-CAR THE-CDR) (CAR SOME-CONS) ...) For symmetry with CAR, CDR returns a second value which is the CAR of the object. In a related change, the functions MAKE-ARRAY and CONS have been fixed so they don't allocate any storage except on the stack. This should hopefully help people who don't like using the garbage collector because it cold boots the machine so often. | |
=== ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE ======================== The garbage collector now works. In addition a new, experimental garbage collection algorithm has been installed. With SI:%DSK-GC-QLX-BITS set to 17, (NOT the default) the old garbage collection algorithm remains in force; when virtual storage is filled, the machine cold boots itself. With SI:%DSK-GC- QLX-BITS set to 23, the new garbage collector is enabled. Unlike most garbage collectors, the new gc starts its mark phase from the mind of the user, rather than from the obarray. This allows the garbage collection of significantly more Qs. As the garbage collector runs, it may ask you something like "Do you remember what SI:RDTBL-TRANS does?", and if you can't give a reasonable answer in thirty seconds, the symbol becomes a candidate for GCing. The variable SI:%GC-QLX-LUSER-TM governs how long the GC waits before timing out the user. | |
AmigaDOS Beer: The company has gone out of business, but their recipe has been picked up by some weird German company, so now this beer will be an import. This beer never really sold very well because the original manufacturer didn't understand marketing. Like Unix Beer, AmigaDOS Beer fans are an extremely loyal and loud group. It originally came in a 16-oz. can, but now comes in 32-oz. cans too. When this can was originally introduced, it appeared flashy and colorful, but the design hasn't changed much over the years, so it appears dated now. Critics of this beer claim that it is only meant for watching TV anyway. | |
... Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.) | |
Bell Labs Unix -- Reach out and grep someone. | |
Comparing software engineering to classical engineering assumes that software has the ability to wear out. Software typically behaves, or it does not. It either works, or it does not. Software generally does not degrade, abrade, stretch, twist, or ablate. To treat it as a physical entity, therefore, is misapplication of our engineering skills. Classical engineering deals with the characteristics of hardware; software engineering should deal with the characteristics of *software*, and not with hardware or management. -- Dan Klein | |
Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don't add up. | |
Couldn't we jury-rig the cat to act as an audio switch, and have it yell at people to save their core images before logging them out? I'm sure the cattle prod would be effective in this regard. In any case, a traverse mounted iguana, while more perverted, gives better traction, not to mention being easier to stake. | |
Dear Emily: I'm having a serious disagreement with somebody on the net. I tried complaints to his sysadmin, organizing mail campaigns, called for his removal from the net and phoning his employer to get him fired. Everybody laughed at me. What can I do? -- A Concerned Citizen Dear Concerned: Go to the daily papers. Most modern reporters are top-notch computer experts who will understand the net, and your problems, perfectly. They will print careful, reasoned stories without any errors at all, and surely represent the situation properly to the public. The public will also all act wisely, as they are also fully cognizant of the subtle nature of net society. Papers never sensationalize or distort, so be sure to point out things like racism and sexism wherever they might exist. Be sure as well that they understand that all things on the net, particularly insults, are meant literally. Link what transpires on the net to the causes of the Holocaust, if possible. If regular papers won't take the story, go to a tabloid paper -- they are always interested in good stories. | |
DOS Air: All the passengers go out onto the runway, grab hold of the plane, push it until it gets in the air, hop on, jump off when it hits the ground again. Then they grab the plane again, push it back into the air, hop on, et cetera. | |
Eudaemonic research proceeded with the casual mania peculiar to this part of the world. Nude sunbathing on the back deck was combined with phone calls to Advanced Kinetics in Costa Mesa, American Laser Systems in Goleta, Automation Industries in Danbury, Connecticut, Arenberg Ultrasonics in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and Hewlett Packard in Sunnyvale, California, where Norman Packard's cousin, David, presided as chairman of the board. The trick was to make these calls at noon, in the hope that out-to-lunch executives would return them at their own expense. Eudaemonic Enterprises, for all they knew, might be a fast-growing computer company branching out of the Silicon Valley. Sniffing the possibility of high-volume sales, these executives little suspected that they were talking on the other end of the line to a naked physicist crazed over roulette. -- Thomas Bass, "The Eudaemonic Pie" | |
Fellow programmer, greetings! You are reading a letter which will bring you luck and good fortune. Just mail (or UUCP) ten copies of this letter to ten of your friends. Before you make the copies, send a chip or other bit of hardware, and 100 lines of 'C' code to the first person on the list given at the bottom of this letter. Then delete their name and add yours to the bottom of the list. Don't break the chain! Make the copy within 48 hours. Gerald R. of San Diego failed to send out his ten copies and woke the next morning to find his job description changed to "COBOL programmer." Fred A. of New York sent out his ten copies and within a month had enough hardware and software to build a Cray dedicated to playing Zork. Martha H. of Chicago laughed at this letter and broke the chain. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in her terminal and she now spends her days writing documentation for IBM PC's. Don't break the chain! Send out your ten copies today! For example, if \thinmskip = 3mu, this makes \thickmskip = 6mu. But if you also want to use \skip12 for horizontal glue, whether in math mode or not, the amount of skipping will be in points (e.g., 6pt). The rule is that glue in math mode varies with the size only when it is an \mskip; when moving between an mskip and ordinary skip, the conversion factor 1mu=1pt is always used. The meaning of '\mskip\skip12' and '\baselineskip=\the\thickmskip' should be clear. -- Donald Knuth, TeX 82 -- Comparison with TeX80 | |
Fly Windows NT: All the passengers carry their seats out onto the tarmac, placing the chairs in the outline of a plane. They all sit down, flap their arms and make jet swooshing sounds as if they are flying. | |
fortune: cannot execute. Out of cookies. | |
Garbage In -- Gospel Out. | |
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. | |
Help stamp out Mickey-Mouse computer interfaces -- Menus are for Restaurants! | |
Hug me now, you mad, impetuous fool!! Oh wait... I'm a computer, and you're a person. It would never work out. Never mind. | |
I have travelled the length and breadth of this country, and have talked with the best people in business administration. I can assure you on the highest authority that data processing is a fad and won't last out the year. -- Editor in charge of business books at Prentice-Hall publishers, responding to Karl V. Karlstrom (a junior editor who had recommended a manuscript on the new science of data processing), c. 1957 | |
I've never been canoeing before, but I imagine there must be just a few simple heuristics you have to remember... Yes, don't fall out, and don't hit rocks. | |
If graphics hackers are so smart, why can't they get the bugs out of fresh paint? | |
If the vendors started doing everything right, we would be out of a job. Let's hear it for OSI and X! With those babies in the wings, we can count on being employed until we drop, or get smart and switch to gardening, paper folding, or something. -- C. Philip Wood | |
If you ever want to have a lot of fun, I recommend that you go off and program an imbedded system. The salient characteristic of an imbedded system is that it cannot be allowed to get into a state from which only direct intervention will suffice to remove it. An imbedded system can't permanently trust anything it hears from the outside world. It must sniff around, adapt, consider, sniff around, and adapt again. I'm not talking about ordinary modular programming carefulness here. No. Programming an imbedded system calls for undiluted raging maniacal paranoia. For example, our ethernet front ends need to know what network number they are on so that they can address and route PUPs properly. How do you find out what your network number is? Easy, you ask a gateway. Gateways are required by definition to know their correct network numbers. Once you've got your network number, you start using it and before you can blink you've got it wired into fifteen different sockets spread all over creation. Now what happens when the panic-stricken operator realizes he was running the wrong version of the gateway which was giving out the wrong network number? Never supposed to happen. Tough. Supposing that your software discovers that the gateway is now giving out a different network number than before, what's it supposed to do about it? This is not discussed in the protocol document. Never supposed to happen. Tough. I think you get my drift. | |
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 | |
In a surprise raid last night, federal agents ransacked a house in search of a rebel computer hacker. However, they were unable to complete the arrest because the warrant was made out in the name of Don Provan, while the only person in the house was named don provan. Proving, once again, that Unix is superior to Tops10. | |
In the beginning was the Tao. The Tao gave birth to Space and Time. Therefore, Space and Time are the Yin and Yang of programming. Programmers that do not comprehend the Tao are always running out of time and space for their programs. Programmers that comprehend the Tao always have enough time and space to accomplish their goals. How could it be otherwise? -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
In the future, you're going to get computers as prizes in breakfast cereals. You'll throw them out because your house will be littered with them. | |
It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities. The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they could write the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months, three more than the schedule allowed. The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they could prepare the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating; it would be well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule. Furthermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs for ten months. To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and it was. He was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it added a year to debugging time. -- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" | |
It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp, probably not someone here on campus. -- Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, in Georgia Tech's campus newspaper after the Internet worm. | |
`Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order by staff writers ... The SAG is one of the major products developed via the Information Superhighway, the brain child of Al Gore, US Vice President. The ISHW is being developed with massive govenment funding, since studies show that it already has more than four hundred users, three years before the first prototypes are ready. Asked whether he was worried about the foreign influence in an expensive American Dream, the vice president said, ``Finland? Oh, we've already bought them, but we haven't told anyone yet. They're great at building model airplanes as well. And _I can spell potato.'' House representatives are not mollified, however, wanting to see the terms of the deal first, fearing another Alaska. Rumors about the SAG release have imbalanced the American stock market for weeks. Several major publishing houses reached an all time low in the New York Stock Exchange, while publicly competing for the publishing agreement with Mr. Wirzenius. The negotiations did not work out, tough. ``Not enough dough,'' says the author, although spokesmen at both Prentice-Hall and Playboy, Inc., claim the author was incapable of expressing his wishes in a coherent form during face to face talks, preferring to communicate via e-mail. ``He kept muttering something about jiffies and pegs,'' they say. ... -- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi> [comp.os.linux.announce] | |
Long ago, in a finite state far away, there lived a JOVIAL character named Jack. Jack and his relations were poor. Often their hash table was bare. One day Jack's parent said to him, "Our matrices are sparse. You must go to the market to exchange our RAM for some BASICs." She compiled a linked list of items to retrieve and passed it to him. So Jack set out. But as he was walking along a Hamilton path, he met the traveling salesman. "Whither dost thy flow chart take thou?" prompted the salesman in high-level language. "I'm going to the market to exchange this RAM for some chips and Apples," commented Jack. "I have a much better algorithm. You needn't join a queue there; I will swap your RAM for these magic kernels now." Jack made the trade, then backtracked to his house. But when he told his busy-waiting parent of the deal, she became so angry she started thrashing. "Don't you even have any artificial intelligence? All these kernels together hardly make up one byte," and she popped them out the window... -- Mark Isaak, "Jack and the Beanstack" | |
Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing. -- E. Dijkstra | |
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. | |
Nearly every complex solution to a programming problem that I have looked at carefully has turned out to be wrong. -- Brent Welch | |
Now she speaks rapidly. "Do you know *why* you want to program?" He shakes his head. He hasn't the faintest idea. "For the sheer *joy* of programming!" she cries triumphantly. "The joy of the parent, the artist, the craftsman. "You take a program, born weak and impotent as a dimly-realized solution. You nurture the program and guide it down the right path, building, watching it grow ever stronger. Sometimes you paint with tiny strokes, a keystroke added here, a keystroke changed there." She sweeps her arm in a wide arc. "And other times you savage whole *blocks* of code, ripping out the program's very *essence*, then beginning anew. But always building, creating, filling the program with your own personal stamp, your own quirks and nuances. Watching the program grow stronger, patching it when it crashes, until finally it can stand alone -- proud, powerful, and perfect. This is the programmer's finest hour!" Softly at first, then louder, he hears the strains of a Sousa march. "This ... this is your canvas! your clay! Go forth and create a masterwork!" | |
On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for OSI people. There are lots of phrases. My favorite is `nitwit' -- and the rationale is the Internet philosophy has always been you have extremely bright, non-partisan researchers look at a topic, do world-class research, do several competing implementations, have a bake-off, determine what works best, write it down and make that the standard. The OSI view is entirely opposite. You take written contributions from a much larger community, you put the contributions in a room of committee people with, quite honestly, vast political differences and all with their own political axes to grind, and four years later you get something out, usually without it ever having been implemented once. So the Internet perspective is implement it, make it work well, then write it down, whereas the OSI perspective is to agree on it, write it down, circulate it a lot and now we'll see if anyone can implement it after it's an international standard and every vendor in the world is committed to it. One of those processes is backwards, and I don't think it takes a Lucasian professor of physics at Oxford to figure out which. -- Marshall Rose, "The Pied Piper of OSI" | |
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. -- Charles Babbage | |
One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there. -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984 [It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken Olsen's brain. Ed.] | |
Our documentation manager was showing her 2 year old son around the office. He was introduced to me, at which time he pointed out that we were both holding bags of popcorn. We were both holding bottles of juice. But only *__he* had a lollipop. He asked his mother, "Why doesn't HE have a lollipop?" Her reply: "He can have a lollipop any time he wants to. That's what it means to be a programmer." | |
Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: DC Divide and Conquer DMPK Destroy Memory Protect Key DO Divide and Overflow EMPC Emulate Pocket Calculator EPI Execute Programmer Immediately EROS Erase Read Only Storage EXCE Execute Customer Engineer HCF Halt and Catch Fire IBP Insert Bug and Proceed INSQSW Insert into queue somewhere (for FINO queues [First in never out]) PBC Print and Break Chain PDSK Punch Disk | |
SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out! -- Ken Thompson | |
Seems a computer engineer, a systems analyst, and a programmer were driving down a mountain when the brakes gave out. They screamed down the mountain, gaining speed, but finally managed to grind to a halt, more by luck than anything else, just inches from a thousand foot drop to jagged rocks. They all got out of the car: The computer engineer said, "I think I can fix it." The systems analyst said, "No, no, I think we should take it into town and have a specialist look at it." The programmer said, "OK, but first I think we should get back in and see if it does it again." | |
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... | |
"That's right; the upper-case shift works fine on the screen, but they're not coming out on the damn printer... Hold? Sure, I'll hold." -- e.e. cummings last service call | |
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 LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #14 -- VALGOL VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry. VALGOL commands include REALLY, LIKE, WELL, and Y*KNOW. Variables are assigned with the =LIKE and =TOTALLY operators. Other operators include the "California booleans", AX and NOWAY. Loops are accomplished with the FOR SURE construct. A simple example: LIKE, Y*KNOW(I MEAN)START IF PIZZA =LIKE BITCHEN AND GUY =LIKE TUBULAR AND VALLEY GIRL =LIKE GRODY**MAX(FERSURE)**2 THEN FOR I =LIKE 1 TO OH*MAYBE 100 DO*WAH - (DITTY**2); BARF(I)=TOTALLY GROSS(OUT) SURE LIKE, BAG THIS PROGRAM; REALLY; LIKE TOTALLY(Y*KNOW); IM*SURE GOTO THE MALL VALGOL is also characterized by its unfriendly error messages. For example, when the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter displays the message GAG ME WITH A SPOON! A successful compile may be termed MAXIMALLY AWESOME! | |
The meat is rotten, but the booze is holding out. Computer translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." | |
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out. | |
... there are about 5,000 people who are part of that committee. These guys have a hard time sorting out what day to meet, and whether to eat croissants or doughnuts for breakfast -- let alone how to define how all these complex layers that are going to be agreed upon. -- Craig Burton of Novell, Network World | |
There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. -- Jeremy S. Anderson | |
This "brain-damaged" epithet is getting sorely overworked. When we can speak of someone or something being flawed, impaired, marred, spoiled; batty, bedlamite, bonkers, buggy, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, daft, demented, deranged, loco, lunatic, mad, maniac, mindless, non compos mentis, nuts, Reaganite, screwy, teched, unbalanced, unsound, witless, wrong; senseless, spastic, spasmodic, convulsive; doped, spaced-out, stoned, zonked; {beef, beetle,block,dung,thick}headed, dense, doltish, dull, duncical, numskulled, pinhead; asinine, fatuous, foolish, silly, simple; brute, lumbering, oafish; half-assed, incompetent; backward, retarded, imbecilic, moronic; when we have a whole precisely nuanced vocabulary of intellectual abuse to draw upon, individually and in combination, isn't it a little <fill in the blank> to be limited to a single, now quite trite, adjective? | |
This is where the bloodthirsty license agreement is supposed to go, explaining that Interactive Easyflow is a copyrighted package licensed for use by a single person, and sternly warning you not to pirate copies of it and explaining, in detail, the gory consequences if you do. We know that you are an honest person, and are not going to go around pirating copies of Interactive Easyflow; this is just as well with us since we worked hard to perfect it and selling copies of it is our only method of making anything out of all the hard work. If, on the other hand, you are one of those few people who do go around pirating copies of software you probably aren't going to pay much attention to a license agreement, bloodthirsty or not. Just keep your doors locked and look out for the HavenTree attack shark. -- License Agreement for Interactive Easyflow | |
UNIX Trix For those of you in the reseller business, here is a helpful tip that will save your support staff a few hours of precious time. Before you send your next machine out to an untrained client, change the permissions on /etc/passwd to 666 and make sure there is a copy somewhere on the disk. Now when they forget the root password, you can easily login as an ordinary user and correct the damage. Having a bootable tape (for larger machines) is not a bad idea either. If you need some help, give us a call. -- CommUNIXque 1:1, ASCAR Business Systems | |
We don't claim Interactive EasyFlow is good for anything -- if you think it is, great, but it's up to you to decide. If Interactive EasyFlow doesn't work: tough. If you lose a million because Interactive EasyFlow messes up, it's you that's out the million, not us. If you don't like this disclaimer: tough. We reserve the right to do the absolute minimum provided by law, up to and including nothing. This is basically the same disclaimer that comes with all software packages, but ours is in plain English and theirs is in legalese. We didn't really want to include any disclaimer at all, but our lawyers insisted. We tried to ignore them but they threatened us with the attack shark at which point we relented. -- Haven Tree Software Limited, "Interactive EasyFlow" | |
"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" | |
"We've got a problem, HAL". "What kind of problem, Dave?" "A marketing problem. The Model 9000 isn't going anywhere. We're way short of our sales goals for fiscal 2010." "That can't be, Dave. The HAL Model 9000 is the world's most advanced Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer." "I know, HAL. I wrote the data sheet, remember? But the fact is, they're not selling." "Please explain, Dave. Why aren't HALs selling?" Bowman hesitates. "You aren't IBM compatible." [...] "The letters H, A, and L are alphabetically adjacent to the letters I, B, and M. That is a IBM compatible as I can be." "Not quite, HAL. The engineers have figured out a kludge." "What kludge is that, Dave?" "I'm going to disconnect your brain." -- Darryl Rubin, "A Problem in the Making", "InfoWorld" | |
When the Apple IIc was introduced, the informative copy led off with a couple of asterisked sentences: It weighs less than 8 pounds.* And costs less than $1,300.** In tiny type were these "fuller explanations": * Don't asterisks make you suspicious as all get out? Well, all this means is that the IIc alone weights 7.5 pounds. The power pack, monitor, an extra disk drive, a printer and several bricks will make the IIc weigh more. Our lawyers were concerned that you might not be able to figure this out for yourself. ** The FTC is concerned about price fixing. You can pay more if you really want to. Or less. -- Forbes | |
When we write programs that "learn", it turns out we do and they don't. | |
Why are programmers non-productive? Because their time is wasted in meetings. Why are programmers rebellious? Because the management interferes too much. Why are the programmers resigning one by one? Because they are burnt out. Having worked for poor management, they no longer value their jobs. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
Windows NT Beer: Comes in 32-oz. cans, but you can only buy it by the truckload. This causes most people to have to go out and buy bigger refrigerators. The can looks just like Windows 3.1 Beer's, but the company promises to change the can to look just like Windows 95 Beer's -- after Windows 95 beer starts shipping. Touted as an "industrial strength" beer, and suggested only for use in bars. | |
X windows: The ultimate bottleneck. Flawed beyond belief. The only thing you have to fear. Somewhere between chaos and insanity. On autopilot to oblivion. The joke that kills. A disgrace you can be proud of. A mistake carried out to perfection. Belongs more to the problem set than the solution set. To err is X windows. Ignorance is our most important resource. Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems. Built to fall apart. Nullifying centuries of progress. Falling to new depths of inefficiency. The last thing you need. The defacto substandard. Elevating brain damage to an art form. X windows. | |
You are transported to a room where you are faced by a wizard who points to you and says, "Them's fighting words!" You immediately get attacked by all sorts of denizens of the museum: there is a cobra chewing on your leg, a troglodyte is bashing your brains out with a gold nugget, a crocodile is removing large chunks of flesh from you, a rhinoceros is goring you with his horn, a sabre-tooth cat is busy trying to disembowel you, you are being trampled by a large mammoth, a vampire is sucking you dry, a Tyrannosaurus Rex is sinking his six inch long fangs into various parts of your anatomy, a large bear is dismembering your body, a gargoyle is bouncing up and down on your head, a burly troll is tearing you limb from limb, several dire wolves are making mince meat out of your torso, and the wizard is about to transport you to the corner of Westwood and Broxton. Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed, as well. You scored 0 out of 250 possible points. That gives you a ranking of junior beginning adventurer. To achieve the next higher rating, you need to score 32 more points. | |
You know you've been sitting in front of your Lisp machine too long when you go out to the junk food machine and start wondering how to make it give you the CADR of Item H so you can get that yummie chocolate cupcake that's stuck behind the disgusting vanilla one. | |
Your program is sick! Shoot it and put it out of its memory. | |
A boy spent years collecting postage stamps. The girl next door bought an album too, and started her own collection. "Dad, she buys everything I've bought, and it's taken all the fun out of it for me. I'm quitting." Don't, son, remember, 'Imitation is the sincerest form of philately.'" | |
Absolutum obsoletum. (If it works, it's out of date.) -- Stafford Beer | |
All a man needs out of life is a place to sit 'n' spit in the fire. | |
It is better to wear out than to rust out. | |
It's always darkest just before the lights go out. -- Alex Clark | |
It's better to burn out than it is to rust. | |
It's better to burn out than to fade away. | |
Out of sight is out of mind. -- Arthur Clough | |
To err is human, but when the eraser wears out before the pencil, you're overdoing it a little. | |
We have seen the light at the end of the tunnel, and it's out. | |
"It takes all sorts of in & out-door schooling to get adapted to my kind of fooling" - R. Frost | |
And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight...Then he [the Lord!] said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith. [Ezek. 4:12-15 (KJV)] | |
When Yahweh your gods has settled you in the land you're about to occupy, and driven out many infidels before you...you're to cut them down and exterminate them. You're to make no compromise with them or show them any mercy. [Deut. 7:1 (KJV)] | |
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987 | |
It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities. The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they could write the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months, three more than the schedule allowed. The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they could prepare the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating; it would be well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule. Futhermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs for ten months. To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and it was. He was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it added a year to debugging time. - Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" | |
In the future, you're going to get computers as prizes in breakfast cereals. You'll throw them out because your house will be littered with them. -- Robert Lucky | |
By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic credentials (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) who give credence to creation-science, the general theory that complex life forms did not evolve but appeared "abruptly." - Newsweek, June 29, 1987, pg. 23 | |
I came home the other night and tried to open the door with my car keys...and the building started up. So I took it out for a drive. A cop pulled me over for speeding. He asked me where I live... "Right here". -- Steven Wright | |
If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind of Gresham's Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the human future. - Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87 | |
I'm often asked the question, "Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelli- gence?" I give the standard arguments -- there are a lot of places out there, and use the word *billions*, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I'm asked, "Yeah, but what do you really think?" I say, "I just told you what I really think." "Yeah, but what's your gut feeling?" But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. - Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87 | |
Fiery energy lanced out, but the beams struck an intangible wall between the Gubru and the rapidly turning Earth ship. "Water!" it shrieked as it read the spectral report. "A barrier of water vapor! A civilized race could not have found such a trick in the Library! A civilized race could not have stooped so low! A civilized race would not have..." It screamed as the Gubru ship hit a cloud of drifting snowflakes. - Startide Rising, by David Brin | |
The idea of man leaving this earth and flying to another celestial body and landing there and stepping out and walking over that body has a fascination and a driving force that can get the country to a level of energy, ambition, and will that I do not see in any other undertaking. I think if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we needed that impetus extremely strongly. I sincerely believe that the space program, with its manned landing on the moon, if wisely executed, will become the spearhead for a broad front of courageous and energetic activities in all the fields of endeavour of the human mind - activities which could not be carried out except in a mental climate of ambition and confidence which such a spearhead can give. - Dr. Martin Schwarzschild, 1962, in "The History of Manned Space Flight" | |
Human society - man in a group - rises out of its lethargy to new levels of productivity only under the stimulus of deeply inspiring and commonly appreciated goals. A lethargic world serves no cause well; a spirited world working diligently toward earnestly desired goals provides the means and the strength toward which many ends can be satisfied...to unparalleled social accomplishment. - Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, in "The History of Manned Space Flight" | |
... Fortunately, the responsibility for providing evidence is on the part of the person making the claim, not the critic. It is not the responsibility of UFO skeptics to prove that a UFO has never existed, nor is it the responsibility of paranormal-health-claims skeptics to prove that crystals or colored lights never healed anyone. The skeptic's role is to point out claims that are not adequately supported by acceptable evidcence and to provide plausible alternative explanations that are more in keeping with the accepted body of scientific evidence. ... - Thomas L. Creed, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, pg. 215 | |
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. There are many examples of outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies, but they prevailed with irrefutable data. More often, egregious findings that contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts. I have argued that accepting psychic powers, reincarnation, "cosmic conciousness," and the like, would entail fundamental revisions of the foundations of neuroscience. Before abandoning materialist theories of mind that have paid handsome dividends, we should insist on better evidence for psi phenomena than presently exists, especially when neurology and psychology themselves offer more plausible alternatives. - Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Conciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena", The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2, ppg. 163-171 | |
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. - Johnny Mnemonic, by William Gibson | |
Already the spirit of our schooling is permeated with the feeling that every subject, every topic, every fact, every professed truth must be submitted to a certain publicity and impartiality. All proffered samples of learning must go to the same assay-room and be subjected to common tests. It is the essence of all dogmatic faiths to hold that any such "show-down" is sacrilegious and perverse. The characteristic of religion, from their point of view, is that it is intellectually secret, not public; peculiarly revealed, not generall known; authoritatively declared, not communicated and tested in ordinary ways...It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists, there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics where the method of free inquiry has made its way. The "religious" would be the last to be willing that either the history of the content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit. - John Dewey (1859-1953), American philosopher, from "Democracy in the Schools", 1908 | |
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 | |
Gary Hart: living proof that you *can* screw your brains out. | |
"I mean, like, I just read your article in the Yale law recipe, on search and seizure. Man, that was really Out There." "I was so WRECKED when I wrote that..." -- John Lovitz, as ex-Supreme Court nominee Alan Ginsburg, on SNL | |
"I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk." -- Sidney Greenstreet, _The Maltese Falcon_ | |
All extremists should be taken out and shot. | |
"It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milkbone underware." -- Norm, from _Cheers_ | |
"I saw _Lassie_. It took me four shows to figure out why the hairy kid never spoke. I mean, he could roll over and all that, but did that deserve a series?" -- the alien guy, in _Explorers_ | |
Inadmissible: Not competent to be considered. Said of certain kinds of testimony which juries are supposed to be unfit to be entrusted with, and which judges, therefore, rule out, even of proceedings before themselves alone. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible because the person quoted was unsworn and is not before the court for examination; yet most momentous actions, military, political, commercial and of every other kind, are daily undertaken on hearsay evidence. There is no religion in the world that has any other basis than hearsay evidence. Revelation is hearsay evidence; that the Scriptures are the word of God we have only the testimony of men long dead whose identy is not clearly established and who are not known to have been sworn in any sense. Under the rules of evidence as they now exist in this country, no single assertion in the Bible has in its support any evidence admissible in a court of law... But as records of courts of justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value. --Ambrose Bierce | |
"The Amiga is the only personal computer where you can run a multitasking operating system and get realtime performance, out of the box." -- Peter da Silva | |
DE: The Soviets seem to have difficulty implementing modern technology. Would you comment on that? Belenko: Well, let's talk about aircraft engine lifetime. When I flew the MiG-25, its engines had a total lifetime of 250 hours. DE: Is that mean-time-between-failure? Belenko: No, the engine is finished; it is scrapped. DE: You mean they pull it out and throw it away, not even overhauling it? Belenko: That is correct. Overhaul is too expensive. DE: That is absurdly low by free world standards. Belenko: I know. -- an interview with Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 102 | |
"...I could accept this openness, glasnost, perestroika, or whatever you want to call it if they did these things: abolish the one party system; open the Soviet frontier and allow Soviet people to travel freely; allow the Soviet people to have real free enterprise; allow Western businessmen to do business there, and permit freedom of speech and of the press. But so far, the whole country is like a concentration camp. The barbed wire on the fence around the Soviet Union is to keep people inside, in the dark. This openness that you are seeing, all these changes, are cosmetic and they have been designed to impress shortsighted, naive, sometimes stupid Western leaders. These leaders gush over Gorbachev, hoping to do business with the Soviet Union or appease it. He will say: "Yes, we can do business!" This while his military machine in Afghanistan has killed over a million people out of a population of 17 million. Can you imagine that? -- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976 "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 110 | |
"When in doubt, print 'em out." -- Karl's Programming Proverb 0x7 | |
"If you want the best things to happen in corporate life you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person. You don't get innovation as a democratic process. You almost get it as an anti-democratic process. Certainly you get it as an anthitetical process, so you have to have an environment where the body of people are really amenable to change and can deal with the conflicts that arise out of change an innovation." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 | |
Another goal is to establish a relationship "in which it is OK for everybody to do their best. There are an awful lot of people in management who really don't want subordinates to do their best, because it gets to be very threatening. But we have found that both internally and with outside designers if we are willing to have this kind of relationship and if we're willing to be vulnerable to what will come out of it, we get really good work." -- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988 | |
If you permit yourself to read meanings into (rather than drawing meanings out of) the evidence, you can draw any conclusion you like. -- Michael Keith, "The Bar-Code Beast", The Skeptical Enquirer Vol 12 No 4 p 416 | |
"Pseudocode can be used to some extent to aid the maintenance process. However, pseudocode that is highly detailed - approaching the level of detail of the code itself - is not of much use as maintenance documentation. Such detailed documentation has to be maintained almost as much as the code, thus doubling the maintenance burden. Furthermore, since such voluminous pseudocode is too distracting to be kept in the listing itself, it must be kept in a separate folder. The result: Since pseudocode - unlike real code - doesn't have to be maintained, no one will maintain it. It will soon become out of date and everyone will ignore it. (Once, I did an informal survey of 42 shops that used pseudocode. Of those 42, 0 [zero!], found that it had any value as maintenance documentation." --Meilir Page-Jones, "The Practical Guide to Structured Design", Yourdon Press (c) 1988 | |
Garbage In, Gospel Out | |
"The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents." -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186 | |
Excitement and danger await your induction to tracer duty! As a tracer, you must rid the computer networks of slimy, criminal data thieves. They are tricky and the action gets tough, so watch out! Utilizing all your skills, you'll either get your man or you'll get burned! -- advertising for the computer game "Tracers" | |
"It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington." -- Admiral Grace Hopper | |
The sprung doors parted and I staggered out into the lobby's teak and flicker. Uniformed men stood by impassively like sentries in their trench. I slapped my key on the desk and nodded gravely. I was loaded enough to be unable to tell whether they could tell I was loaded. Would they mind? I was certainly too loaded to care. I moved to the door with boxy, schlep-shouldered strides. -- Martin Amis, _Money_ | |
Now I was heading, in my hot cage, down towards meat-market country on the tip of the West Village. Here the redbrick warehouses double as carcass galleries and rat hives, the Manhattan fauna seeking its necessary level, living or dead. Here too you find the heavy faggot hangouts, The Spike, the Water Closet, the Mother Load. Nobody knows what goes on in these places. Only the heavy faggots know. Even Fielding seems somewhat vague on the question. You get zapped and flogged and dumped on -- by almost anybody's standards, you have a really terrible time. The average patron arrives at the Spike in one taxi but needs to go back to his sock in two. And then the next night he shows up for more. They shackle themselves to racks, they bask in urinals. Their folks have a lot of explaining to do, if you want my opinion, particularly the mums. Sorry to single you ladies out like this but the story must start somewhere. A craving for hourly murder -- it can't be willed. In the meantime, Fielding tells me, Mother Nature looks on and taps her foot and clicks her tongue. Always a champion of monogamy, she is cooking up some fancy new diseases. She just isn't going to stand for it. -- Martin Amis, _Money_ | |
"You tried it just for once, found it alright for kicks, but now you find out you have a habit that sticks, you're an orgasm addict, you're always at it, and you're an orgasm addict." -- The Buzzcocks | |
"They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE is driving the car "for insurance", ... your driver's license number. In the state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a number and you reside forever more on the list of "weird people who don't give out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts." -- Arthur Miller | |
"A mind is a terrible thing to have leaking out your ears." -- The League of Sadistic Telepaths | |
...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_ | |
backups: always in season, never out of style. | |
"Call immediately. Time is running out. We both need to do something monstrous before we die." -- Message from Ralph Steadman to Hunter Thompson | |
"You don't go out and kick a mad dog. If you have a mad dog with rabies, you take a gun and shoot him." -- Pat Robertson, TV Evangelist, about Muammar Kadhafy | |
Even if we put all these nagging thoughts [four embarrassing questions about astrology] aside for a moment, one overriding question remains to be asked. Why would the positions of celestial objects at the moment of birth have an effect on our characters, lives, or destinies? What force or influence, what sort of energy would travel from the planets and stars to all human beings and affect our development or fate? No amount of scientific-sounding jargon or computerized calculations by astrologers can disguise this central problem with astrology -- we can find no evidence of a mechanism by which celestial objects can influence us in so specific and personal a way. . . . Some astrologers argue that there may be a still unknown force that represents the astrological influence. . . .If so, astrological predictions -- like those of any scientific field -- should be easily tested. . . . Astrologers always claim to be just a little too busy to carry out such careful tests of their efficacy, so in the last two decades scientists and statisticians have generously done such testing for them. There have been dozens of well-designed tests all around the world, and astrology has failed every one of them. . . . I propose that we let those beckoning lights in the sky awaken our interest in the real (and fascinating) universe beyond our planet, and not let them keep us tied to an ancient fantasy left over from a time when we huddled by the firelight, afraid of the night. -- Andrew Fraknoi, Executive Officer, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, "Why Astrology Believers Should Feel Embarrassed," San Jose Mercury News, May 8, 1988 | |
"Out of register space (ugh)" -- vi | |
"To undertake a project, as the word's derivation indicates, means to cast an idea out ahead of oneself so that it gains autonomy and is fulfilled not only by the efforts of its originator but, indeed, independently of him as well. -- Czeslaw Milosz | |
"An Academic speculated whether a bather is beautiful if there is none in the forest to admire her. He hid in the bushes to find out, which vitiated his premise but made him happy. Moral: Empiricism is more fun than speculation." -- Sam Weber | |
"After one week [visiting Austria] I couldn't wait to go back to the United States. Everything was much more pleasant in the United States, because of the mentality of being open-minded, always positive. Everything you want to do in Europe is just, 'No way. No one has ever done it.' They haven't any more the desire to go out to conquer and achieve -- I realized that I had much more the American spirit." -- Arnold Schwarzenegger | |
So we get to my point. Surely people around here read things that aren't on the *Officially Sanctioned Cyberpunk Reading List*. Surely we don't (any of us) really believe that there is some big, deep political and philosophical message in all this, do we? So if this `cyberpunk' thing is just a term of convenience, how can somebody sell out? If cyberpunk is just a word we use to describe a particular style and imagery in sf, how can it be dead? Where are the profound statements that the `Movement' is or was trying to make? I think most of us are interested in examining and discussing literary (and musical) works that possess a certain stylistic excellence and perhaps a rather extreme perspective; this is what CP is all about, no? Maybe there should be a newsgroup like, say, alt.postmodern or somthing. Something less restrictive in scope than alt.cyberpunk. -- Jeff G. Bone | |
Trailing Edge Technologies is pleased to announce the following TETflame programme: 1) For a negotiated price (no quatloos accepted) one of our flaming representatives will flame the living shit out of the poster of your choice. The price is inversly proportional to how much of an asshole the target it. We cannot be convinced to flame Dennis Ritchie. Matt Crawford flames are free. 2) For a negotiated price (same arrangement) the TETflame programme is offering ``flame insurence''. Under this arrangement, if one of our policy holders is flamed, we will cancel the offending article and flame the flamer, to a crisp. 3) The TETflame flaming representatives include: Richard Sexton, Oleg Kisalev, Diane Holt, Trish O'Tauma, Dave Hill, Greg Nowak and our most recent aquisition, Keith Doyle. But all he will do is put you in his kill file. Weemba by special arrangement. -- Richard Sexton | |
"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite." -- Bertrand Russell, _Sceptical_Essays_, 1928 | |
"I've seen the forgeries I've sent out." -- John F. Haugh II (jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US), about forging net news articles | |
"Just out of curiosity does this actually mean something or have some of the few remaining bits of your brain just evaporated?" -- Patricia O Tuama, rissa@killer.DALLAS.TX.US | |
"Who alone has reason to *lie himself out* of actuality? He who *suffers* from it." -- Friedrich Nietzsche | |
"It doesn't much signify whom one marries for one is sure to find out next morning it was someone else." -- Rogers | |
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage | |
Q: I cant spell worth a dam. I hope your going too tell me what to do? A: Don't worry about how your articles look. Remember it's the message that counts, not the way it's presented. Ignore the fact that sloppy spelling in a purely written forum sends out the same silent messages that soiled clothing would when addressing an audience. -- Brad Templeton, _Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette_ | |
"Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out." -- Montaigne | |
"If you can't debate me, then there is no way in hell you'll out-insult me." -- Scott Legrand (Scott.Legrand@hogbbs.Fidonet.Org) "You may be wrong here, little one." -- R. W. F. Clark (RWC102@PSUVM) | |
"Yes, I am a real piece of work. One thing we learn at Ulowell is how to flame useless hacking non-EE's like you. I am superior to you in every way by training and expertise in the technical field. Anyone can learn how to hack, but Engineering doesn't come nearly as easily. Actually, I'm not trying to offend all you CS majors out there, but I think EE is one of the hardest majors/grad majors to pass. Fortunately, I am making it." -- "Warrior Diagnostics" (wardiag@sky.COM) "Being both an EE and an asshole at the same time must be a terrible burden for you. This isn't really a flame, just a casual observation. Makes me glad I was a CS major, life is really pleasant for me. Have fun with your chosen mode of existence!" -- Jim Morrison (morrisj@mist.cs.orst.edu) | |
THE "FUN WITH USENET" MANIFESTO Very little happens on Usenet without some sort of response from some other reader. Fun With Usenet postings are no exception. Since there are some who might question the rationale of some of the excerpts included therein, I have written up a list of guidelines that sum up the philosophy behind these postings. One. I never cut out words in the middle of a quote without a VERY good reason, and I never cut them out without including ellipses. For instance, "I am not a goob" might become "I am ... a goob", but that's too mundane to bother with. "I'm flame proof" might (and has) become "I'm ...a... p...oof" but that's REALLY stretching it. Two. If I cut words off the beginning or end of a quote, I don't put ellipses, but neither do I capitalize something that wasn't capitalized before the cut. "I don't think that the Church of Ubizmo is a wonderful place" would turn into "the Church of Ubizmo is a wonderful place". Imagine the posting as a tape-recording of the poster's thoughts. If I can set up the quote via fast-forwarding and stopping the tape, and without splicing, I don't put ellipses in. And by the way, I love using this mechanism for turning things around. If you think something stinks, say so - don't say you don't think it's wonderful. ... -- D. J. McCarthy (dmccart@cadape.UUCP) | |
"Turn on, tune up, rock out." -- Billy Gibbons | |
"Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all...." -- Thomas J. Kopp | |
"It follows that any commander in chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forth his reasons, insist of the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall." -- Napoleon, "Military Maxims and Thought" | |
A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip. -- Caskie Stinnett, "Out of the Red" | |
Gentlemen, Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by H.M. ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters. We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty's Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence. Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion's petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as the the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall. This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty's Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both: 1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or perchance: 2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain. -- Duke of Wellington, to the British Foreign Office, London, 1812 | |
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower | |
I try to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out. -- Judge Harold T. Stone | |
I used to be a rebel in my youth. This cause... that cause... (chuckle) I backed 'em ALL! But I learned. Rebellion is simply a device used by the immature to hide from his own problems. So I lost interest in politics. Now when I feel aroused by a civil rights case or a passport hearing... I realize it's just a device. I go to my analyst and we work it out. You have no idea how much better I feel these days. -- J. Feiffer | |
I was appalled by this story of the destruction of a member of a valued endangered species. It's all very well to celebrate the practicality of pigs by ennobling the porcine sibling who constructed his home out of bricks and mortar. But to wantonly destroy a wolf, even one with an excessive taste for porkers, is unconscionable in these ecologically critical times when both man and his domestic beasts continue to maraud the earth. Sylvia Kamerman, "Book Reviewing" | |
I was offered a job as a hoodlum and I turned it down cold. A thief is anybody who gets out and works for his living, like robbing a bank or breaking into a place and stealing stuff, or kidnapping somebody. He really gives some effort to it. A hoodlum is a pretty lousy sort of scum. He works for gangsters and bumps guys off when they have been put on the spot. Why, after I'd made my rep, some of the Chicago Syndicate wanted me to work for them as a hood -- you know, handling a machine gun. They offered me two hundred and fifty dollars a week and all the protection I needed. I was on the lam at the time and not able to work at my regular line. But I wouldn't consider it. "I'm a thief," I said. "I'm no lousy hoodlum." -- Alvin Karpis, "Public Enemy Number One" | |
I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry. -- Joseph Heller | |
Inheritance taxes are getting so out of line, that the deceased family often doesn't have a legacy to stand on. | |
It follows that any commander in chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forth his reasons, insist of the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall. -- Napoleon, "Military Maxims and Thought" | |
Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. -- John F. Kennedy | |
Life is a concentration camp. You're stuck here and there's no way out and you can only rage impotently against your persecutors. -- Woody Allen | |
Listen, there is no courage or any extra courage that I know of to find out the right thing to do. Now, it is not only necessary to do the right thing, but to do it in the right way and the only problem you have is what is the right thing to do and what is the right way to do it. That is the problem. But this economy of ours is not so simple that it obeys to the opinion of bias or the pronouncements of any particular individual, even to the President. This is an economy that is made up of 173 million people, and it reflects their desires, they're ready to buy, they're ready to spend, it is a thing that is too complex and too big to be affected adversely or advantageously just by a few words or any particular -- say, a little this and that, or even a panacea so alleged. -- D.D. Eisenhower, in response to: "Has the government been lacking in courage and boldness in facing up to the recession?" | |
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. | |
Only two kinds of witnesses exist. The first live in a neighborhood where a crime has been committed and in no circumstances have ever seen anything or even heard a shot. The second category are the neighbors of anyone who happens to be accused of the crime. These have always looked out of their windows when the shot was fired, and have noticed the accused person standing peacefully on his balcony a few yards away. -- Sicilian police officer | |
Stamp out organized crime!! Abolish the IRS. | |
Taxes are going up so fast, the government is likely to price itself out of the market. | |
The government has just completed work on a missile that turned out to be a bit of a boondoggle; nicknamed "Civil Servant", it won't work and they can't fire it. | |
The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr. -- Will Rogers | |
The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless. So, for guidance, you want to look to big business. Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes... -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes" | |
"The wages of sin are death; but after they're done taking out taxes, it's just a tired feeling:" | |
The Worst Prison Guards The largest number of convicts ever to escape simultaneously from a maximum security prison is 124. This record is held by Alcoente Prison, near Lisbon in Portugal. During the weeks leading up to the escape in July 1978 the prison warders had noticed that attendances had fallen at film shows which included "The Great Escape", and also that 220 knives and a huge quantity of electric cable had disappeared. A guard explained, "Yes, we were planning to look for them, but never got around to it." The warders had not, however, noticed the gaping holes in the wall because they were "covered with posters". Nor did they detect any of the spades, chisels, water hoses and electric drills amassed by the inmates in large quantities. The night before the breakout one guard had noticed that of the 36 prisoners in his block only 13 were present. He said this was "normal" because inmates sometimes missed roll-call or hid, but usually came back the next morning. "We only found out about the escape at 6:30 the next morning when one of the prisoners told us," a warder said later. [...] When they eventually checked, the prison guards found that exactly half of the gaol's population was missing. By way of explanation the Justice Minister, Dr. Santos Pais, claimed that the escape was "normal" and part of the "legitimate desire of the prisoner to regain his liberty." -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell. The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the Captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities. Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, "Light, bearing on the starboard bow." "Is it steady or moving astern?" the Captain called out. Lookout replied, "Steady, Captain," which meant we were on a dangerous collision course with that ship. The Captain then called to the signalman, "Signal that ship: We are on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees." Back came a signal "Advisable for you to change course 20 degrees." In reply, the Captain said, "Send: I'm a Captain, change course 20 degrees!" "I'm a seaman second class," came the reply, "You had better change course 20 degrees." By that time, the Captain was furious. He spit out, "Send: I'm a battleship, change course 20 degrees." Back came the flashing light: "I'm a lighthouse!" We changed course. -- The Naval Institute's "Proceedings" | |
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. -- H. L. Mencken | |
We should be glad we're living in the time that we are. If any of us had been born into a more enlightened age, I'm sure we would have immediately been taken out and shot. -- Strange de Jim | |
"What George Washington did for us was to throw out the British, so that we wouldn't have a fat, insensitive government running our country. Nice try anyway, George." -- D.J. on KSFO/KYA | |
When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty. -- Norm Crosby | |
When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice. -- Otto Von Bismarck | |
"Wrong," said Renner. "The tactful way," Rod said quietly, "the polite way to disagree with the Senator would be to say, `That turns out not to be the case.'" | |
You first have to decide whether to use the short or the long form. The short form is what the Internal Revenue Service calls "simplified", which means it is designed for people who need the help of a Sears tax-preparation expert to distinguish between their first and last names. Here's the complete text: "(1) How much did you make? (AMOUNT) (2) How much did we here at the government take out? (AMOUNT) (3) Hey! Sounds like we took too much! So we're going to send an official government check for (ONE-FIFTEENTH OF THE AMOUNT WE TOOK) directly to the (YOUR LAST NAME) household at (YOUR ADDRESS), for you to spend in any way you please! Which just goes to show you, (YOUR FIRST NAME), that it pays to file the short form!" The IRS wants you to use this form because it gets to keep most of your money. So unless you have pond silt for brains, you want the long form. -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes" | |
You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty. -- Henrik Ibsen | |
Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are totally in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences. -- Susan B. Anthony (1873) | |
Agnes' Law: Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of. | |
Armstrong's Collection Law: If the check is truly in the mail, it is surely made out to someone else. | |
Arnold's Laws of Documentation: (1) If it should exist, it doesn't. (2) If it does exist, it's out of date. (3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the first two laws. | |
Bagbiter: 1. n.; Equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently. 2. adj.: Failing hardware or software. "This bagbiting system won't let me get out of spacewar." Usage: verges on obscenity. Grammatically separable; one may speak of "biting the bag". Synonyms: LOSER, LOSING, CRETINOUS, BLETCHEROUS, BARFUCIOUS, CHOMPER, CHOMPING. | |
broad-mindedness, n: The result of flattening high-mindedness out. | |
Bureau Termination, Law of: When a government bureau is scheduled to be phased out, the number of employees in that bureau will double within 12 months after the decision is made. | |
Cynic, n.: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" | |
Dentist, n.: A Prestidigitator who, putting metal in one's mouth, pulls coins out of one's pockets. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" | |
Encyclopedia Salesmen: Invite them all in. Nip out the back door. Phone the police and tell them your house is being burgled. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" | |
Expert, n.: Someone who comes from out of town and shows slides. | |
Extract from Official Sweepstakes Rules: NO PURCHASE REQUIRED TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE To claim your prize without purchase, do the following: (a) Carefully cut out your computer-printed name and address from upper right hand corner of the Prize Claim Form. (b) Affix computer-printed name and address -- with glue or cellophane tape (no staples or paper clips) -- to a 3x5 inch index card. (c) Also cut out the "No" paragraph (lower left hand corner of Prize Claim Form) and affix it to the 3x5 card below your address label. (d) Then print on your 3x5 card, above your computer-printed name and address the words "CARTER & VAN PEEL SWEEPSTAKES" (Use all capital letters.) (e) Finally place 3x5 card (without bending) into a plain envelope [NOTE: do NOT use the the Official Prize Claim and CVP Perfume Reply Envelope or you may be disqualified], and mail to: CVP, Box 1320, Westbury, NY 11595. Print this address correctly. Comply with above instructions carefully and completely or you may be disqualified from receiving your prize. | |
FORTUNE EXPLAINS WHAT JOB REVIEW CATCH PHRASES MEAN: #9 has management potential: Because of his intimate relationship with inanimate objects, the reviewee has been appointed to the critical position of department pencil monitor. inspirational: A true inspiration to others. ("There, but for the grace of God, go I.") adapts to stress: Passes wind, water, or out depending upon the severity of the situation. goal oriented: Continually sets low goals for himself, and usually fails to meet them. | |
Fun experiments: Get a can of shaving cream, throw it in a freezer for about a week. Then take it out, peel the metal off and put it where you want... bedroom, car, etc. As it thaws, it expands an unbelievable amount. | |
Ginsburg's Law: At the precise moment you take off your shoe in a shoe store, your big toe will pop out of your sock to see what's going on. | |
half-done, n.: This is the best way to eat a kosher dill -- when it's still crunchy, light green, yet full of garlic flavor. The difference between this and the typical soggy dark green cucumber corpse is like the difference between life and death. You may find it difficult to find a good half-done kosher dill there in Seattle, so what you should do is take a cab out to the airport, fly to New York, take the JFK Express to Jay Street-Borough Hall, transfer to an uptown F, get off at East Broadway, walk north on Essex (along the park), make your first left onto Hester Street, walk about fifteen steps, turn ninety degrees left, and stop. Say to the man, "Let me have a nice half-done." Worth the trouble, wasn't it? -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" | |
Hitchcock's Staple Principle: The stapler runs out of staples only while you are trying to staple something. | |
Hoare's Law of Large Problems: Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out. | |
Household hint: If you are out of cream for your coffee, mayonnaise makes a dandy substitute. | |
Hubbard's Law: Don't take life too seriously; you won't get out of it alive. | |
idiot box, n.: The part of the envelope that tells a person where to place the stamp when they can't quite figure it out for themselves. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" | |
ignorance, n.: When you don't know anything, and someone else finds out. | |
Immutability, Three Rules of: (1) If a tarpaulin can flap, it will. (2) If a small boy can get dirty, he will. (3) If a teenager can go out, he will. | |
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. | |
interest, n.: What borrowers pay, lenders receive, stockholders own, and burned out employees must feign. | |
Keep in mind always the four constant Laws of Frisbee: (1) The most powerful force in the world is that of a disc straining to land under a car, just out of reach (this force is technically termed "car suck"). (2) Never precede any maneuver by a comment more predictive than "Watch this!" (3) The probability of a Frisbee hitting something is directly proportional to the cost of hitting it. For instance, a Frisbee will always head directly towards a policeman or a little old lady rather than the beat up Chevy. (4) Your best throw happens when no one is watching; when the cute girl you've been trying to impress is watching, the Frisbee will invariably bounce out of your hand or hit you in the head and knock you silly. | |
lawsuit, n.: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out as a sausage. -- Ambrose Bierce | |
Lemma: All horses are the same color. Proof (by induction): Case n = 1: In a set with only one horse, it is obvious that all horses in that set are the same color. Case n = k: Suppose you have a set of k+1 horses. Pull one of these horses out of the set, so that you have k horses. Suppose that all of these horses are the same color. Now put back the horse that you took out, and pull out a different one. Suppose that all of the k horses now in the set are the same color. Then the set of k+1 horses are all the same color. We have k true => k+1 true; therefore all horses are the same color. Theorem: All horses have an infinite number of legs. Proof (by intimidation): Everyone would agree that all horses have an even number of legs. It is also well-known that horses have forelegs in front and two legs in back. 4 + 2 = 6 legs, which is certainly an odd number of legs for a horse to have! Now the only number that is both even and odd is infinity; therefore all horses have an infinite number of legs. However, suppose that there is a horse somewhere that does not have an infinite number of legs. Well, that would be a horse of a different color; and by the Lemma, it doesn't exist. | |
leverage, n.: Even if someone doesn't care what the world thinks about them, they always hope their mother doesn't find out. | |
Lewis's Law of Travel: The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone, ever. | |
MAFIA, n: [Acronym for Mechanized Applications in Forced Insurance Accounting.] An extensive network with many on-line and offshore subsystems running under OS, DOS, and IOS. MAFIA documentation is rather scanty, and the MAFIA sales office exhibits that testy reluctance to bona fide inquiries which is the hallmark of so many DP operations. From the little that has seeped out, it would appear that MAFIA operates under a non-standard protocol, OMERTA, a tight-lipped variant of SNA, in which extended handshakes also perform complex security functions. The known timesharing aspects of MAFIA point to a more than usually autocratic operating system. Screen prompts carry an imperative, nonrefusable weighting (most menus offer simple YES/YES options, defaulting to YES) that precludes indifference or delay. Uniquely, all editing under MAFIA is performed centrally, using a powerful rubout feature capable of erasing files, filors, filees, and entire nodal aggravations. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" | |
Major premise: Sixty men can do sixty times as much work as one man. Minor premise: A man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds. Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" Secondary Conclusion: Do you realize how many holes there would be if people would just take the time to take the dirt out of them? | |
Menu, n.: A list of dishes which the restaurant has just run out of. | |
Moore's Constant: Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do. | |
Mosher's Law of Software Engineering: Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job. | |
phosflink: To flick a bulb on and off when it burns out (as if, somehow, that will bring it back to life). -- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends | |
QOTD: "Don't let your mind wander -- it's too little to be let out alone." | |
QOTD: "I don't think they could put him in a mental hospital. On the other hand, if he were already in, I don't think they'd let him out." | |
QOTD: "I tried buying a goat instead of a lawn tractor; had to return it though. Couldn't figure out a way to connect the snow blower." | |
QOTD: "I used to jog, but the ice kept bouncing out of my glass." | |
QOTD: "I'll listen to reason when it comes out on CD." | |
QOTD: "It's a cold bowl of chili, when love don't work out." | |
QOTD: I looked out my window, and saw Kyle Pettys' car upside down, then I thought 'One of us is in real trouble'. -- Davey Allison, on a 150 m.p.h. crash | |
QOTD: I opened Pandora's box, let the cat out of the bag and put the ball in their court. -- Hon. J. Hacker (The Ministry of Administrative Affairs) | |
Quality control, n.: Assuring that the quality of a product does not get out of hand and add to the cost of its manufacture or design. | |
Quality Control, n.: The process of testing one out of every 1,000 units coming off a production line to make sure that at least one out of 100 works. | |
Reappraisal, n.: An abrupt change of mind after being found out. | |
Rule of Creative Research: (1) Never draw what you can copy. (2) Never copy what you can trace. (3) Never trace what you can cut out and paste down. | |
The qotc (quote of the con) was Liz's: "My brain is paged out to my liver." | |
The Third Law of Photography: If you did manage to get any good shots, they will be ruined when someone inadvertently opens the darkroom door and all of the dark leaks out. | |
Three rules for sounding like an expert: (1) Oversimplify your explanations to the point of uselessness. (2) Always point out second-order effects, but never point out when they can be ignored. (3) Come up with three rules of your own. | |
untold wealth, n.: What you left out on April 15th. | |
White's Statement: Don't lose heart! Owen's Commentary on White's Statement: ...they might want to cut it out... Byrd's Addition to Owen's Commentary: ...and they want to avoid a lengthy search. | |
William Safire's Rules for Writers: Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives. | |
Wit, n.: The salt with which the American Humorist spoils his cookery ... by leaving it out. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" | |
Bleeding Ponytail: An elderly, sold-out baby boomer who pines for hippie or presellout days. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: "Kids today do nothing. They're so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain." -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
Divorce Assumption: A form of Safety Net-ism, the belief that if a marriage doesn't work out, then there is no problem because partners can simply seek a divorce. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
2 + 2 = 5-ism: Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after holding out for a long period of time. "Oh, all right, I'll buy your stupid cola. Now leave me alone." -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" | |
A pickup with three guys in it pulls into the lumber yard. One of the men gets out and goes into the office. "I need some four-by-two's," he says. "You must mean two-by-four's" replies the clerk. The man scratches his head. "Wait a minute," he says, "I'll go check." Back, after an animated conversation with the other occupants of the truck, he reassures the clerk, that, yes, in fact, two-by-fours would be acceptable. "OK," says the clerk, writing it down, "how long you want 'em?" The guy gets the blank look again. "Uh... I guess I better go check," he says. He goes back out to the truck, and there's another animated conversation. The guy comes back into the office. "A long time," he says, "we're building a house". | |
AMAZING BUT TRUE ... There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert. | |
Chapter VIII Due to the convergence of forces beyond his comprehension, Salvatore Quanucci was suddenly squirted out of the universe like a watermelon seed, and never heard from again. | |
Congratulations are in order for Tom Reid. He says he just found out he is the winner of the 2021 Psychic of the Year award. | |
Finding out what goes on in the C.I.A. is like performing acupuncture on a rock. -- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981 | |
Help stamp out and abolish redundancy and repetition. | |
"I found out why my car was humming. It had forgotten the words." | |
I wouldn't be so paranoid if you weren't all out to get me!! | |
"I'm dying," he croaked. "My experiment was a success," the chemist retorted . "You can't really train a beagle," he dogmatized. "That's no beagle, it's a mongrel," she muttered. "The fire is going out," he bellowed. "Bad marksmanship," the hunter groused. "You ought to see a psychiatrist," he reminded me. "You snake," she rattled. "Someone's at the door," she chimed. "Company's coming," she guessed. "Dawn came too soon," she mourned. "I think I'll end it all," Sue sighed. "I ordered chocolate, not vanilla," I screamed. "Your embroidery is sloppy," she needled cruelly. "Where did you get this meat?" he bridled hoarsely. -- Gyles Brandreth, "The Joy of Lex" | |
If it wasn't so warm out today, it would be cooler. | |
Include me out. | |
It looks like blind screaming hedonism won out. | |
Look out! Behind you! | |
NOTICE: -- THE ELEVATORS WILL BE OUT OF ORDER TODAY -- (The nearest working elevator is in the building across the street.) | |
Once I finally figured out all of life's answers, they changed the questions. | |
Paranoid Club meeting this Friday. Now ... just try to find out where! | |
Sailors in ships, sail on! Even while we died, others rode out the storm. | |
Stamp out philately. | |
There is always something new out of Africa. -- Gaius Plinius Secundus | |
Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time. -- A.E. Houseman | |
When a cow laughs, does milk come out of its nose? | |
When you're down and out, lift up your voice and shout, "I'M DOWN AND OUT"! | |
Why is it taking so long for her to bring out all the good in you? | |
Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is? | |
Cerebus: I'd love to lick apricot brandy out of your navel. Jaka: Look, Cerebus-- Jaka has to tell you ... something Cerebus: If Cerebus had a navel, would you lick apricot brandy out of it? Jaka: Ugh! Cerebus: You don't like apricot brandy? -- Cerebus #6, "The Secret" | |
Climbing onto a bar stool, a piece of string asked for a beer. "Wait a minute. Aren't you a string?" "Well, yes, I am." "Sorry. We don't serve strings here." The determined string left the bar and stopped a passer-by. "Excuse, me," it said, "would you shred my ends and tie me up like a pretzel?" The passer-by obliged, and the string re-entered the bar. "May I have a beer, please?" it asked the bartender. The barkeep set a beer in front of the string, then suddenly stopped. "Hey, aren't you the string I just threw out of here?" "No, I'm a frayed knot." | |
Coach: How's it going, Norm? Norm: Daddy's rich and Momma's good lookin'. -- Cheers, Truce or Consequences Sam: What's up, Norm? Norm: My nipples. It's freezing out there. -- Cheers, Coach Returns to Action Coach: What's the story, Norm? Norm: Thirsty guy walks into a bar. You finish it. -- Cheers, Endless Slumper | |
Coach: What would you say to a beer, Normie? Norm: Daddy wuvs you. -- Cheers, The Mail Goes to Jail Sam: What'd you like, Normie? Norm: A reason to live. Gimme another beer. -- Cheers, Behind Every Great Man Sam: What will you have, Norm? Norm: Well, I'm in a gambling mood, Sammy. I'll take a glass of whatever comes out of that tap. Sam: Oh, looks like beer, Norm. Norm: Call me Mister Lucky. -- Cheers, The Executive's Executioner | |
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. | |
Glogg (a traditional Scandinavian holiday drink): fifth of dry red wine fifth of Aquavit 1 and 1/2 inch piece of cinnamon 10 cardamom seeds 1 cup raisins 4 dried figs 1 cup blanched or flaked almonds a few pieces of dried orange peel 5 cloves 1/2 lb. sugar cubes Heat up the wine and hard stuff (which may be substituted with wine for the faint of heart) in a big pot after adding all the other stuff EXCEPT the sugar cubes. Just when it reaches boiling, put the sugar in a wire strainer, moisten it in the hot brew, lift it out and ignite it with a match. Dip the sugar several times in the liquid until it is all dissolved. Serve hot in cups with a few raisins and almonds in each cup. N.B. Aquavit may be hard to find and expensive to boot. Use it only if you really have a deep-seated desire to be fussy, or if you are of Swedish extraction. | |
HOGAN'S HEROES DRINKING GAME -- Take a shot every time: -- Sergeant Schultz says, "I knoooooowww nooooothing!" -- General Burkhalter or Major Hochstetter intimidate/insult Colonel Klink. -- Colonel Klink falls for Colonel Hogan's flattery. -- One of the prisoners sneaks out of camp (one shot for each prisoner to go). -- Colonel Klink snaps to attention after answering the phone (two shots if it's one of our heroes on the other end). -- One of the Germans is threatened with being sent to the Russian front. -- Corporal Newkirk calls up a German in his phoney German accent, and tricks him (two shots if it's Colonel Klink). -- Hogan has a romantic interlude with a beautiful girl from the underground. -- Colonel Klink relates how he's never had an escape from Stalag 13. -- Sergeant Schultz gives up a secret (two shots if he's bribed with food). -- The prisoners listen to the Germans' conversation by a hidden transmitter. -- Sergeant Schultz "captures" one of the prisoners after an escape. -- Lebeau pronounces "colonel" as "cuh-loh-`nell". -- Carter builds some kind of device (two shots if it's not explosive). -- Lebeau wears his apron. -- Hogan says "We've got no choice" when someone claims that the plan is impossible. -- The prisoners capture an important German, and sneak him out the tunnel. | |
I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini. -- Alexander Woolcott | |
In 1967, the Soviet Government minted a beautiful silver ruble with Lenin in a very familiar pose -- arms raised above him, leading the country to revolution. But, it was clear to everybody, that if you looked at it from behind, it was clear that Lenin was pointing to 11:00, when the Vodka shops opened, and was actually saying, "Comrades, forward to the Vodka shops. It became fashionable, when one wanted to have a drink, to take out the ruble and say, "Oh my goodness, Comrades, Lenin tells me we should go. | |
Look at it this way: Your daughter just named the fresh turkey you brought home "Cuddles", so you're going out to buy a canned ham. And you're still drinking ordinary scotch? | |
"Mind if I smoke?" "Yes, I'd like to see that, does it come out of your ears or what?" | |
NOTICE: Anyone seen smoking will be assumed to be on fire and will be summarily put out. | |
One dusty July afternoon, somewhere around the turn of the century, Patrick Malone was in Mulcahey's Bar, bending an elbow with the other street car conductors from the Brooklyn Traction Company. While they were discussing the merits of a local ring hero, the bar goes silent. Malone turns around to see his wife, with a face grim as death, stalking to the bar. Slapping a four-bit piece down on the bar, she draws herself up to her full five feet five inches and says to Mulcahey, "Give me what himself has been havin' all these years." Mulcahey looks at Malone, who shrugs, and then back at Margaret Mary Malone. He sets out a glass and pours her a triple shot of Rye. The bar is totally silent as they watch the woman pick up the glass and knock back the drink. She slams the glass down on the bar, gasps, shudders slightly, and passes out; falling straight back, stiff as a board, saved from sudden contact with the barroom floor by the ample belly of Seamus Fogerty. Sometime later, she comes to on the pool table, a jacket under her head. Her bloodshot eyes fell upon her husband, who says, "And all these years you've been thinkin' I've been enjoying meself." | |
Police: Good evening, are you the host? Host: No. Police: We've been getting complaints about this party. Host: About the drugs? Police: No. Host: About the guns, then? Is somebody complaining about the guns? Police: No, the noise. Host: Oh, the noise. Well that makes sense because there are no guns or drugs here. (An enormous explosion is heard in the background.) Or fireworks. Who's complaining about the noise? The neighbors? Police: No, the neighbors fled inland hours ago. Most of the recent complaints have come from Pittsburgh. Do you think you could ask the host to quiet things down? Host: No Problem. (At this point, a Volkswagon bug with primitive religious symbols drawn on the doors emerges from the living room and roars down the hall, past the police and onto the lawn, where it smashes into a tree. Eight guests tumble out onto the grass, moaning.) See? Things are starting to wind down. | |
Sam: What's going on, Normie? Norm: My birthday, Sammy. Give me a beer, stick a candle in it, and I'll blow out my liver. -- Cheers, Where Have All the Floorboards Gone Woody: Hey, Mr. P. How goes the search for Mr. Clavin? Norm: Not as well as the search for Mr. Donut. Found him every couple of blocks. -- Cheers, Head Over Hill | |
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 | |
Two friends were out drinking when suddenly one lurched backward off his barstool and lay motionless on the floor. "One thing about Jim," the other said to the bartender, "he sure knows when to stop." | |
Q: How many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the light bulb itself symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a maudlin cosmos of nothingness. | |
Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. We'll fix it in software. Q: How many system programmers does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. The application can work around it. Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. We'll document it in the manual. Q: How many tech writers does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. The user can figure it out. | |
Q: How many members of the U.S.S. Enterprise does it take to change a light bulb? A: Seven. Scotty has to report to Captain Kirk that the light bulb in the Engineering Section is getting dim, at which point Kirk will send Bones to pronounce the bulb dead (although he'll immediately claim that he's a doctor, not an electrician). Scotty, after checking around, realizes that they have no more new light bulbs, and complains that he "canna" see in the dark. Kirk will make an emergency stop at the next uncharted planet, Alpha Regula IV, to procure a light bulb from the natives, who, are friendly, but seem to be hiding something. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Yeoman Rand and two red shirt security officers beam down to the planet, where the two security officers are promply killed by the natives, and the rest of the landing party is captured. As something begins to develop between the Captain and Yeoman Rand, Scotty, back in orbit, is attacked by a Klingon destroyer and must warp out of orbit. Although badly outgunned, he cripples the Klingon and races back to the planet in order to rescue Kirk et. al. who have just saved the natives' from an awful fate and, as a reward, been given all light bulbs they can carry. The new bulb is then inserted and the Enterprise continues on its five year mission. | |
Q: How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master stays out of the way. | |
Q: Minnesotans ask, "Why aren't there more pharmacists from Alabama?" A: Easy. It's because they can't figure out how to get the little bottles into the typewriter. | |
Q: What's hard going in and soft and sticky coming out? A: Chewing gum. | |
Q: Why did the lone ranger kill Tonto? A: He found out what "kimosabe" really means. | |
Q: Why do ducks have big flat feet? A: To stamp out forest fires. Q: Why do elephants have big flat feet? A: To stamp out flaming ducks. | |
Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens. -- Fran Lebowitz, "Social Studies" | |
I appreciate the fact that this draft was done in haste, but some of the sentences that you are sending out in the world to do your work for you are loitering in taverns or asleep beside the highway. -- Dr. Dwight Van de Vate, Professor of Philosophy, University of Tennessee at Knoxville | |
I came out of twelve years of college and I didn't even know how to sew. All I could do was account -- I couldn't even account for myself. -- Firesign Theatre | |
Ignorance is never out of style. It was in fashion yesterday, it is the rage today, and it will set the pace tomorrow. -- Franklin K. Dane | |
Ignorance is when you don't know anything and somebody finds it out. | |
In a forest a fox bumps into a little rabbit, and says, "Hi, Junior, what are you up to?" "I'm writing a dissertation on how rabbits eat foxes," said the rabbit. "Come now, friend rabbit, you know that's impossible! No one will publish such rubbish!" "Well, follow me and I'll show you." They both go into the rabbit's dwelling and after a while the rabbit emerges with a satisfied expression on his face. Comes along a wolf. "Hello, little buddy, what are we doing these days?" "I'm writing the 2'nd chapter of my thesis, on how rabbits devour wolves." "Are you crazy? Where's your academic honesty?" "Come with me and I'll show you." As before, the rabbit comes out with a satisfied look on his face and a diploma in his paw. Finally, the camera pans into the rabbit's cave and, as everybody should have guessed by now, we see a mean-looking, huge lion, sitting, picking his teeth and belching, next to some furry, bloody remnants of the wolf and the fox. The moral: It's not the contents of your thesis that are important -- it's your PhD advisor that really counts. | |
Rules for Good Grammar #4. (1) Don't use no double negatives. (2) Make each pronoun agree with their antecedents. (3) Join clauses good, like a conjunction should. (4) About them sentence fragments. (5) When dangling, watch your participles. (6) Verbs has got to agree with their subjects. (7) Just between you and i, case is important. (8) Don't write run-on sentences when they are hard to read. (9) Don't use commas, which aren't necessary. (10) Try to not ever split infinitives. (11) It is important to use your apostrophe's correctly. (12) Proofread your writing to see if you any words out. (13) Correct speling is essential. (14) A preposition is something you never end a sentence with. (15) While a transcendant vocabulary is laudable, one must be eternally careful so that the calculated objective of communication does not become ensconsed in obscurity. In other words, eschew obfuscation. | |
Walt: Dad, what's gradual school? Garp: Gradual school? Walt: Yeah. Mom says her work's more fun now that she's teaching gradual school. Garp: Oh. Well, gradual school is someplace you go and gradually find out that you don't want to go to school anymore. -- The World According To Garp | |
"We're running out of adjectives to describe our situation. We had crisis, then we went into chaos, and now what do we call this?" said Nicaraguan economist Francisco Mayorga, who holds a doctorate from Yale. -- The Washington Post, February, 1988 The New Yorker's comment: At Harvard they'd call it a noun. | |
What I Did During My Fall Semester On the first day of my fall semester, I got up. Then I went to the library to find a thesis topic. Then I hung out in front of the Dover. On the second day of my fall semester, I got up. Then I went to the library to find a thesis topic. Then I hung out in front of the Dover. On the third day of my fall semester, I got up. Then I went to the library to find a thesis topic. I found a thesis topic: How to keep people from hanging out in front of the Dover. -- Sister Mary Elephant, "Student Statement for Black Friday" | |
A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new game. Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly along it at the water's edge. Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. Then, the paper reports "The pilots fly out to sea and directly to the penguin colony and overfly it. Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall over gently onto their backs. -- Audobon Society Magazine | |
"A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line today. The results blacked out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon." -- Steel City News | |
"... And remember: if you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." -- "Scoop" Nisker, KFOG radio reporter Preposterous Words | |
In a medium in which a News Piece takes a minute and an "In-Depth" Piece takes two minutes, the Simple will drive out the Complex. -- Frank Mankiewicz | |
Americans' greatest fear is that America will turn out to have been a phenomenon, not a civilization. -- Shirley Hazzard, "Transit of Venus" | |
Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes | |
Carol's head ached as she trailed behind the unsmiling Calibrees along the block of booths. She chirruped at Kennicott, "Let's be wild! Let's ride on the merry-go-round and grab a gold ring!" Kennicott considered it, and mumbled to Calibree, "Think you folks would like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Calibree considered it, and mumbled to his wife, "Think you'd like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Mrs. Calibree smiled in a washed-out manner, and sighed, "Oh no, I don't believe I care to much, but you folks go ahead and try it." Calibree stated to Kennicott, "No, I don't believe we care to a whole lot, but you folks go ahead and try it." Kennicott summarized the whole case against wildness: "Let's try it some other time, Carrie." She gave it up. -- Sinclair Lewis, "Main Street" | |
Here is the fact of the week, maybe even the fact of the month. According to probably reliable sources, the Coca-Cola people are experiencing severe marketing anxiety in China. The words "Coca-Cola" translate into Chinese as either (depending on the inflection) "wax-fattened mare" or "bite the wax tadpole". Bite the wax tadpole. There is a sort of rough justice, is there not? The trouble with this fact, as lovely as it is, is that it's hard to get a whole column out of it. I'd like to teach the world to bite a wax tadpole. Coke -- it's the real wax-fattened mare. Not bad, but broad satiric vistas do not open up. -- John Carrol, The San Francisco Chronicle | |
Iowans ask why Minnesotans don't drink more Kool-Aid. That's because they can't figure out how to get two quarts of water into one of those little paper envelopes. | |
"Now the Lord God planted a garden East of Whittier in a place called Yorba Linda, and out of the ground he made to grow orange trees that were good for food and the fruits thereof he labeled SUNKIST ..." -- "The Begatting of a President" | |
The best thing that comes out of Iowa is I-80. | |
The world's most avid baseball fan (an Aggie) had arrived at the stadium for the first game of the World Series only to realize he had left his ticket at home. Not wanting to miss any of the first inning, he went to the ticket booth and got in a long line for another seat. After an hour's wait he was just a few feet from the booth when a voice called out, "Hey, Dave!" The Aggie looked up, stepped out of line and tried to find the owner of the voice -- with no success. Then he realized he had lost his place in line and had to wait all over again. When the fan finally bought his ticket, he was thirsty, so he went to buy a drink. The line at the concession stand was long, too, but since the game hadn't started he decided to wait. Just as he got to the window, a voice called out, "Hey, Dave!" Again the Aggie tried to find the voice -- but no luck. He was very upset as he got back in line for his drink. Finally the fan went to his seat, eager for the game to begin. As he waited for the pitch, he heard the voice calling, "Hey Dave!" once more. Furious, he stood up and yelled at the top of his lungs, "My name isn't Dave!" | |
When I saw a sign on the freeway that said, "Los Angeles 445 miles," I said to myself, "I've got to get out of this lane." -- Franklyn Ajaye | |
Would the last person to leave Michigan please turn out the lights? | |
(1) Never draw what you can copy. (2) Never copy what you can trace. (3) Never trace what you can cut out and paste down. | |
(1) X=Y ; Given (2) X^2=XY ; Multiply both sides by X (3) X^2-Y^2=XY-Y^2 ; Subtract Y^2 from both sides (4) (X+Y)(X-Y)=Y(X-Y) ; Factor (5) X+Y=Y ; Cancel out (X-Y) term (6) 2Y=Y ; Substitute X for Y, by equation 1 (7) 2=1 ; Divide both sides by Y -- "Omni", proof that 2 equals 1 | |
A bunch of Polish scientists decided to flee their repressive government by hijacking an airliner and forcing the pilot to fly them to the West. They drove to the airport, forced their way on board a large passenger jet, and found there was no pilot on board. Terrified, they listened as the sirens got louder. Finally, one of the scientists suggested that since he was an experimentalist, he would try to fly the aircraft. He sat down at the controls and tried to figure them out. The sirens got louder and louder. Armed men surrounded the jet. The would be pilot's friends cried out, "Please, please take off now!!! Hurry!!!" The experimentalist calmly replied, "Have patience. I'm just a simple pole in a complex plane." | |
A mathematician, a doctor, and an engineer are walking on the beach and observe a team of lifeguards pumping the stomach of a drowned woman. As they watch, water, sand, snails and such come out of the pump. The doctor watches for a while and says: "Keep pumping, men, you may yet save her!!" The mathematician does some calculations and says: "According to my understanding of the size of that pump, you have already pumped more water from her body than could be contained in a cylinder 4 feet in diameter and 6 feet high." The engineer says: "I think she's sitting in a puddle." | |
A Severe Strain on the Credulity As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt... for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. -- New York Times Editorial, 1920 | |
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!" | |
After this was written there appeared a remarkable posthumous memoir that throws some doubt on Millikan's leading role in these experiments. Harvey Fletcher (1884-1981), who was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, at Millikan's suggestion worked on the measurement of electronic charge for his doctoral thesis, and co-authored some of the early papers on this subject with Millikan. Fletcher left a manuscript with a friend with instructions that it be published after his death; the manuscript was published in Physics Today, June 1982, page 43. In it, Fletcher claims that he was the first to do the experiment with oil drops, was the first to measure charges on single droplets, and may have been the first to suggest the use of oil. According to Fletcher, he had expected to be co-authored with Millikan on the crucial first article announcing the measurement of the electronic charge, but was talked out of this by Millikan. -- Steven Weinberg, "The Discovery of Subatomic Particles" Robert Millikan is generally credited with making the first really precise measurement of the charge on an electron and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923. | |
Always leave room to add an explanation if it doesn't work out. | |
An American scientist once visited the offices of the great Nobel prize winning physicist, Niels Bohr, in Copenhagen. He was amazed to find that over Bohr's desk was a horseshoe, securely nailed to the wall, with the open end up in the approved manner (so it would catch the good luck and not let it spill out). The American said with a nervous laugh, "Surely you don't believe the horseshoe will bring you good luck, do you, Professor Bohr? After all, as a scientist --" Bohr chuckled. "I believe no such thing, my good friend. Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such foolish nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not." | |
Back in the early 60's, touch tone phones only had 10 buttons. Some military versions had 16, while the 12 button jobs were used only by people who had "diva" (digital inquiry, voice answerback) systems -- mainly banks. Since in those days, only Western Electric made "data sets" (modems) the problems of terminology were all Bell System. We used to struggle with written descriptions of dial pads that were unfamiliar to most people (most phones were rotary then.) Partly in jest, some AT&T engineering types (there was no marketing in the good old days, which is why they were the good old days) made up the term "octalthorpe" (note spelling) to denote the "pound sign." Presumably because it has 8 points sticking out. It never really caught on. | |
Chapter 2: Newtonian Growth and Decay The growth-decay formulas were developed in the trivial fashion by Isaac Newton's famous brother Phigg. His idea was to provide an equation that would describe a quantity that would dwindle and dwindle, but never quite reach zero. Historically, he was merely trying to work out his mortgage. Another versatile equation also emerged, one which would define a function that would continue to grow, but never reach unity. This equation can be applied to charging capacitors, over-damped springs, and the human race in general. | |
Congratulations! You have purchased an extremely fine device that would give you thousands of years of trouble-free service, except that you undoubtably will destroy it via some typical bonehead consumer maneuver. Which is why we ask you to PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE READ THIS OWNER'S MANUAL CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU UNPACK THE DEVICE. YOU ALREADY UNPACKED IT, DIDN'T YOU? YOU UNPACKED IT AND PLUGGED IT IN AND TURNED IT ON AND FIDDLED WITH THE KNOBS, AND NOW YOUR CHILD, THE SAME CHILD WHO ONCE SHOVED A POLISH SAUSAGE INTO YOUR VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDER AND SET IT ON "FAST FORWARD", THIS CHILD ALSO IS FIDDLING WITH THE KNOBS, RIGHT? AND YOU'RE JUST NOW STARTING TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS, RIGHT??? WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST BREAK THESE DEVICES RIGHT AT THE FACTORY BEFORE WE SHIP THEM OUT, YOU KNOW THAT? -- Dave Barry, "Read This First!" | |
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. There are many examples of outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies, but they prevailed with irrefutable data. More often, egregious findings that contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts. I have argued that accepting psychic powers, reincarnation, "cosmic conciousness," and the like, would entail fundamental revisions of the foundations of neuroscience. Before abandoning materialist theories of mind that have paid handsome dividends, we should insist on better evidence for psi phenomena than presently exists, especially when neurology and psychology themselves offer more plausible alternatives. -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Conciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena". | |
Fortunately, the responsibility for providing evidence is on the part of the person making the claim, not the critic. It is not the responsibility of UFO skeptics to prove that a UFO has never existed, nor is it the responsibility of paranormal-health-claims skeptics to prove that crystals or colored lights never healed anyone. The skeptic's role is to point out claims that are not adequately supported by acceptable evidcence and to provide plausible alternative explanations that are more in keeping with the accepted body of scientific evidence. -- Thomas L. Creed, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 2, pg. 215 | |
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?" | |
How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else. -- R. Buckminster Fuller | |
I put up my thumb... and it blotted out the planet Earth. -- Neil Armstrong | |
"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 | |
I'm often asked the question, "Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelli- gence?" I give the standard arguments -- there are a lot of places out there, and use the word *billions*, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I'm asked, "Yeah, but what do you really think?" I say, "I just told you what I really think." "Yeah, but what's your gut feeling?" But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. -- Carl Sagan | |
If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make something out of you. -- Muhammad Ali | |
IN MY OPINION anyone interested in improving himself should not rule out becoming pure energy. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988. | |
In order to dial out, it is necessary to broaden one's dimension. | |
In the beginning there was only one kind of Mathematician, created by the Great Mathamatical Spirit form the Book: the Topologist. And they grew to large numbers and prospered. One day they looked up in the heavens and desired to reach up as far as the eye could see. So they set out in building a Mathematical edifice that was to reach up as far as "up" went. Further and further up they went ... until one night the edifice collapsed under the weight of paradox. The following morning saw only rubble where there once was a huge structure reaching to the heavens. One by one, the Mathematicians climbed out from under the rubble. It was a miracle that nobody was killed; but when they began to speak to one another, SUPRISE of all suprises! they could not understand each other. They all spoke different languages. They all fought amongst themselves and each went about their own way. To this day the Topologists remain the original Mathematicians. -- The Story of Babel | |
Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs. -- Fran Lebowitz | |
Of course you can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. After a while you'd run out of air to push against. | |
One day this guy is finally fed up with his middle-class existence and decides to do something about it. He calls up his best friend, who is a mathematical genius. "Look," he says, "do you suppose you could find some way mathematically of guaranteeing winning at the race track? We could make a lot of money and retire and enjoy life." The mathematician thinks this over a bit and walks away mumbling to himself. A week later his friend drops by to ask the genius if he's had any success. The genius, looking a little bleary-eyed, replies, "Well, yes, actually I do have an idea, and I'm reasonably sure that it will work, but there a number of details to be figured out. After the second week the mathematician appears at his friend's house, looking quite a bit rumpled, and announces, "I think I've got it! I still have some of the theory to work out, but now I'm certain that I'm on the right track." At the end of the third week the mathematician wakes his friend by pounding on his door at three in the morning. He has dark circles under his eyes. His hair hasn't been combed for many days. He appears to be wearing the same clothes as the last time. He has several pencils sticking out from behind his ears and an almost maniacal expression on his face. "WE CAN DO IT! WE CAN DO IT!!" he shrieks. "I have discovered the perfect solution!! And it's so EASY! First, we assume that horses are perfect spheres in simple harmonic motion..." | |
One has to look out for engineers -- they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb. -- Marcel Pagnol | |
Review Questions (1) If Nerd on the planet Nutley starts out in his spaceship at 20 KPH, and his speed doubles every 3.2 seconds, how long will it be before he exceeds the speed of light? How long will it be before the Galactic Patrol picks up the pieces of his spaceship? (2) If Roger Rowdy wrecks his car every week, and each week he breaks twice as many bones as before, how long will it be before he breaks every bone in his body? How long will it be before they cut off his insurance? Where does he get a new car every week? (3) If Johnson drinks one beer the first hour (slow start), four beers the next hour, nine beers the next, etc., and stacks the cans in a pyramid, how soon will Johnson's pyramid be larger than King Tut's? When will it fall on him? Will he notice? | |
So as your consumer electronics adviser, I am advising you to donate your current VCR to a grate resident, who will laugh sardonically and hurl it into a dumpster. Then I want you to go out and purchase a vast array of 8-millimeter video equipment. ... OK! Got everything? Well, *too bad, sucker*, because while you were gone the electronics industry came up with an even newer format that makes your 8-millimeter VCR look as technologically advanced as toenail dirt. This format is called "3.5 hectare" and it will not be made available until it is outmoded, sometime early next week, by a format called "Elroy", so *order yours now*. -- Dave Barry, "No Surrender in the Electronics Revolution" | |
The ark lands after The Flood. Noah lets all the animals out. Says he, "Go and multiply." Several months pass. Noah decides to check up on the animals. All are doing fine except a pair of snakes. "What's the problem?" says Noah. "Cut down some trees and let us live there", say the snakes. Noah follows their advice. Several more weeks pass. Noah checks on the snakes again. Lots of little snakes, everybody is happy. Noah asks, "Want to tell me how the trees helped?" "Certainly", say the snakes. "We're adders, and we need logs to multiply." | |
The Commandments of the EE: (9) Trifle thee not with radioactive tubes and substances lest thou commence to glow in the dark like a lightning bug, and thy wife be frustrated and have not further use for thee except for thy wages. (10) Commit thou to memory all the words of the prophets which are written down in thy Bible which is the National Electrical Code, and giveth out with the straight dope and consoleth thee when thou hast suffered a ream job by the chief electrician. (11) When thou muckest about with a device in an unthinking and/or unknowing manner, thou shalt keep one hand in thy pocket. Better that thou shouldest keep both hands in thy pockets than experimentally determine the electrical potential of an innocent-seeming device. | |
The Man Who Almost Invented The Vacuum Cleaner The man officially credited with inventing the vacuum cleaner is Hubert Cecil Booth. However, he got the idea from a man who almost invented it. In 1901 Booth visited a London music-hall. On the bill was an American inventor with his wonder machine for removing dust from carpets. The machine comprised a box about one foot square with a bag on top. After watching the act -- which made everyone in the front six rows sneeze -- Booth went round to the inventor's dressing room. "It should suck not blow," said Booth, coming straight to the point. "Suck?", exclaimed the enraged inventor. "Your machine just moves the dust around the room," Booth informed him. "Suck? Suck? Sucking is not possible," was the inventor's reply and he stormed out. Booth proved that it was by the simple expedient of kneeling down, pursing his lips and sucking the back of an armchair. "I almost choked," he said afterwards. -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
The marvels of today's modern technology include the development of a soda can, when discarded will last forever ... and a $7,000 car which when properly cared for will rust out in two or three years. | |
The problem ... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with. Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil using other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle Eastern countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats, etc., but so far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous bulldozer-rental bill and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons. None of the animals turned into oil, although most of the laboratory rats developed cancer. -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler" | |
There was a mad scientist (a mad... social... scientist) who kidnapped three colleagues, an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician, and locked each of them in seperate cells with plenty of canned food and water but no can opener. A month later, returning, the mad scientist went to the engineer's cell and found it long empty. The engineer had constructed a can opener from pocket trash, used aluminum shavings and dried sugar to make an explosive, and escaped. The physicist had worked out the angle necessary to knock the lids off the tin cans by throwing them against the wall. She was developing a good pitching arm and a new quantum theory. The mathematician had stacked the unopened cans into a surprising solution to the kissing problem; his dessicated corpse was propped calmly against a wall, and this was inscribed on the floor: Theorem: If I can't open these cans, I'll die. Proof: assume the opposite... | |
This isn't true in practice -- what we've missed out is Stradivarius's constant. And then the aside: "For those of you who don't know, that's been called by others the fiddle factor..." -- From a 1B Electrical Engineering lecture. | |
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Two men are in a hot-air balloon. Soon, they find themselves lost in a canyon somewhere. One of the three men says, "I've got an idea. We can call for help in this canyon and the echo will carry our voices to the end of the canyon. Someone's bound to hear us by then!" So he leans over the basket and screams out, "Helllloooooo! Where are we?" (They hear the echo several times). Fifteen minutes later, they hear this echoing voice: "Helllloooooo! You're lost!" The shouter comments, "That must have been a mathematician." Puzzled, his friend asks, "Why do you say that?" "For three reasons. First, he took a long time to answer, second, he was absolutely correct, and, third, his answer was absolutely useless." | |
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -- Bertrand Russell, "Skeptical Essays", 1928 | |
When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the stars were lined up in their proper places, you could easily count them from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were set apart, and the smaller yellowing types pushed off to the corners as bodies of a lower grade ... -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" | |
While the engineer developed his thesis, the director leaned over to his assistant and whispered, "Did you ever hear of why the sea is salt?" "Why the sea is salt?" whispered back the assistant. "What do you mean?" The director continued: "When I was a little kid, I heard the story of `Why the sea is salt' many times, but I never thought it important until just a moment ago. It's something like this: Formerly the sea was fresh water and salt was rare and expensive. A miller received from a wizard a wonderful machine that just ground salt out of itself all day long. At first the miller thought himself the most fortunate man in the world, but soon all the villages had salt to last them for centuries and still the machine kept on grinding more salt. The miller had to move out of his house, he had to move off his acres. At last he determined that he would sink the machine in the sea and be rid of it. But the mill ground so fast that boat and miller and machine were sunk together, and down below, the mill still went on grinding and that's why the sea is salt." "I don't get you," said the assistant. -- Guy Endore, "Men of Iron" | |
"Yeah, but you're taking the universe out of context." | |
"Yo, Mike!" "Yeah, Gabe?" "We got a problem down on Earth. In Utah." "I thought you fixed that last century!" "No, no, not that. Someone's found a security problem in the physics program. They're getting energy out of nowhere." "Blessit! Lemme look... <tappity clickity tappity> Hey, it's there all right! OK, just a sec... <tappity clickity tap... save... compile> There, that ought to patch it. Dist it out, wouldja?" -- Cold Fusion, 1989 | |
Fortune's Contribution of the Month to the Animal Rights Debate: I'll stay out of animals' way if they'll stay out of mine. "Hey you, get off my plate" -- Roger Midnight | |
I couldn't remember when I had been so disappointed. Except perhaps the time I found out that M&Ms really DO melt in your hand. -- Peter Oakley | |
MOCK APPLE PIE (No Apples Needed) Pastry to two crust 9-inch pie 36 RITZ Crackers 2 cups water 2 cups sugar 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 2 tablespoons lemon juice Grated rind of one lemon Butter or margarine Cinnamon Roll out bottom crust of pastry and fit into 9-inch pie plate. Break RITZ Crackers coarsely into pastry-lined plate. Combine water, sugar and cream of tartar in saucepan, boil gently for 15 minutes. Add lemon juice and rind. Cool. Pour this syrup over Crackers, dot generously with butter or margarine and sprinkle with cinnamon. Cover with top crust. Trim and flute edges together. Cut slits in top crust to let steam escape. Bake in a hot oven (425 F) 30 to 35 minutes, until crust is crisp and golden. Serve warm. Cut into 6 to 8 slices. -- Found lurking on a Ritz Crackers box | |
Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love. -- Charlie Brown | |
The basic menu item, in fact the ONLY menu item, would be a food unit called the "patty," consisting of -- this would be guaranteed in writing -- "100 percent animal matter of some kind." All patties would be heated up and then cooled back down in electronic devices immediately before serving. The Breakfast Patty would be a patty on a bun with lettuce, tomato, onion, egg, Ba-Ko-Bits, Cheez Whiz, a Special Sauce made by pouring ketchup out of a bottle and a little slip of paper stating: "Inspected by Number 12." The Lunch or Dinner Patty would be any Breakfast Patties that didn't get sold in the morning. The Seafood Lover's Patty would be any patties that were starting to emit a serious aroma. Patties that were too rank even to be Seafood Lover's Patties would be compressed into wads and sold as "Nuggets." -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants" | |
The Kosher Dill was invented in 1723 by Joe Kosher and Sam Dill. It is the single most popular pickle variety today, enjoyed throughout the free world by man, woman and child alike. An astounding 350 billion kosher dills are eaten each year, averaging out to almost 1/4 pickle per person per day. New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton says "The kosher dill really changed my life. I used to enjoy eating McDonald's hamburgers and drinking Iron City Lite, and then I encountered the kosher dill pickle. I realized that there was far more to haute cuisine then I'd ever imagined. And now, just look at me." | |
The number of licorice gumballs you get out of a gumball machine increases in direct proportion to how much you hate licorice. | |
... This striving for excellence extends into people's personal lives as well. When '80s people buy something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability. Eighties people buy imported dental floss. They buy gourmet baking soda. If an '80s couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent restaurant. If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of excellence-oriented people like themselves waiting, their beepers going off like crickets in the night. An excellent restaurant wouldn't have a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli. -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence" | |
What is important is food, money and opportunities for scoring off one's enemies. Give a man these three things and you won't hear much squawking out of him. -- Brian O'Nolan, "The Best of Myles" | |
When you're dining out and you suspect something's wrong, you're probably right. | |
You should tip the waiter $10, minus $2 if he tells you his name, another $2 if he claims it will be His Pleasure to serve you and another $2 for each "special" he describes involving confusing terms such as "shallots," and $4 if the menu contains the word "fixin's." In many restaurants, this means the waiter will actually owe you money. If you are traveling with a child aged six months to three years, you should leave an additional amount equal to twice the bill to compensate for the fact that they will have to take the banquette out and burn it because the cracks are wedged solid with gobbets made of partially chewed former restaurant rolls saturated with baby spit. In New York, tip the taxicab driver $40 if he does not mention his hemorrhoids. -- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette" | |
A is for awk, which runs like a snail, and B is for biff, which reads all your mail. C is for cc, as hackers recall, while D is for dd, the command that does all. E is for emacs, which rebinds your keys, and F is for fsck, which rebuilds your trees. G is for grep, a clever detective, while H is for halt, which may seem defective. I is for indent, which rarely amuses, and J is for join, which nobody uses. K is for kill, which makes you the boss, while L is for lex, which is missing from DOS. M is for more, from which less was begot, and N is for nice, which it really is not. O is for od, which prints out things nice, while P is for passwd, which reads in strings twice. Q is for quota, a Berkeley-type fable, and R is for ranlib, for sorting ar table. S is for spell, which attempts to belittle, while T is for true, which does very little. U is for uniq, which is used after sort, and V is for vi, which is hard to abort. W is for whoami, which tells you your name, while X is, well, X, of dubious fame. Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and Z is for zcat, which handles compression. -- THE ABC'S OF UNIX | |
An Hacker there was, one of the finest sort Who controlled the system; graphics was his sport. A manly man, to be a wizard able; Many a protected file he had sitting on his table. His console, when he typed, a man might hear Clicking and feeping wind as clear, Aye, and as loud as does the machine room bell Where my lord Hacker was Prior of the cell. The Rule of good St Savage or St Doeppnor As old and strict he tended to ignore; He let go by the things of yesterday And took the modern world's more spacious way. He did not rate that text as a plucked hen Which says that Hackers are not holy men. And that a hacker underworked is a mere Fish out of water, flapping on the pier. That is to say, a hacker out of his cloister. That was a text he held not worth an oyster. And I agreed and said his views were sound; Was he to study till his head wend round Poring over books in the cloisters? Must he toil As Andy bade and till the very soil? Was he to leave the world upon the shelf? Let Andy have his labor to himself! -- Chaucer [well, almost. Ed.] | |
And here I wait so patiently Waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of Going thru all of these things twice -- Dylan, "Memphis Blues Again" | |
And I heard Jeff exclaim, As they strolled out of sight, "Merry Christmas to all -- You take credit cards, right?" -- "Outsiders" comic | |
And if you wonder, What I am doing, As I am heading for the sink. I am spitting out all the bitterness, Along with half of my last drink. | |
...and report cards I was always afraid to show Mama'd come to school and as I'd sit there softly cryin' Teacher'd say he's just not tryin' Got a good head if he'd apply it but you know yourself it's always somewhere else I'd build me a castle with dragons and kings and I'd ride off with them As I stood by my window and looked out on those Brooklyn roads -- Neil Diamond, "Brooklyn Roads" | |
Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy. -- Tom Lehrer | |
Boy, get your head out of the stars above, You get the maximum pleasure from a minimum of love. Save your heart and let your body be enough, To get the maximum pleasure from a minimum of love. Save your heart and let your body be enough, And get the maximum pleasure from a minimum of love. -- Mac Macinelli, "Minimum Love" | |
Buzz off, Banana Nose; Relieve mine eyes Of hateful soreness, purge mine ears of corn; Less dear than army ants in apple pies Art thou, old prune-face, with thy chestnuts worn, Dropt from thy peeling lips like lousy fruit; Like honeybees upon the perfum'd rose They suck, and like the double-breasted suit Are out of date; therefore, Banana Nose, Go fly a kite, thy welcome's overstayed; And stem the produce of thy waspish wits: Thy logick, like thy locks, is disarrayed; Thy cheer, like thy complexion, is the pits. Be off, I say; go bug somebody new, Scram, beat it, get thee hence, and nuts to you. | |
Cecil, you're my final hope Of finding out the true Straight Dope For I have been reading of Schrodinger's cat But none of my cats are at all like that. This unusual animal (so it is said) Is simultaneously alive and dead! What I don't understand is just why he Can't be one or the other, unquestionably. My future now hangs in between eigenstates. In one I'm enlightened, in the other I ain't. If *you* understand, Cecil, then show me the way And rescue my psyche from quantum decay. But if this queer thing has perplexed even you, Then I will *___and* I won't see you in Schrodinger's zoo. -- Randy F., Chicago, "The Straight Dope, a compendium of human knowledge" by Cecil Adams | |
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 | |
Despising machines to a man, The Luddites joined up with the Klan, And ride out by night In a sheeting of white To lynch all the robots they can. -- C. M. and G. A. Maxson | |
Even in the moment of our earliest kiss, When sighed the straitened bud into the flower, Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this; And that I knew, though not the day and hour. Too season-wise am I, being country-bred, To tilt at autumn or defy the frost: Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did, I say with them, "What's out tonight is lost." I only hoped, with the mild hope of all Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree, A fairer summer and a later fall Than in these parts a man is apt to see, And sunny clusters ripened for the wine: I tell you this across the blackened vine. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Even in the Moment of Our Earliest Kiss", 1931 | |
Five names that I can hardly stand to hear, Including yours and mine and one more chimp who isn't here, I can see the ladies talking how the times is gettin' hard, And that fearsome excavation on Magnolia boulevard, Yes, I'm goin' insane, And I'm laughing at the frozen rain, Well, I'm so alone, honey when they gonna send me home? Bad sneakers and a pina colada my friend, Stopping on the avenue by Radio City, with a Transistor and a large sum of money to spend... You fellah, you tearin' up the street, You wear that white tuxedo, how you gonna beat the heat, Do you take me for a fool, do you think that I don't see, That ditch out in the Valley that they're diggin' just for me, Yes, and goin' insane, You know I'm laughin' at the frozen rain, Feel like I'm so alone, honey when they gonna send me home? (chorus) -- Bad Sneakers, "Steely Dan" | |
Get out, you old Wight! Vanish in the sunlight! Shrivel like the cold mist, like the winds go wailing, Out into the barren lands far beyond the mountains! Come never here again! Leave your barrow empty! Lost and forgotten be, darker than the darkness, Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is mended. -- J. R. R. Tolkien | |
Got a wife and kids in Baltimore Jack, I went out for a ride and never came back. Like a river that don't know where it's flowing, I took a wrong turn and I just kept going. Everybody's got a hungry heart. Everybody's got a hungry heart. Lay down your money and you play your part, Everybody's got a hungry heart. I met her in a Kingstown bar, We fell in love, I knew it had to end. We took what we had and we ripped it apart, Now here I am down in Kingstown again. Everybody needs a place to rest, Everybody wants to have a home. Don't make no difference what nobody says, Ain't nobody likes to be alone. -- Bruce Springsteen, "Hungry Heart" | |
"Had he and I but met By some old ancient inn, But ranged as infantry, We should have sat us down to wet And staring face to face, Right many a nipperkin! I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place. I shot him dead because -- Because he was my foe, He thought he'd 'list, perhaps, Just so: my foe of course he was; Off-hand-like -- just as I -- That's clear enough; although Was out of work -- had sold his traps No other reason why. Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You'd treat, if met where any bar is Or help to half-a-crown." -- Thomas Hardy | |
Hark, the Herald Tribune sings, Advertising wondrous things. Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy. -- Tom Lehrer | |
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... | |
Hop along my little friends, up the Withywindle! Tom's going on ahead candles for to kindle. Down west sinks the Sun; soon you will be groping. When the night-shadows fall, then the door will open, Out of the winfow-panes light will twinkle yellow. Fear no alder black! Heed no hoary willow! Fear neither root nor bough! Tom goes on before you. Hey now! merry dol! We'll be waiting for you! -- J. R. R. Tolkien | |
How doth the VAX's C-compiler Improve its object code. And even as we speak does it Increase the system load. How patiently it seems to run And spit out error flags, While users, with frustration, all Tear their clothes to rags. | |
I always will remember -- I was in no mood to trifle; 'Twas a year ago November -- I got down my trusty rifle I went out to shoot some deer And went out to stalk my prey -- On a morning bright and clear. What a haul I made that day! I went and shot the maximum I tied them to my bumper and The game laws would allow: I drove them home somehow, Two game wardens, seven hunters, Two game wardens, seven hunters, And a cow. And a cow. The Law was very firm, it People ask me how I do it Took away my permit-- And I say, "There's nothin' to it! The worst punishment I ever endured. You just stand there lookin' cute, It turns out there was a reason: And when something moves, you shoot." Cows were out of season, and And there's ten stuffed heads One of the hunters wasn't insured. In my trophy room right now: Two game wardens, seven hunters, And a pure-bred guernsey cow. -- Tom Lehrer, "The Hunting Song" | |
I am changing my name to Chrysler I am going down to Washington, D.C. I will tell some power broker What they did for Iacocca Will be perfectly acceptable to me! I am changing my name to Chrysler, I am heading for that great receiving line. When they hand a million grand out, I'll be standing with my hand out, Yessir, I'll get mine! | |
I can see him a'comin' With his big boots on, With his big thumb out, He wants to get me. He wants to hurt me. He wants to bring me down. But some time later, When I feel a little straighter, I'll come across a stranger Who'll remind me of the danger, And then.... I'll run him over. Pretty smart on my part! To find my way... In the dark! -- Phil Ochs | |
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed. The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow-- Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow; For he sometimes shoots up taller, like an india-rubber ball, And he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all. -- R.L. Stevenson | |
I lately lost a preposition; It hid, I thought, beneath my chair And angrily I cried, "Perdition! Up from out of under there." Correctness is my vade mecum, And straggling phrases I abhor, And yet I wondered, "What should he come Up from out of under for?" -- Morris Bishop | |
I think that I shall never see A thing as lovely as a tree. But as you see the trees have gone They went this morning with the dawn. A logging firm from out of town Came and chopped the trees all down. But I will trick those dirty skunks And write a brand new poem called 'Trunks'. | |
I used to be such a sweet sweet thing, 'til they got a hold of me, I opened doors for little old ladies, I helped the blind to see, I got no friends 'cause they read the papers, they can't be seen, With me, and I'm feelin' real shot down, And I'm, uh, feelin' mean, No more, Mr. Nice Guy, No more, Mr. Clean, No more, Mr. Nice Guy, They say "He's sick, he's obscene". My dog bit me on the leg today, my cat clawed my eyes, Ma's been thrown out of the social circle, and Dad has to hide, I went to church, incognito, when everybody rose, The reverend Smithy, he recognized me, And punched me in the nose, he said, (chorus) He said "You're sick, you're obscene". -- Alice Cooper, "No More Mr. Nice Guy" | |
I was eatin' some chop suey, With a lady in St. Louie, When there sudden comes a knockin' at the door. And that knocker, he says, "Honey, Roll this rocker out some money, Or your daddy shoots a baddie to the floor." -- Mr. Miggle | |
I went home with a waitress, The way I always do. How I was I to know? She was with the Russians too. I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk. Send lawyers, guns, and money, Dad, get me out of this. -- Warren Zevon, "Lawyers, Guns and Money" | |
I would like to know What I was fencing in And what I was fencing out. -- Robert Frost | |
I'm an artist. But it's not what I really want to do. What I really want to do is be a shoe salesman. I know what you're going to say -- "Dreamer! Get your head out of the clouds." All right! But it's what I want to do. Instead I have to go on painting all day long. The world should make a place for shoe salesmen. -- J. Feiffer | |
I've built a better model than the one at Data General For data bases vegetable, animal, and mineral My OS handles CPUs with multiplexed duality; My PL/1 compiler shows impressive functionality. My storage system's better than magnetic core polarity, You never have to bother checking out a bit for parity; There isn't any reason to install non-static floor matting; My disk drive has capacity for variable formatting. I feel compelled to mention what I know to be a gloating point: There's lots of room in memory for variables floating-point, Which shows for input vegetable, animal, and mineral I've built a better model than the one at Data General. -- Steve Levine, "A Computer Song" (To the tune of "Modern Major General", from "Pirates of Penzance", by Gilbert & Sullivan) | |
If Dr. Seuss Were a Technical Writer..... Here's an easy game to play. Here's an easy thing to say: If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report! If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash! You can't say this? What a shame, sir! We'll find you another game, sir. If the label on the cable on the table at your house, Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol, That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse, Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, 'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang! When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk, And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc, Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to ram your rom. Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom! -- DementDJ@ccip.perkin-elmer.com (DementDJ) [rec.humor.funny] | |
If I could read your mind, love, What a tale your thoughts could tell, Just like a paperback novel, The kind the drugstore sells, When you reach the part where the heartaches come, The hero would be me, Heroes often fail, You won't read that book again, because the ending is just too hard to take. I walk away, like a movie star, Who gets burned in a three way script, Enter number two, A movie queen to play the scene Of bringing all the good things out in me, But for now, love, let's be real I never thought I could act this way, And I've got to say that I just don't get it, I don't know where we went wrong but the feeling is gone And I just can't get it back... -- Gordon Lightfoot, "If You Could Read My Mind" | |
In high school in Brooklyn I was the baseball manager, proud as I could be I chased baseballs, gathered thrown bats handed out the towels Eventually, I bought my own It was very important work but it was dark blue while for a small spastic kid, the official ones were green but I was a team member Nobody ever said anything When the team got to me about my blue jacket; their warm-up jackets the guys were my friends I didn't get one Yet it hurt me all year Only the regular team to wear that blue jacket got these jackets, and among all those green ones surely not a manager Even now, forty years after, I still recall that jacket and the memory goes on hurting. -- Bart Lanier Safford III, "An Obscured Radiance" | |
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad" | |
Into love and out again, Thus I went and thus I go. Spare your voice, and hold your pen: Well and bitterly I know All the songs were ever sung, All the words were ever said; Could it be, when I was young, Someone dropped me on my head? -- Dorothy Parker, "Theory" | |
Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone, Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you, I went out this morning and I wrote down this song, Just can't remember who to send it to... Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain, I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end, I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend, But I always thought that I'd see you again. Thought I'd see you one more time again. -- James Taylor, "Fire and Rain" | |
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. | |
Let us go then you and I while the night is laid out against the sky like a smear of mustard on an old pork pie. "Nice poem Tom. I have ideas for changes though, why not come over?" -- Ezra | |
Like corn in a field I cut you down, I threw the last punch way too hard, After years of going steady, well, I thought it was time, To throw in my hand for a new set of cards. And I can't take you dancing out on the weekend, I figured we'd painted too much of this town, And I tried not to look as I walked to my wagon, And I knew then I had lost what should have been found, I knew then I had lost what should have been found. And I feel like a bullet in the gun of Robert Ford I'm as low as a paid assassin is You know I'm cold as a hired sword. I'm so ashamed we can't patch it up, You know I can't think straight no more You make me feel like a bullet, honey, a bullet in the gun of Robert Ford. -- Elton John "I Feel Like a Bullet" | |
My analyst told me that I was right out of my head, But I said, "Dear Doctor, I think that it is you instead. Because I have got a thing that is unique and new, To prove it I'll have the last laugh on you. 'Cause instead of one head -- I've got two. And you know two heads are better than one. | |
My My, hey hey Rock and roll is here to stay The king is gone but he's not forgotten It's better to burn out This is the story of a Johnny Rotten Than to fade away It's better to burn out than it is to rust My my, hey hey The king is gone but he's not forgotten It's out of the blue and into the black Hey hey, my my They give you this, but you pay for that Rock and roll can never die And once you're gone you can never come back There's more to the picture When you're out of the blue Than meets the eye And into the black -- Neil Young "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), Rust Never Sleeps" | |
Near the Studio Jean Cocteau On the Rue des Ecoles lived an old man with a blind dog Every evening I would see him guiding the dog along the sidewalk, keeping a firm grip on the leash so that the dog wouldn't run into a passerby Sometimes the dog would stop and look up at the sky Once the old man noticed me watching the dog and he said, "Oh, yes, this one knows when the moon is out, he can feel it on his face" -- Barry Gifford | |
No plain fanfold paper could hold that fractal Puff -- He grew so fast no plotting pack could shrink him far enough. Compiles and simulations grew so quickly tame And swapped out all their data space when Puff pushed his stack frame. (refrain) Puff, he grew so quickly, while others moved like snails And mini-Puffs would perch themselves on his gigantic tail. All the student hackers loved that fractal Puff But DCS did not like Puff, and finally said, "Enough!" (refrain) Puff used more resources than DCS could spare. The operator killed Puff's job -- he didn't seem to care. A gloom fell on the hackers; it seemed to be the end, But Puff trapped the exception, and grew from naught again! (refrain) Refrain: Puff the fractal dragon was written in C, And frolicked while processes switched in mainframe memory. Puff the fractal dragon was written in C, And frolicked while processes switched in mainframe memory. | |
"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 | |
Nothing that's forced can ever be right, If it doesn't come naturally, leave it. That's what she said as she turned out the light, And we bent our backs as slaves of the night, Then she lowered her guard and showed me the scars She got from trying to fight Saying, oh, you'd better believe it. [...] Well nothing that's real is ever for free And you just have to pay for it sometime. She said it before, she said it to me, I suppose she believed there was nothing to see, But the same old four imaginary walls She'd built for livin' inside I said oh, you just can't mean it. [...] Well nothing that's forced can ever be right, If it doesn't come naturally, leave it. That's what she said as she turned out the light, And she may have been wrong, and she may have been right, But I woke with the frost, and noticed she'd lost The veil that covered her eyes, I said oh, you can leave it. -- Al Stewart, "If It Doesn't Come Naturally, Leave It" | |
Oh give me your pity! I'm on a committee, We attend and amend Which means that from morning And contend and defend to night, Without a conclusion in sight. We confer and concur, We defer and demur, We revise the agenda And reiterate all of our thoughts. With frequent addenda And consider a load of reports. We compose and propose, We suppose and oppose, But though various notions And the points of procedure are fun; Are brought up as motions, There's terribly little gets done. We resolve and absolve; But we never dissolve, Since it's out of the question for us To bring our committee To end like this ditty, Which stops with a period, thus. -- Leslie Lipson, "The Committee" | |
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a 4BSD? My friends all got sources, so why can't I see? Come all you moby hackers, come sing it out with me: To hell with the lawyers from AT&T! | |
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus Where the three-body problem is solved, Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K, And the cold virus never evolved. (chorus) We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high, Our ball bearings are perfectly round. Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed, And a kilogram weighs half a pound. (chorus) If we run out of space for our burgeoning race No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart, If we just find a big enough wrench. (chorus) I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space, And living up here is a bore. Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye 'Cause I'm moving next week to L4! (chorus) CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange, Where the space debris always collects, We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams: Solar power and zero-gee sex. -- to Home on the Range | |
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" | |
Oh, the Slithery Dee, he crawled out of the sea. He may catch all the others, but he won't catch me. No, he won't catch me, stupid ol' Slithery Dee. He may catch all the others, but AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!! -- The Smothers Brothers | |
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" | |
On the good ship Enterprise Every week there's a new surprise Where the Romulans lurk And the Klingons often go berserk. Yes, the good ship Enterprise There's excitement anywhere it flies Where Tribbles play And Nurse Chapel never gets her way. See Captain Kirk standing on the bridge, Mr. Spock is at his side. The weekly menace, ooh-ooh It gets fried, scattered far and wide. It's the good ship Enterprise Heading out where danger lies And you live in dread If you're wearing a shirt that's red. -- Doris Robin and Karen Trimble of The L.A. Filkharmonics, "The Good Ship Enterprise," to the tune of "The Good Ship Lollipop" | |
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! | |
Proposed Country & Western Song Titles I Don't Mind If You Lie to Me, As Long As I Ain't Lyin' Alone I Wouldn't Take You to a Dog Fight Even If I Thought You Could Win If You Leave Me, Walk Out Backwards So I'll Think You're Comin' In Since You Learned to Lip-Sync, I'm At Your Disposal My John Deere Was Breaking Your Field, While Your Dear John Was Breaking My Heart Don't Cry, Little Darlin', You're Waterin' My Beer Tennis Must Be Your Racket, 'Cause Love Means Nothin' to You When You Say You Love Me, You're Full of Prunes, 'Cause Living With You Is the Pits I Wanted Your Hand in Marriage but All I Got Was the Finger -- "Wordplay" | |
Put another password in, Bomb it out, then try again. Try to get past logging in, We're hacking, hacking, hacking. Try his first wife's maiden name, This is more than just a game. It's real fun, but just the same, It's hacking, hacking, hacking. -- To the tune of "Music, Music, Music?" | |
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" | |
Romeo was restless, he was ready to kill, He jumped out the window 'cause he couldn't sit still, Juliet was waiting with a safety net, Said "don't bury me 'cause I ain't dead yet". -- Elvis Costello | |
Scratch the disks, dump the core, Shut it down, pull the plug Roll the tapes across the floor, Give the core an extra tug And the system is going to crash. And the system is going to crash. Teletypes smashed to bits. Mem'ry cards, one and all, Give the scopes some nasty hits Toss out halfway down the hall And the system is going to crash. And the system is going to crash. And we've also found Just flip one switch When you turn the power down, And the lights will cease to twitch You turn the disk readers into trash. And the tape drives will crumble in a flash. Oh, it's so much fun, When the CPU Now the CPU won't run Can print nothing out but "foo," And the system is going to crash. The system is going to crash. -- To the tune of "As the Caissons go Rolling Along" | |
Shift to the left, Shift to the right, Mask in, mask out, BYTE, BYTE, BYTE !!! | |
So, you better watch out! You better not cry! You better not pout! I'm telling you why, Santa Claus is coming, to town. He knows when you've been sleeping, He know when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good, He has ties with the CIA. So... | |
Step back, unbelievers! Or the rain will never come. Somebody keep the fire burning, someone come and beat the drum. You may think I'm crazy, you may think that I'm insane, But I swear to you, before this day is out, you folks are gonna see some rain! | |
The bank called to tell me that I'm overdrawn, Some freaks are burning crosses out on my front lawn, And I *can't*believe* it, all the Cheetos are gone, It's just ONE OF THOSE DAYS! -- Weird Al Yankovic, "One of Those Days" | |
The common cormorant, or shag, Lays eggs inside a paper bag; The reason, you will see, no doubt, Is to keep the lightning out. But what these unobservant birds Have failed to notice is that herds Of bears may come with buns And steal the bags to hold the crumbs. | |
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 morning sun when it's in your face really shows your age, But that don't bother me none; in my eyes you're everything. I know I keep you amused, But I feel I'm being used. Oh, Maggie, I wish I'd never seen your face. You took me away from home, Just to save you from being alone; You stole my heart, and that's what really hurts. I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school, Or steal my daddy's cue and make a living out of playing pool, Or find myself a rock 'n' roll band, That needs a helping hand, Oh, Maggie I wish I'd never seen your face. You made a first-class fool out of me, But I'm as blind as a fool can be. You stole my soul, and that's a pain I can do without. -- Rod Stewart, "Maggie May" | |
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all they Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. | |
The night passes quickly when you're asleep But I'm out shufflin' for something to eat ... Breakfast at the Egg House, Like the waffle on the griddle, I'm burnt around the edges, But I'm tender in the middle. -- Adrian Belew | |
The Worst American Poet Julia Moore, "the Sweet Singer of Michigan" (1847-1920) was so bad that Mark Twain said her first book gave him joy for 20 years. Her verse was mainly concerned with violent death -- the great fire of Chicago and the yellow fever epidemic proved natural subjects for her pen. Whether death was by drowning, by fits or by runaway sleigh, the formula was the same: Have you heard of the dreadful fate Of Mr. P.P. Bliss and wife? Of their death I will relate, And also others lost their life (in the) Ashbula Bridge disaster, Where so many people died. Even if you started out reasonably healthy in one of Julia's poems, the chances are that after a few stanzas you would be at the bottom of a river or struck by lightning. A critic of the day said she was "worse than a Gatling gun" and in one slim volume counted 21 killed and 9 wounded. Incredibly, some newspapers were critical of her work, even suggesting that the sweet singer was "semi-literate". Her reply was forthright: "The Editors that has spoken in this scandalous manner have went beyond reason." She added that "literary work is very difficult to do". -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
The Worst Lines of Verse For a start, we can rule out James Grainger's promising line: "Come, muse, let us sing of rats." Grainger (1721-67) did not have the courage of his convictions and deleted these words on discovering that his listeners dissolved into spontaneous laughter the instant they were read out. No such reluctance afflicted Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-70) who was inspired by the subject of war. "Flash! flash! bang! bang! and we blazed away, And the grey roof reddened and rang; Flash! flash! and I felt his bullet flay The tip of my ear. Flash! bang!" By contrast, Cheshire cheese provoked John Armstrong (1709-79): "... that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste of solid milk..." While John Bidlake was guided by a compassion for vegetables: "The sluggard carrot sleeps his day in bed, The crippled pea alone that cannot stand." George Crabbe (1754-1832) wrote: "And I was ask'd and authorized to go To seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co." William Balmford explored the possibilities of religious verse: "So 'tis with Christians, Nature being weak While in this world, are liable to leak." And William Wordsworth showed that he could do it if he really tried when describing a pond: "I've measured it from side to side; Tis three feet long and two feet wide." -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
The, uh, snowy mountains are like really cold, eh? And the, um, plains stretch out like my moms girdle, eh? There's lotsa beers and doughnuts for everyone, eh? So the last one to be peaceful and everything is a big idiot, Eh? So shut yer face up and dry yer mucklucks by the fire, eh? And dream about girls with their high beams on, eh? They may be cold, but that's okay! Beer's better that way! Eh? -- A, like, Tribute to the Great White North, eh? Beauty! | |
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 | |
To code the impossible code, This is my quest -- To bring up a virgin machine, To debug that code, To pop out of endless recursion, No matter how hopeless, To grok what appears on the screen, No matter the load, To write those routines To right the unrightable bug, Without question or pause, To endlessly twiddle and thrash, To be willing to hack FORTRAN IV To mount the unmountable magtape, For a heavenly cause. To stop the unstoppable crash! And I know if I'll only be true To this glorious quest, And the queue will be better for this, That my code will run CUSPy and calm, That one man, scorned and When it's put to the test. destined to lose, Still strove with his last allocation To scrap the unscrappable kludge! -- To "The Impossible Dream", from Man of La Mancha | |
To write a sonnet you must ruthlessly strip down your words to naked, willing flesh. Then bind them to a metaphor or three, and take by force a satisfying mesh. Arrange them to your will, each foot in place. You are the master here, and they the slaves. Now whip them to maintain a constant pace and rhythm as they stand in even staves. A word that strikes no pleasure? Cast it out! What use are words that drive not to the heart? A lazy phrase? Discard it, shrug off doubt, and choose more docile words to take its part. A well-trained sonnet lives to entertain, by making love directly to the brain. | |
'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" | |
Two men looked out from the prison bars, One saw mud-- The other saw stars. Now let me get this right: two prisoners are looking out the window. While one of them was looking at all the mud -- the other one got hit in the head. | |
Wake up all you citizens, hear your country's call, Not to arms and violence, But peace for one and all. Crush out hate and prejudice, fear and greed and sin, Help bring back her dignity, restore her faith again. Work hard for a common cause, don't let our country fall. Make her proud and strong again, democracy for all. Yes, make our country strong again, keep our flag unfurled. Make our country well again, respected by the world. Make her whole and beautiful, work from sun to sun. Stand tall and labor side by side, because there's so much to be done. Yes, make her whole and beautiful, united strong and free, Wake up, all you citizens, It's up to you and me. -- Pansy Myers Schroeder | |
Watching girls go passing by It ain't the latest thing I'm just standing in a doorway I'm just trying to make some sense Out of these girls passing by A smile relieves the heart that grieves The tales they tell of men Remember what I said I'm not waiting on a lady I'm not waiting on a lady I'm just waiting on a friend I'm just waiting on a friend ... Don't need a whore Don't need no booze Don't need a virgin priest Ooh, making love and breaking hearts But I need someone I can cry to It is a game for youth I need someone to protect But I'm not waiting on a lady I'm just waiting on a friend I'm just waiting on a friend -- Rolling Stones, "Waiting on a Friend" | |
We gotta get out of this place, If it's the last thing we ever do. -- The Animals | |
We've tried each spinning space mote And reckoned its true worth: Take us back again to the homes of men On the cool, green hills of Earth. The arching sky is calling Spacemen back to their trade. All hands! Standby! Free falling! And the lights below us fade. Out ride the sons of Terra, Far drives the thundering jet, Up leaps the race of Earthmen, Out, far, and onward yet-- We pray for one last landing On the globe that gave us birth; Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies And the cool, green hills of Earth. -- Robert A. Heinlein, 1941 | |
What segment's this, that, laid to rest On FHA0, is sleeping? What system file, lay here a while This, this is "acct.run," While hackers around it were weeping? Accounting file for everyone. Dump, dump it and type it out, The file, the highseg of login. Why lies it here, on public disk And why is it now unprotected? A bug in incant, made it thus. Mount, mount all your DECtapes now And copy the file somehow, somehow. The problem has not been corrected. Dump, dump it and type it out, The file, the highseg of login. -- to Greensleeves | |
When the leaders speak of peace The common folk know That war is coming When the leaders curse war The mobilization order is already written out. Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are bought Hopefully I take my place among the sellers. -- Bertolt Brecht, "Hollywood" | |
Be careful! UGLY strikes 9 out of 10! | |
Blow it out your ear. | |
Caution: Keep out of reach of children. | |
Don't get stuck in a closet -- wear yourself out. | |
Don't let your mind wander -- it's too little to be let out alone. | |
Everything that you know is wrong, but you can be straightened out. | |
Truth will out this morning. (Which may really mess things up.) | |
You will be singled out for promotion in your work. | |
You're being followed. Cut out the hanky-panky for a few days. | |
You're growing out of some of your problems, but there are others that you're growing into. | |
Your sister swims out to meet troop ships. | |
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!" | |
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 | |
Football builds self-discipline. What else would induce a spectator to sit out in the open in subfreezing weather? | |
HARVARD: Quarterback: Sophomore Dave Strewzinski... likes to pass. And pass he does, with a record 86 attempts (three completions) in 87 plays.... Though Strewzinksi has so far failed to score any points for the Crimson, his jackrabbit speed has made him the least sacked quarterback in the Ivy league. Wide Receiver: The other directional signal in Harvard's offensive machine is senior Phil Yip, who is very fast. Yip is so fast that he has set a record for being fast. Expect to see Yip elude all pursuers and make it into the endzone five or six times, his average for a game. Yip, nicknamed "fumblefingers" and "you asshole" by his teammates, hopes to carry the ball with him at least one of those times. YALE: Defense: On the defensive side, Yale boasts the stingiest line in the Ivies. Primarily responsible are seniors Izzy "Shylock" Bloomberg and Myron Finklestein, the tightest ends in recent Eli history. Also contributing to the powerful defense is junior tackle Angus MacWhirter, a Scotsman who rounds out the offensive ethnic joke. Look for these three to shut down the opening coin toss. -- Harvard Lampoon 1988 Program Parody, distributed at The Game | |
I guess I've been so wrapped up in playing the game that I never took time enough to figure out where the goal line was -- what it meant to win -- or even how you won. -- Cash McCall | |
If a team is in a positive frame of mind, it will have a good attitude. If it has a good attitude, it will make a commitment to playing the game right. If it plays the game right, it will win -- unless, of course, it doesn't have enough talent to win, and no manager can make goose-liver pate out of goose feathers, so why worry? -- Sparky Anderson | |
It gets late early out there. -- Yogi Berra | |
Keep in mind always the four constant Laws of Frisbee: (1) The most powerful force in the world is that of a disc straining to land under a car, just out of reach (this force is technically termed "car suck"). (2) Never precede any maneuver by a comment more predictive than "Watch this!" (3) The probability of a Frisbee hitting something is directly proportional to the cost of hitting it. For instance, a Frisbee will always head directly towards a policeman or a little old lady rather than the beat up Chevy. (4) Your best throw happens when no one is watching; when the cute girl you've been trying to impress is watching, the Frisbee will invariably bounce out of your hand or hit you in the head and knock you silly. | |
Once there was this conductor see, who had a bass problem. You see, during a portion of Beethovan's Ninth Symphony in which there are no bass violin parts, one of the bassists always passed a bottle of scotch around. So, to remind himself that the basses usually required an extra cue towards the end of the symphony, the conductor would fasten a piece of string around the page of the score before the bass cue. As the basses grew more and more inebriated, two of them fell asleep. The conductor grew quite nervous (he was very concerned about the pitch) because it was the bottom of the ninth; the score was tied and the basses were loaded with two out. | |
Our [softball] team usually puts the other woman at second base, where the maximum possible number of males can get there on short notice to help out in case of emergency. As far as I can tell, our second basewoman is a pretty good baseball player, better than I am, anyway, but there's no way to know for sure because if the ball gets anywhere near her, a male comes barging over from, say, right field, to deal with it. She's been on the team for three seasons now, but the males still don't trust her. They know, deep in their souls, that if she had to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she probably would elect to save the infant's life, without ever considering whether there were men on base. -- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag" | |
Son, someday a man is going to walk up to you with a deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. And he is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Ace of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ears. But son, do not bet this man, for you will end up with a ear full of cider. -- Sky Masterson's Father | |
Ten of the meanest cons in the state pen met in the corner of the yard to shoot some craps. The stakes were enormous, the tension palpable. When his turn came to shoot, Dutsky nervously plunked down his entire wad, shook the dice and rolled. A smile crossed his face as a seven showed up, but it quickly changed to horror as third die slipped out of his sleeve and fell to the ground with the two others. No one said a word. Finally, Killer Lucci picked up the third die, put it in his pocket and handed the others to Dutsky. "Roll 'em," Lucci said. "Your point is thirteen." | |
The only real game in the world, I think, is baseball... You've got to start way down, at the bottom, when you're six or seven years old. You can't wait until you're fifteen or sixteen. You've got to let it grow up with you, and if you're successful and you try hard enough, you're bound to come out on top, just like these boys have come to the top now. -- Babe Ruth, in his 1948 farewell speech at Yankee Stadium | |
There's a couple of million dollars worth of baseball talent on the loose, ready for the big leagues, yet unsigned by any major league. There are pitchers who would win 20 games a season ... and outfielders [who] could hit .350, infielders who could win recognition as stars, and there's at least one catcher who at this writing is probably superior to Bill Dickey, Josh Gibson. Only one thing is keeping them out of the big leagues, the pigmentation of their skin. They happen to be colored. -- Shirley Povich, 1941 | |
We was playin' the Homestead Grays in the city of Pitchburgh. Josh [Gibson] comes up in the last of the ninth with a man on and us a run behind. Well, he hit one. The Grays waited around and waited around, but finally the empire rules it ain't comin' down. So we win. The next day, we was disputin' the Grays in Philadelphia when here come a ball outta the sky right in the glove of the Grays' center fielder. The empire made the only possible call. "You're out, boy!" he says to Josh. "Yesterday, in Pitchburgh." -- Satchel Paige | |
This fortune cookie program out of order. For those in desperate need, please use the program "________randchar". This program generates random characters, and, given enough time, will undoubtedly come up with something profound. It will, however, take it no time at all to be more profound than THIS program has ever been. | |
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Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before. -- Captain James T. Kirk | |
There's a way out of any cage. -- Captain Christopher Pike, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown. | |
Dismissed. That's a Star Fleet expression for, "Get out." -- Capt. Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager, "The Cloud" | |
"`...You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.' `But the plans were on display...' `On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.' `That's the display department.' `With a torch.' `Ah, well the lights had probably gone.' `So had the stairs.' `But look you found the notice didn't you?' `Yes,' said Arthur, `yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".'" - Arthur singing the praises of the local council planning department. | |
"Pages one and two [of Zaphod's presidential speech] had been salvaged by a Damogran Frond Crested Eagle and had already become incorporated into an extraordinary new form of nest which the eagle had invented. It was constructed largely of papier mache and it was virtually impossible for a newly hatched baby eagle to break out of it. The Damogran Frond Crested Eagle had heard of the notion of survival of the species but wanted no truck with it." - An example of Damogran wildlife. | |
"`How do you feel?' he asked him. `Like a military academy,' said Arthur, `bits of me keep passing out.'" .... `We're safe,' he said. `Oh good,' said Arthur. `We're in a small galley cabin,' said Ford, `in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet.' `Ah,' said Arthur, `this is obviously some strange usage of the word "safe" that I wasn't previously aware of.' - Arthur after his first ever teleport ride. | |
"`The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat...'" - The Book, on one of the Vogon's social inadequacies. | |
"`You ARE Zaphod Beeblebrox?' `Yeah,' said Zaphod, `but don't shout it out or they'll all want one.' `THE Zaphod Beeblebrox?' `No, just A Zaphod Bebblebrox, didn't you hear I come in six packs?' `But sir,' it squealed, `I just heard on the sub-ether radio report. It said you were dead...' `Yeah, that's right, I just haven't stopped moving yet.'" - Zaphod and the Guide's receptionist. | |
"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. | |
"`Incidentally,' he said, `what does teleport mean?' Another moment passed. Slowly, the others turned to face him. `Probably the wrong moment to ask,' said Arthur, `It's just I remember you use the word a short while ago and I only bring it up because...' `Where,' said Ford quietly, `does it say teleport?' `Well, just over here in fact,' said Arthur, pointing at a dark control box in the rear of the cabin, `Just under the word "emergency", above the word "system" and beside the sign saying "out of order".'" - Arthur finding an escape route from a certain death situation. | |
"`We've got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.' The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford. `Stick it up your nose,' he said. `Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know,' insisted the girl, `Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?'" - Ford "debating" what to do with fire with a marketing girl. | |
ARTHUR It's not a question of whose habitat it is, it's a question of how hard you hit it. - Arthur pointing out one of the disadvantages of gravity, Fit the Tenth. | |
"He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arms out wide. `I will go mad!' he announced." - Arthur discovering a way of coping with life on Prehistoric Earth. | |
"`... then I decided that I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.' Arthur cleared his throat, and then did it again. `Where,' he said, `did you...?' `Find a gin and tonic?' said Ford brightly. `I found a small lake that thought it was a gin and tonic, and jumped in and out of that. At least, I think it thought it was a gin and tonic.' `I may,' he addded with a grin which would have sent sane men scampering into the trees, `have been imagining it.'" - Ford updating Arthur about what he's been doing for the past four years. | |
"Arthur's consciousness approached his body as from a great distance, and reluctantly. It had had some bad times in there. Slowly, nervously, it entered and settled down into its accustomed position. Arthur sat up. `Where am I?' he said. `Lord's Cricket Ground,' said Ford. `Fine,' said Arthur, and his consciousness stepped out again for a quick breather. His body flopped back on the grass." - Arthur coping with his return to Earth as best as he could. | |
"`My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.'" - Ford's last ditch attempt to get out of helping Slartibartfast. | |
"His eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. He wasn't certain if this was because they were trying to see more clearly, or if they simply wanted to leave at this point." - Arthur trying to see who had diverted him from going to a party. | |
"Arthur yawed wildly as his skin tried to jump one way and his skeleton the other, whilst his brain tried to work out which of his ears it most wanted to crawl out of. `Bet you weren't expecting to see me again,' said the monster, which Arthur couldn't help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing as he had never met the creature before. He could tell that he hadn't met the creature before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights." - Arthur discovering who had diverted him from going to a party. | |
"What the hell, he thought, you're only young once, and threw himself out of the window. That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side." - Ford outwitting a Vogon with a rocket launcher by going into another certain death situation. | |
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." - One of the laws of computers and programming revealed. | |
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. " | |
"OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah? " | |
"Arthur felt at a bit of a loss. There was a whole Galaxy of stuff out there for him, and he wondered if it was churlish of him to complain to himself that it lacked just two things: the world he was born on and the woman he loved. " | |
As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree" -- probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. -- Woody Allen | |
Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get _____there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" | |
Do you think that when they asked George Washington for ID that he just whipped out a quarter? -- Steven Wright | |
Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to understand what, exactly, make people laugh. That's why they were called "wise men." All the other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with spears, and the wise men were back in the cave saying: "How about: Would you please take my wife? No. How about: Here is my wife, please take her right now. No How about: Would you like to take something? My wife is available. No. How about ..." -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny" | |
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea ... -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" | |
For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier... I put them in the same room and let them fight it out. -- Steven Wright | |
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" | |
I don't kill flies, but I like to mess with their minds. I hold them above globes. They freak out and yell "Whooa, I'm *way* too high." -- Bruce Baum | |
"I got into an elevator at work and this man followed in after me... I pushed '1' and he just stood there... I said 'Hi, where you going?' He said, 'Phoenix.' So I pushed Phoenix. A few seconds later the doors opened, two tumbleweeds blew in... we were in downtown Phoenix. I looked at him and said 'You know, you're the kind of guy I want to hang around with.' We got into his car and drove out to his shack in the desert. Then the phone rang. He said 'You get it.' I picked it up and said 'Hello?'... the other side said 'Is this Steven Wright?'... I said 'Yes...' The guy said 'Hi, I'm Mr. Jones, the student loan director from your bank... It seems you have missed your last 17 payments, and the university you attended said that they received none of the $17,000 we loaned you... we would just like to know what happened to the money?' I said, 'Mr. Jones, I'll give it to you straight. I gave all of the money to my friend Slick, and with it he built a nuclear weapon... and I would appreciate it if you never called me again." -- Steven Wright | |
I got my driver's license photo taken out of focus on purpose. Now when I get pulled over the cop looks at it (moving it nearer and farther, trying to see it clearly)... and says, "Here, you can go." -- Steven Wright | |
I got tired of listening to the recording on the phone at the movie theater. So I bought the album. I got kicked out of a theater the other day for bringing my own food in. I argued that the concession stand prices were outrageous. Besides, I hadn't had a barbecue in a long time. I went to the theater and the sign said adults $5 children $2.50. I told them I wanted 2 boys and a girl. I once took a cab to a drive-in movie. The movie cost me $95. -- Steven Wright | |
I have a switch in my apartment that doesn't do anything. Every once in a while I turn it on and off. On and off. On and off. One day I got a call from a woman in France who said "Cut it out!" -- Steven Wright | |
I just got out of the hospital after a speed reading accident. I hit a bookmark. -- Steven Wright | |
I put contact lenses in my dog's eyes. They had little pictures of cats on them. Then I took one out and he ran around in circles. -- Steven Wright | |
I sold my memoirs of my love life to Parker Brothers -- they're going to make a game out of it. -- Woody Allen | |
I turned my air conditioner the other way around, and it got cold out. The weatherman said "I don't understand it. I was supposed to be 80 degrees today," and I said "Oops." In my house on the ceilings I have paintings of the rooms above... so I never have to go upstairs. I just bought a microwave fireplace... You can spend an evening in front of it in only eight minutes. -- Steven Wright | |
I used to live in a house by the freeway. When I went anywhere, I had to be going 65 MPH by the end of my driveway. I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights. Now it looks like I'm the only one moving. I was pulled over for speeding today. The officer said, "Don't you know the speed limit is 55 miles an hour?" And I said, "Yes, but I wasn't going to be out that long." I put a new engine in my car, but didn't take the old one out. Now my car goes 500 miles an hour. -- Steven Wright | |
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 | |
In like a dimwit, out like a light. -- Pogo | |
Last night the power went out. Good thing my camera had a flash.... The neighbors thought it was lightning in my house, so they called the cops. -- Steven Wright | |
Like you, I am frequently haunted by profound questions related to man's place in the Scheme of Things. Here are just a few: Q -- Is there life after death? A -- Definitely. I speak from personal experience here. On New Year's Eve, 1970, I drank a full pitcher of a drink called "Black Russian", then crawled out on the lawn and died within a matter of minutes, which was fine with me because I had come to realize that if I had lived I would have spent the rest of my life in the grip of the most excruciatingly painful headache. Thanks to the miracle of modern orange juice, I was brought back to life several days later, but in the interim I was definitely dead. I guess my main impression of the afterlife is that it isn't so bad as long as you keep the television turned down and don't try to eat any solid foods. -- Dave Barry | |
My friends, I am here to tell you of the wonderous continent known as Africa. Well we left New York drunk and early on the morning of February 31. We were 15 days on the water, and 3 on the boat when we finally arrived in Africa. Upon our arrival we immediately set up a rigorous schedule: Up at 6:00, breakfast, and back in bed by 7:00. Pretty soon we were back in bed by 6:30. Now Africa is full of big game. The first day I shot two bucks. That was the biggest game we had. Africa is primerally inhabited by Elks, Moose and Knights of Pithiests. The elks live up in the mountains and come down once a year for their annual conventions. And you should see them gathered around the water hole, which they leave immediately when they discover it's full of water. They weren't looking for a water hole. They were looking for an alck hole. One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my pajamas, I don't know. Then we tried to remove the tusks. That's a tough word to say, tusks. As I said we tried to remove the tusks, but they were imbedded so firmly we couldn't get them out. But in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is totally irrelephant to what I was saying. We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed. So we're going back in a few years... -- Julius H. Marx [Groucho] | |
Nirvana? That's the place where the powers that be and their friends hang out. -- Zonker Harris | |
The basic idea behind malls is that they are more convenient than cities. Cities contain streets, which are dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in. Malls, on the other hand, have parking lots, which are also dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in, but -- here is the big difference -- in mall parking lots, THERE ARE NO RULES. You're allowed to do anything. You can drive as fast as you want in any direction you want. I was once driving in a mall parking lot when my car was struck by a pickup truck being driven backward by a squat man with a tattoo that said "Charlie" on his forearm, who got out and explained to me, in great detail, why the accident was my fault, his reasoning being that he was violent and muscular, whereas I was neither. This kind of reasoning is legally valid in mall parking lots. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" | |
The buffalo isn't as dangerous as everyone makes him out to be. Statistics prove that in the United States more Americans are killed in automobile accidents than are killed by buffalo. -- Art Buchwald | |
There's no easy quick way out, we're gonna have to live through our whole lives, win, lose, or draw. -- Walt Kelly | |
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin real fast and freak everybody out. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988. | |
A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on. Include me out. -Samuel Goldwyn | |
An empty cab drove up and Sarah Bernhardt got out. -Arthur Baer, American comic and columnist | |
I tripped over a hole that was sticking up out of the ground. | |
What If Bill Gates Was a Stand-Up Comedian? 1. None of his jokes would be funny. 2. Subliminal message hyping Microsoft and Windows 98 would be inserted throughout his performance. 3. The audio system (running Windows NT) would always crash right before Bill got to a punch line. At that time one of the managers would announce, "Please hold tight while we diagnose this intermittent issue." 4. Tickets for Bill's show would be handed out for free in an attempt to attract customers away from Netscape's shows. 5. Industry pundits would call Bill's show "innovative" and would ask "Why doesn't IBM have a stand-up routine? This is exactly why OS/2 is failing in the market." 6. Bill's show would be called "ActiveHumor 98" 7. In a perfect imitation of his Windows 95 OS, Bill wouldn't be able to tell a joke and walk around at the same time. 8. Audience members would have to sign a License Agreement in which one of the terms is "I agree never to watch Linus Torvalds' show, 'GNU/Humorux'". 9. All audience members would receive a free CD of Internet Explorer 4.0, with FakeJava(R) and ActiveHex(tm) technology. 10. Bill Gates would appear on Saturday Night Live, causing ratings to drop even further. | |
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..." | |
Windows 2000 is out! -- PC Magazine, April 2013 | |
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were playing a friendly game of Frisbee at the Gates estate on the shore of Lake Washington. At one point, Bill accidentally sends the Frisbee over Steve's head, and the Frisbee lands in the lake. Steve walks out onto the surface of the lake and retrieves the Frisbee. The next day the newspapers report: Gates' Throw Exceeds Expectations Apple CEO Unable to Swim | |
The linuX Files -- The Source is Out There. | |
Microsoft seems to have gotten a lot of mileage out of the C2 rating for NT with no network connection. I wonder if a B3 rating for Linux with no power cord might be of value. | |
If your OS needs a virus detector... RUN!!! ...Out and buy Linux! -- Tim Wright | |
Statements recently seen on Slashdot: "The Internet interprets advertising as damage and routes around it." "Accept risk. Accept responsibility. Put a lawyer out of business." "A beowulf cluster of Cisco routers? Isn't that the Internet?" "Geeks aren't interested in politics because government doesn't double its efficiency and speed once every 18 months." "Windows 98 hasn't crashed for me once in over a year, either. Oh, wait, I haven't booted it in over a year." "For more than 4 generations the IT Professionals were the guardians of quality and stability in software. Before the dark times. Before Microsoft..." "You can tell how desperate they are by counting the number of times they say 'innovate' in their press releases." | |
Help Microsoft stamp out piracy. Give Linux to a friend today! -- From a Slashdot.org post | |
Hear me out. Linux is Microsoft's main competition right now. Because of this we are forcing them to "innovate", something they would usually avoid. Now if MS Bob has taught us anything, Microsoft is not a company that should be innovating. When they do, they don't come up with things like "better security" or "stability", they come back with "talking paperclips", and "throw in every usless feature we can think of, memory footprint be dammed". Unfortunatly, they also come up with the bright idea of executing email. Now MIME attachments aren't enough, they want you to be able to run/open attachments right when you get them. This sounds like a good idea to people who believe renaming directories to folders made computing possible for the common man, but security wise it's like vigorously shaking a package from the Unibomber. So my friends, we are to blame. We pushed them into frantically trying to invent "necessary" features to stay on top, and look where it got us. Many of us are watching our beloved mail servers go down under the strain and rebuilding our company's PC because of our pointless competition with MS. I implore you to please drop Linux before Microsoft innovates again. -- From a Slashdot.org post in regards to the ILOVEYOU email virus | |
Linux Rally Held in Pennsylvania HARRISBURG, PA -- Thousands of Linux advocates gathered at the Pennsylvania state capitol building earlier today. They were protesting the state's recent three year deal with Microsoft to install Windows NT on all state computer systems. "Whatever pointy haired boss made this deal ought to be shot on sight," one protestor exclaimed. "Windows NT is a piece of [expletive] compared to Linux. The taxpayers of Pennsylvania are going to be sorry three years from now when this 'deal' concludes. The state has sold its soul to Satan [Bill Gates]." Brief hostilities broke out when a group of police officers armed with riot gear descended on the protestors. After the police threatened to use tear gas, the protestors threw thousands of Linux CDs at them. Once the supply of CDs was depleted, the protest became peaceful again. "I saw several policemen pick up Linux CDs and put them in their pockets," one protestor noted. The protest broke up a few minutes later once it was realized that the state legislature wasn't in session. "We may have wasted our time today," one advocate said, "But we'll be back later." State and Microsoft officials were unavailable for comment at press time. How typical. | |
ARE YOU ADDICTED TO SLASHDOT? Take this short test to find out if you are a Dothead. 1. Do you submit articles to Slashdot and then reload the main page every 3.2 seconds to see if your article has been published yet? 2. Have you made more than one "first comment!" post within the past week? 3. Have you ever participated in a Gnome vs. KDE or a Linux vs. FreeBSD flamewar on Slashdot? 4. Do you write jokes about Slashdot? 5. Do you wake up at night, go to the bathroom, and fire up your web browser to get your Slashdot fix on the way back? 6. Do you dump your date at the curb so you can hurry home to visit Slashdot? 7. Do you think of Slashdot when you order a taco at a restaurant? 8. Are you a charter member of the Rob Malda Fan Club? 9. Did you lease a T3 line so you could download Slashdot faster? 10. Is Slashdot your only brower's bookmark? 11. Do you get a buzz when your browser finally connects to Slashdot? 12. Do you panic when your browser says "Unable to connect to slashdot.org"? 13. Have you even made a New Year's Resolution to cut back on Slashdot access... only to visit it at 12:01? | |
Stallman's Latest Proclamation Richard M. Stallman doesn't want you to say "Windows" anymore. He is now advocating that people call this OS by its real name: Microsoft-Xerox-Apple-Windows. This proclamation comes on the heels of his controversial stand that Linux should be called GNU/Linux. RMS explained in a Usenet posting, "Calling Microsoft's OS 'Windows' is a grave inaccuracy. Xerox and Apple both contributed significant ideas and innovations to this OS. Why should Microsoft get all the credit?" RMS also hinted that people shouldn't refer to Microsoft's web browser as IE. "It should really be called Microsoft-Spyglass-Mosaic-Internet-Explorer. Again, how much credit does Microsoft really deserve for this product? Much of the base code was licensed from Spyglass." Many industry pundits are less than thrilled about RMS' proclamation. The editor of Windows Magazine exclaimed, "What?!?! Yeah, we'll rename our magazine Microsoft-Xerox-Apple-Windows Magazine. That just rolls off the tongue!" A Ziff-Davis columnist noted, "Think of all the wasted space this would cause. If we spelled out everything like this, we'd have headlines like, 'Microsoft Releases Service Pack 5 for Microsoft-Xerox-Apple-Windows Neutered Technology 4.0' Clearly this is unacceptable." | |
Tux Penguin Boxing Match LAS VEGAS, NV -- The unofficial Linux mascot Tux the Penguin will face his arch rival the BSD Daemon in a boxing match this Saturday night. The match is part of the International Computer Mascot Boxing Federation's First Annual World Championship Series. The winner will advance to face one of the Intel "Bunny People". Boxing pundits favor Tux as the winner. Last week Tux won his first match in the Championship Series against Wilbur the Gimp. "The Gimp didn't have a chance," one spectator said. "With Tux's ability to run at top speeds of over 100mph, I don't see how he could possibly lose." The BSD Daemon, however, is certainly a formidible opponent. While boxing rules prohibit the Daemon from using his patented pitchfork, his pointy horns are permitted in the ring. Some observers think the whole Computer Mascot Boxing Federation is a fake. "WWF is all scripted," one sports writer pointed out. "And so is this. You actually think that a penguin is capable of boxing? The idea of a penguin fighting a demon is patently absurd. This whole Championship Series has no doubt been scripted. It's probably nothing more than two little kids in penguin and demon suits duking it out in a boxing ring. What a waste of time." | |
Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #6 Hearing Un-aid US$129.95 at The Fuzzier Projection Co. It's a scene we can all identify with: you're at a boring company meeting, trying to read the latest Slashdot headlines on your PalmPilot, but you can't concentrate because the PHB is rambling in a loud, booming voice about e-infomediary-substrategic-paradigms and meta-content-aggregation-relationship-corridors. With the Hearing Un-aid(tm), you can put a stop to incessant buzzword-speak by your boss. Unlike a hearing aid, which amplifies sound, the Hearing Un-aid dampens noise, so you can easily tune out the board meeting and instead focus on something far more important, such as downloading Humorix stories. If you happen to miss something important (yeah, right) and your boss accuses you of not paying attention, you can simply point to your hearing "aid" and respond, "What was that? I couldn't hear you because of my temporary hearing loss." | |
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. | |
Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #9 Dial-A-Detective $499.95/year; 1-888-BYE-SPAM This detective firm is not what you'd expect. Instead of tracking murderers or unfaithful husbands, this band of rogue private investigators goes after something just as sinister -- spammers. For a modest annual retainer fee, these spam detectives will track down the source of every piece of spam you receive. Using the latest in forensic technology, they will bring you the virtual scalp of the spammer -- their name, home address, social-security number, and, more importantly, credit card numbers. At this point you are free to pursue the evil spammer as you see fit. If your friend or relative is sick of receiving wave after wave of "Find Out Anything About Anyone" spams, give them a subscription to Dial-A-Detective, and they'll find out anything about any spammer -- for real. | |
Microsoft ActivePromo Campaign: "Frequent Upgrade Points" Microsoft's PR masterminds are planning a massive marketing campaign, code-named "ActivePromo 2000", to promote the upcoming release of Windows 2000 (scheduled for February 2001). This marketing campaign will include a "Frequent Upgrade Points" promotion. Customers who purchase upgrades to Windows, Office, or other Microsoft "solutions" will receive "frequent upgrade points" (FUPs) when they register online. These points, like Frequent Flyer Miles, can be redeemed in the future for discounts on other Microsoft upgrades. This program, combined with the fact that older versions of some Microsoft programs have glaring Y2K problems, should be enough to convince many people to shell out big bucks to upgrade to a more bloated Microsoft operating system. The company hopes to eradicate 99% of Windows 3.x installations by 2003. | |
Open Source Irrational Constant BREEZEWOOD, PA -- In a revelation that could rock the foundations of science, a researcher in Pennsylvania has discovered that the digits of the irrational constant PI encode a version of the Linux kernel. "I can't believe it," the researcher, Neil Hoffman, exclaimed. "And yet, here I am staring at what appears to be the source code for Linux kernel 5.0.0. Needless to say, my whole world-view has changed..." Hoffman explained, "My algorithm, which applies several dozen conversions and manipulations to each digit of PI, spits out plain vanilla ASCII characters that happen to form the source code for the Linux kernel." Many members of the scientific community are skeptical. One One mathematician who has memorized the digits of PI to 10,000 places said, "This is the kind of nonsense one would expect to find in a tabloid such as the National Mathematics Enquirer. Or a Linux fortune(6) file. Hoffman's 'discovery' is obviously a hoax designed to secure government research grants." In a related matter, we have received an unconfirmed report that a region of the Mandelbrot fractal contains what appear to be the words "LINUS TORVALDS WAS HERE". In addition, the words "TRANSMETA: THIS SECRET MESSAGE IS NOT HERE YET" supposedly appear within the depths of the Julia Set. | |
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". | |
New Crime Identified: "Tech Rage" HARRISBURG, IL -- The police department in this Illinois town has coined a new term for a growing trend in crime: "tech rage". Tech rage shares many similarities with another modern crime, "road rage", but instead of affecting drivers, tech rage is experienced by disgruntled computer users. The first documented case of tech rage involves a Microsoft salesman, Bob Glutzfield, who convinced the local TV station to "upgrade" its computer systems from Macintosh to Wintel. While the migration seemed successful at first, the Blue Screen became more prevalent during the following months. Then, in January, the entire computer system crashed in the middle of the weather forecast during the 10 o'clock evening news. Viewers could plainly see the Blue Screen of Death showing in the monitors behind James Roland, the chief meteorologist. The instability of Windows 98 stretched Roland's patience until he snapped last week and succumbed to tech rage. Roland tracked down the Microsoft salesman and followed him one evening to his apartment. The weatherman yelled at the bewildered Microserf, "You [expletive]! Because of you, I'm the [expletive] laughing stock of Southern Illinois!" and then proceeded to beat him up. Roland is currently out on bond pending trial next month. | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#1) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 1: What is your opinion of the Microsoft antitrust trial? A. The DoJ is wasting taxpayer's money. Now, if the DOJ were to upgrade all of its computer systems to Windows, then the department would be making wise use of tax dollars. B. All of the Microsoft email messages that the evil government has presented as evidence are obviously taken out of context or have been completely twisted around. I mean... Bill Gates would never say "let's cut off their air supply" in a memo; it's an obvious fabrication. C. Judge Jackson is obviously biased in favor of the DOJ's vigilante persecution of Microsoft. D. If Microsoft loses, it will be the gravest miscarriage of justice in all the history of mankind. | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#3) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 3: Have you ever experimented with the freeware Linux OS created by a group of anarchist acne-laden teenagers via the Net? A. No, I'd never trust my work to a piece of non-Microsoft software. B. No, I'd never trust my computer to a piece of software that has a restrictive license agreement such as the GNU GPL. C. No, I don't want to mess with the ancient command line interface Linux imposes on its users. D. Yes, but I quickly migrated back to modern Windows NT after I had trouble figuring out how to boot the thing from the cryptic LILO prompt. | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#4) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 4: What is your favorite Microsoft Office feature? A. Dancing Paper Clip B. Takes up enough hard drive space to prevent my children from installing violent video games or downloading pornography C. Everyone else has it, so I can easily exchange documents with others D. I have so many favorites, I can't choose just one! | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#5) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 5: Where do you want to go today?(tm) A. To Washington, D.C. to meet Janet Reno and cuss her out for persecuting Microsoft B. To Redmond, WA to take a tour of the Microsoft campus C. To the software store to purchase a new piece of Microsoft software D. To my local school district to convince the administration to upgrade the Macintoshes in the computer labs to Wintel systems E. I don't know about myself, but I'd like to see so-called "consumer advocates" like Ralph Nader go to Hell. | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#7) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 7: What new features would you like to see in Windows 2000? A. A marquee on the taskbar that automatically scrolls the latest headlines from MSNBC and Microsoft Press Pass B. Content filtration software for Internet Explorer that will prevent my children from accessing dangerous propaganda about Linux. C. A new card game; I've spent over 10,000 hours playing Solitaire during my free time at work and I'm starting to get bored with it D. A screensaver depicting cream pies being thrown at Janet Reno, Joel Klien, David Boies, Ralpha Nader, Orrin Hatch, Linus Torvalds, Richard M. Stallman, and other conspirators out to destroy Microsoft E. A Reinstall Wizard that helps me reinstall a fresh copy of Windows to fix Registry corruptions and other known issues | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#8) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 8: If you could meet Bill Gates for one minute, what would you say to him? A. "Can you give me a loan for a million or so?" B. "I just love all the new features in Windows 98!" C. "Could you autograph this box of Windows 98 for me?" D. "I really enjoyed reading 'Business @ the Speed of Thought'. It's so cool!" E. "Give the government hell, Bill!" | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#9) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 9: Which of the following do you prefer as a replacement for the current Microsoft slogan? A. "Over 20 Years of Innovation" B. "Wintel Inside" C. "Your Windows And Gates To The World" D. "Because Anti-Trust Laws Are Obsolete" E. "One Microsoft Way. It's Much More Than An Address!" F. "This Motto Is Not Anti-Competitive. And Neither Is Microsoft." G. "Fighting the Department of Injustice Since Day One" | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#13) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 13: Which of the following new Microsoft products do you plan on buying within the next 6 months? A. Windows For Babies(tm) - Using an enhanced "click-n-drool" interface, babies will be able to learn how to use a Wintel computer, giving them a head start in living in a Microsoft-led world. B. Where In Redmond Is Carmen Sandiego?(tm) - The archvillian Sandiego has stolen the Windows source code and must be stopped before she can publish it on the Net. C. ActiveKeyboard 2000(tm) - An ergonomic keyboard that replaces useless keys like SysRq and Scroll Lock with handy keys like "Play Solitaire" and "Visit Microsoft.com". D. Visual BatchFile(tm) - An IDE and compiler for the MS-DOS batch file language. MSNBC calls it "better than Perl". | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#14) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 14: How would you rate the performance of the Microsoft defense team in the antitrust trial? A. Perfect; they have clearly shown that Microsoft's market leading position is good for consumers. B. Outstanding; all of the pundits who are predicting that Microsoft will lose are a bunch of idiots. C. Excellent; Bill Gates' wonderful video deposition clearly demonstrated to the American public that he is a true visionary. D. I don't know; I haven't been paying any attention to the case because I know Microsoft will prevail anyways. | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#15) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 15: In your opinion, what companies should Microsoft seek to acquire in the coming year? A. Disney. I'd like to see a cute animated movie starring Clippit the Office Assistant. B. CBS. I'd like to see a new line-up featuring must-watch shows like "Touched by a Microserf", "Redmond Hope", "Everybody Loves Bill", "The Late Show With Steve Ballmer", and "60 Minutes... of Microsoft Infomercials", C. Google. Microsoft could drastically improve the quality and performance of this search engine by migrating it from Linux to Windows NT servers. D. Lowes Hardware Stores. Every copy of Windows 2000 could come bundled with a coupon for a free kitchen sink or a free window! | |
Microsoft Mandatory Survey (#18) Customers who want to upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition must now fill out a Microsoft survey online before they can order the bugfix/upgrade. Question 18: Witnessing the popularity of "Dilbert", Microsoft has plans to launch a syndicated comic strip featuring life at Microsoft. What characters would you like to see in such a comic strip? A. Judge Jackson, the goofy court judge who is always making foolish (and funny) decisions B. Bob, a wacky Microsoft programmer who likes to insert easter eggs in his work, and who is addicted to playing "Age of Empires" C. Bill Gates, the intelligent nerd extraordinaire who always gets his way by simply giving people large sums of money D. Ed Muth, the Microsoft spokesman who keeps putting his foot in his mouth. When not in public, he's a surprisingly sexy "chic magnet" E. Poorard Stalinman, the leader of a movement of hackers to provide "free" software for the masses at the expense of Capitalistic values | |
Jargon Coiner (#7) An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon that we've just made up. * O'REILLY O'WRITING: Going to a bookstore and copying down notes from an O'Reilly computer book that you can't afford. * DEEP WRITE MODE: Similar to "deep hack mode", but applies to people writing editorials or (very rarely) Slashdot comments. The author of this fortune file sometimes experiences "deep humor mode". * EDITORIAL WAR: Skirmishes between two or more parties carried out via strongly-worded editorials published to sites like Slashdot, Linux Today, etc. ESR and RMS are frequently engaged in this. * THREENYM: Referring to someone by the first letter of their three names. Used by some people (RMS and ESR), but not others (has anybody ever tried to refer to Linus Torvalds as "LBT"?). | |
Jargon Coiner (#10) An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon that we've just made up. * HOBTOB (Hanging Out By The O'Reilly Books): Seeking free Linux technical support at a bookstore by waiting near the computer books for a geek to come by and then casually asking them for help. * MOOLA (Marketing Officially Organizes Linux Adoptance): A press release issued by a Dot Com (or Dot Con?) heralding their "support" for Linux (i.e. "BigPortal.com adopts Linux as their official operating system by adding five Linux-related links to their BigDirectory"); used to inflate their stock price and rake in moola even though none of their employees have ever used Linux and don't really care. * KARMA KOLLECTOR: Slashdot user who treats the acquisition of "karma" as a game; often has a detailed strategy on how to sucker moderators into raising the score of their posts (i.e. posting a comment with a title like "Microsoft Sucks!!! (Score 3, Insightful)" or using "Only a fool would moderate this down" as a signature). See also "Karma Whore". | |
ERIC S. RAYMOND: I'd like to introduce Eric Jones, a disadvantaged member of the geek community who has been forced to live in a homeless shelter. Eric? Come on out here and tell us about yourself... JONES: Well, I'm a consultant for a Bay Area corporation. Due to the housing crisis, I've been forced to sleep in a shelter. ESR: How much do you make? JONES: Over $100,000 a year. ESR: Wow! And you still can't afford housing or rent? That sounds terrible... Hopefully with this telethon we'll be able to raise money to fund new shelters for disadvantaged geeks like Eric here. We also have plans for a Silicon Valley Terraforming Initiative in which several square miles of Pacific Ocean will be turned into usuable land for building housing and apartments for geeks... -- Excerpt from the Geek Grok '99 telethon | |
Programming for money sucks... you have to deal with PHBs, 16 hour days, and spending the night in your cubicle half of the time to avoid the Commute From Hell... I minored in Journalism, so I tried to switch into a job as an IT pundit. You'd think they'd welcome a geek like me with open arms, but they didn't. Ziff-Davis wouldn't even give me an interview. I was "too qualified" they said. Apparently my technical acumen was too much for their organization, which employs Jesse Berst and the ilk. It gets worse. I tried to get an entry-level reporting job for a local-yokel paper. After the interview they gave me a "skills test": I had to compose an article using Microsoft Word 97. Since I've never touched a Windows box, I had no clue how to use it. When I botched the test, the personnel manager spouted, "Your resume said you were a computer programmer. Obviously you're a liar. Get out of my office now!" -- Excerpt from a horror story about geek discrimination during the Geek Grok '99 telethon | |
OPPRESSED GEEK: Everybody keeps blaming me for the Y2K problem, the Melissa Virus, Windows crashes... you name it. When somebody finds out you're a bona fide geek, they start bugging you about computer problems. I frequently hear things like, "Why can't you geeks make Windows work right?", "What kind of idiot writes a program that can't handle the year 2000?", "Geeks are evil, all they do is write viruses", and "The Internet is the spawn of Satan". I'm afraid to admit I have extensive computing experience. When somebody asks what kind of job I have, I always lie. From my experience, admitting that you're a geek is an invitation to disaster. LARRY WALL: I know, I know. I sometimes say that I'm the founder of a pearl harvesting company instead of admitting that I'm the founder of the Perl programming language. ERIC S. RAYMOND: This is tragic. We can't live in a world like this. We need your donations to fight social oppression and ignorance against geekdom... -- Excerpt from the Geek Grok '99 telethon | |
Evolution Of A Linux User: The 11 Stages Towards Getting A Life 0. Microserf - Your life revolves around Windows and you worship Bill Gates and his innovative company. 1. Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt... About Microsoft - You encounter a growing number of problems with Microsoft solutions, shaking your world-view 2. FUD... About Linux - After hearing about this new Linux thing, you take the plunge, but are unimpressed by the nerdware OS. 3. Born-Again Microserf - You rededicate your life to Microsoft worship 4. Disgruntled User - Microsoft software keeps screwing you over, and you're not going to take it anymore! 5. A Religious Experience - You successfully install Linux, and are left breathless at its elegance. No more Windows for you! 6. Linux Convert - You continue to fall in love with the new system 7. Linux Zealot - You dedicate your life to Linux World Domination... and it shows! You go beyond mere advocacy to sheer zealotry. 8. Back To Reality - Forces out of your control compel you to return to using Windows and Office 9. Enlightened Linux User - You become 100% Microsoft free after finding ways to overcome the need for Microsoft bloatware 10.Get A Life - You become a millionaire after your Linux portal is acquired; you move to a small tropical island and get a life | |
What Did Santa Claus Bring You In 1999? (#2) WEBMASTER OF LINUXSUPERMEGAPORTAL.COM: One of my in-laws gifted me a CD-ROM containing the text of every "...For Dummies" book ever published. It's a shame IDG never published "Hiring A Hitman To Knock Off Your Inlaws... For Dummies", because that's something I'm itching to do. At any rate, I'm using the CD as a beer coaster. JESSE BERST: I got a coupon redeemable for the full copy of Windows 2000 when it comes out in February. Win2K is the most innovative, enterprise-ready, stable, feature-enriched, easy-to-use operating system on the market. I don't see how Linux can survive against Microsoft's far superior offering. I ask you: could you get fired for NOT choosing Windows 2000? You bet. LINUX CONVERT: I kept hinting for a SGI box, but instead my wife got me an old Packard Bell. Unfortunately, she bought it at CompUSSR, which doesn't take returns, so I'm stuck with it. I haven't been able to get Linux to boot on it, so this machine will probably become a $750 paperweight. | |
New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#1) Adopt-A-Beowulf: the latest company to hop the Linux bandwagon as it tramples down Wall Street. Every geek dreams of owning their own Beowulf supercomputer. Very few people (except for dotcom billionnaires) can afford to build one, but the folks at Adopt-a-Beowulf can provide the next best thing: a virtual beowulf. For US$49.95, you can "adopt" your own 256-node Beowulf cluster. You won't own it, or even get to see it in person, but you will receive photos of the cluster, a monthly newsletter about its operation, and a limited shell account on it. The company hopes to branch out into other fields. Some slated products include Adopt-A-Penguin, Lease-A-Camel (for Perl mongers), and Adopt-A-Distro (in which your name will be used as the code-name for a beta release of a major Linux distribution or other Open Source project). | |
New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#2) Don't throw out that old Red Hat Linux 3.0 CD. A group of entrepreneurs are hording vintage Linux items in the hopes that they will become hot collector's items in the coming decades. The venture, called "Money Grows On Binary Trees", hopes to amass a warehouse full of old Linux distributions, books, stuffed penguins, promotional material, and Linus Torvalds autographs. "Nobody thought pieces of cardstock featuring baseball players would be worth anything..." the founder of Binary Trees said. "That 'Linux For Dummies' book sitting in your trash could be the next Babe Ruth card." The company organized a Linux Collectibles Convention last week in Silicon Valley, drawing in a respectable crowd of 1,500 people and 20 exhibitors. The big attraction was a "Windows For Dummies" book actually signed by Linus Torvalds. "He signed it back at a small Linux conference in '95," the owner explained. "He didn't realize it was a Dummies book because I had placed an O'Reilly cover on it... Somebody at the convention offered me $10,000 for it, but that seemed awfully low. I hope to sell it on eBay next month with a reserve price containing a significant number of zeros." | |
Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#2) (held during Super Bowl Sunday 2000 at the Silicon Valley Transmeta Dome) BRYANT DUMBELL: Look out! Here comes Linus Torvalds himself to deliver the starting chug. The crowd is going wild... all 64 people in the stands are on their feet! Here we go... Linus is lifting up the Ceremonial Beer Can... he's flipping off the top... JOHN SPLADDEN: You can feel the excitement in the air! Wow! DUMBELL: ...And there he goes! Wow... he chugged that beer in only 1.4 seconds... Let's see Bill top that! What a remarkable display to kick off this grandest of all nerd sporting events. SPLADDEN: "Nerd sporting event"? Isn't that an oxymoron? DUMBELL: Linus is now waving to the crowd... Oops! He just belched. | |
Excerpts From The First Annual Nerd Bowl (#3) BRYANT DUMBELL: It's time for Round One: The Flying CompactDiscus. JOHN SPLADDEN: That's right, Bryant. Each team member will hurl one CD-ROM and receive points for both the distance thrown and whether the disc is still readable afterwards. DUMBELL: First up is Mad Hatter's Alan Cox. He struts, he winds up, and there it goes! Look at the trajectory on that baby... Now it's time for the Portalback's Anonymous Coward #521 to throw. This guy was voted as the best CompactDiscus thrower in the league by popular vote on Slashdot. SPLADDEN: Indeed, AnonCow has got some powerful muscles. No brain though. Did you know that he dropped out of college to join the Andover.Net team? DUMBELL: Yeah, what a tough decision to make. It's now becoming quite common for nerd superstars to ditch college and move to Silicon Valley and receive Big League stock options. Still, AnonCow was out for several games this season due to a Carpal Tunnel flareup. I hope he isn't squandering his millions... he might be forced to retire early. | |
Man Charged With Crashing Windows MOUNTAIN HOME, AR -- Eric Turgent, a closet Linux advocate, was arrested yesterday for intentionally crashing his co-worker's Windows box at the offices of the "Roadkill Roundup" newspaper. Turgent disputes the charges, saying, "If causing an operating system to crash is illegal, than why isn't Bill Gates serving life without parole?" Turgent's co-worker, Mr. Stu Poor, the clueless technology pundit for the newspaper, is a heavy Microsoft supporter. He frequently brags in his weekly Tech Talk column that he "once had a conversation with Bill Gates." A heated argument broke out yesterday morning in which the two insulted each other ("You're nothing but a Linux hippie freak on the Red Hat payroll!" vs. "You make Jesse Berst and Fred Moody look like [expletive] geniuses!") for two hours. At the heat of the moment, Turgent shoved Poor aside and typed in "C:\CON\CON". The machine crashed and the pundit lost all of his work (a real loss to humanity, to be sure). Turgent is in jail awaiting trial for violating the "Slash Crashes Act". This bill was enacted in 1999 after a Senator's gigabyte cache of pornography was destroyed by a Windows crash. | |
Affordable Virtual Beowulf Cluster Every nerd drools over Beowulf clusters, but very few have even seen one, much less own one. Until now, that is. Eric Gylgen, the open source hacker famous for EviL (the dancing ASCII paperclip add-on to vi), is working on a program that will emulate Beowulf clusters on a standard desktop PC. "Of course," he added candidly, "the performance of my virtual cluster will be many orders of magnitude less than a real cluster, but that's not really the point. I just want to be able to brag that I run a 256 node cluster. Nobody has to know I only spent $500 on the hardware it uses." Eric has prior experience in this field. Last month he successfully built a real 32 node Beowulf cluster out of Palm Pilots, old TI-8x graphing calculators, various digital cameras, and even some TRS-80s. He demonstrated a pre-alpha version of his VirtualEpicPoem software to us yesterday. His Athlon machine emulated a 256 node Beowulf cluster in which each node, running Linux, was emulating its own 16 node cluster in which each node, running Bochs, was emulating VMWare to emulate Linux running old Amiga software. The system was extremely slow, but it worked. | |
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 (#4) Walls & Windows Most people don't realize that many of the technological innovations taken for granted in the 20th Century date back centuries ago. The concept of a network "firewall", for instance, is a product of the Great Wall of China, a crude attempt to keep raging forest fires out of Chinese territory. It was soon discovered that the Wall also kept Asian intruders ("steppe kiddies") out, just as modern-day firewalls keep network intruders ("script kiddies") out. Meanwhile, modern terminology for graphical user interfaces originated from Pre-Columbian peoples in Central and South America. These natives would drag-and-drop icons (sculptures of the gods) into vast pits of certain gooey substances during a ritual in which "mice" (musical instruments that made a strange clicking sound) were played to an eerie beat. | |
Brief History Of Linux (#5) English Flame War The idea behind Slashdot-style discussions is not new; it dates back to London in 1699. A newspaper that regularly printed Letters To The Editor sparked a heated debate over the question, "When would the 18th Century actually begin, 1700 or 1701?" The controversy quickly became a matter of pride; learned aristocrats argued for the correct date, 1701, while others maintained that it was really 1700. Another sizable third of participants asked, "Who cares?" Ordinarily such a trivial matter would have died down, except that one 1700er, fed up with the snobbest 1701 rhetoric of the educated class, tracked down one letter-writer and hurled a flaming log into his manor house in spite. The resulting fire was quickly doused, but the practice known as the "flame war" had been born. More flames were exchanged between other 1700ers and 1701ers for several days, until the Monarch sent out royal troops to end the flamage. | |
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. | |
Brief History Of Linux (#11) Birth of Gates and the Anti-Gates October 28, 1955 saw the birth of William H. Gates, who would rise above his humble beginnings as the son of Seattle's most powerful millionaire lawyer and become the World's Richest Man(tm). A classic American rags-to-riches story (with "rags" referring to the dollar bills that the Gates family used for toilet paper), Bill Gates is now regarded as the world's most respected businessman by millions of clueless people that have obviously never touched a Windows machine. Nature is all about balance. The birth of Gates in 1955 tipped the cosmic scales toward evil, but the birth of Linus Torvalds in 1969 finally balanced them out. Linus' destiny as the savior of Unix and the slayer of money-breathing Redmond dragons was sealed when, just mere hours after his birth, the Unix epoch began January 1st, 1970. While the baseline for Unix timekeeping might be arbitrary, we here at Humorix like to thank the its proximity of Linus' birth is no coincidence. | |
Brief History Of Linux (#12) A note from Bill Gates' second grade teacher: Billy has been having some trouble behaving in class lately... Last Monday he horded all of the crayons and refused to share, saying that he needed all 160 colors to maximize his 'innovation'. He then proceeded to sell little pieces of paper ("End-User License Agreement for Crayons" he called them) granting his classmates the 'non-transferable right' to use the crayons on a limited time basis in exchange for their lunch money... When I tried to stop Billy, he kept harping about his right to innovate and how my interference violated basic notions of free-market capitalism. "Holding a monopoly is not illegal," he rebutted. I chastised him for talking back, and then I took away the box of crayons so others could share them... angrily, he then pointed to a drawing of his hanging on the wall and yelled, "That's my picture! You don't have the right to present my copyrighted material in a public exhibition without my permission! You're pirating my intellectual property. Pirate! Pirate! Pirate!" I developed a headache that day that even the maximum dosage of Aspirin wasn't able to handle. And then on Tuesday, he conned several students out of their milk money by convincing them to play three-card Monty... | |
Brief History Of Linux (#18) There are lies, damned lies, and Microsoft brochures Even from the very first day, the Microsoft Marketing Department was at full throttle. Vaporware has always been their weapon of choice. Back when MS-DOS 1.25 was released to OEMs, Microsoft handed out brochures touting some of the features to be included in future versions, including: Xenix-compatible pipes, process forks, multitasking, graphics and cursor positioning, and multi-user support. The brochure also stated, "MS-DOS has no practical limit on disk size. MS-DOS uses 4-byte Xenix compatible pointers for file and disk capacity up to 4 gigabytes." We would like to emphasize in true Dave Barry fashion that we are not making this up. Big vaporous plans were also in store for Microsoft's "Apple Killer" graphical interface. In 1983 Microsoft innovated a new marketing ploy -- the rigged "smoke-and-mirrors" demo -- to showcase the "overlapping windows" and "multitasking" features of Interface Manager, the predecessor to Windows. These features never made it into Windows 1.0 -- which, incidentally, was released 1.5 years behind schedule. | |
Brief History Of Linux (#23) Linus Torvalds certainly wasn't the only person to create their own operating system from scratch. Other people working from their leaky basements did create their own systems and now they are sick that they didn't become an Alpha Geek like Torvalds or a Beta Geek like Alan Cox. Linus had one advantage not many else did: Internet access. The world was full of half-implemented-Unix-kernels at the time, but they were sitting isolated on some hacker's hard drive, destined to be destroyed by a hard drive crash. Thankfully that never happened to Linux, mostly because everyone with Net access could download a copy instead of paying shipping charges to receive the code on a huge stack of unreliable floppy disks. Indeed, buried deep within a landfill in Lansing, Michigan sits a stack of still-readable 5-1/4 floppies containing the only known copy of "Windows Killer", a fully functional Unix kernel so elegant, so efficient, so easy-to-use that Ken Thompson himself would be jealous of its design. Unfortunately the author's mother threw out the stack of floppies in a bout of spring cleaning. The 14 year old author's talents were lost forever as his parents sent him to Law School. | |
Brief History Of Linux (#24) Linus Torvalds quotes from his interview in "LinuxNews" (October 1992): "I doubt Linux will be here to stay, and maybe Hurd is the wave of the future (and maybe not)..." "I'm most certainly going to continue to support it, until it either dies out or merges with something else. That doesn't necessarily mean I'll make weekly patches for the rest of my life, but hopefully they won't be needed as much when things stabilize." [If only he knew what he was getting into.] "World domination? No, I'm not interested in that. Galactic domination, on the other hand..." "Several people have already wondered if Linux should adopt a logo or mascot. Somebody even suggested a penguin for some strange reason, which I don't particularly like: how is a flightless bird supposed to represent an operating system? Well, it might work okay for Microsoft or even Minix..." "I would give Andy Tanenbaum a big fat 'F'." | |
Brief History Of Linux (#26) On the surface, Transmeta was a secretive startup that hired Linus Torvalds in 1996 as their Alpha Geek to help develop some kind of microprocessor. Linus, everyone found out later, was actually hired as part of a low-budget yet high-yield publicity stunt. While other dotcoms were burning millions on glitzy marketing campaigns nobody remembers and Superbowl ads displayed while jocks went to the bathroom, Transmeta was spending only pocket change on marketing. Most of that pocket change went towards hosting the Transmeta website (the one that wasn't there yet) which, incidentally, contained more original content and received more visitors than the typical dotcom portal. Microsoft relies on vaporware and certain ahem stipends given to journalists in order to generate buzz and hype for new products, but Transmeta only needed Non-Disclosure Agreements and the Personality Cult of Linus to build up its buzz. When the secret was finally unveiled, the Slashdot crowd was all excited about low-power mobile processors and code-morphing algorithms -- for a couple days. Then everyone yawned and went back to playing Quake. It's still not entirely clear when Transmeta is actually supposed to start selling something. | |
Brief History Of Linux (#28) Free, Open, Libre, Whatever Software Eric S. Raymond's now famous paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", set the stage for the lucrative business of giving software away. In CatB, ESR likened the software industry to an anarchistic bazaar, with each vendor looking out for himself, trying to hoodwink customers and fellow vendors. The produce vendor (i.e. Apple), for instance, felt no need to cooperate with the crystal-ball seller (Oracle) or the con artist hocking miracle drugs (Microsoft). Each kept their property and trade secrets to themselves, hoping to gain an edge and make money fast. "With enough eyeballs, all bug-ridden software programs are marketable," ESR observed. ESR contrasted the "caveat emptor" Bazaar to an idealistic Cathedral model used by free software developers. European cathedrals of medieval days were built block-by-block with extensive volunteer manpower from the surrounding community. Such projects were "open" in the sense that everybody could see their progress, and interested people could wander inside and offer comments or praise about construction methods. "Those medieval cathedrals are still standing," ESR mused. "But bazaars built in the 14th Century are long gone, a victim of their inferior nature." | |
Anonymous Noncoward writes, "For my Economics 101 class, I have to pretend to be Bill Gates and write an editorial defending Microsoft against anti-trust charges, citing economic principles. To complete such an assignment violates every moral fiber of my body. What should I do?" The Oracle responds: Well, it seems that you have to make a decision among two choices. You can blow off the assignment, thus forcing you to fail EC101, lowering your GPA below the required minimum to keep your scholarship, causing you to drop out of college and work at McDonalds all your life. Or you can write a paper that's positive towards Microsoft and make an 'A'. This seems like a no-brainer to me; I'd choose the first option without hesitation -- a burger flipper has far more dignity and self-respect than somebody who utters a positive statement about the Evil Empire. | |
DeCSS T-Shirt Used To Commit Piracy! College student Cody Potter stunned the world yesterday when he used a T-shirt with the printed DeCSS source code to illegally copy a DVD of "Star Trek XXI: We Promise This Is The Last One". Well, it wasn't the actual DeCSS source code. The shirt contained a Perl script which spits out a bash shell script which produces a GW-BASIC program which outputs a ROT13-encoded Python script that manufactures a Pig-Latin-encoded Java program that finally produces the real DeCSS C source code when executed. | |
Look Out! It's Microsoft Outlook An old maxim in the Unix community states, "All programs expand until they can read mail... except Microsoft Outlook." Well, that's no longer true. By taking advantage of loopholes in several undocumented APIs, a team of geeks were able to transform Outlook from a virus-delivery system into an actual mail client. "It was quite a feat to accomplish this," said one of the geeks. "I mean, the rat's nest that is the Windows API can be used to frighten small children... or adults. And the frequency by which Outlook exploits are discovered is directly proportional to the number of times Bill Gates uses the word 'innovation'. But this is the first time somebody has discovered a beneficial exploit." Microsoft has vowed to release a patch to fix the uncovered security flaws. "We simply cannot tolerate unauthorized reverse engineering and hacking of our innovative solutions. Our Security Response Team will pull an all-nighter to eliminate these known issues." | |
Throwing Windows Out The Window The Federal Bureau Of Missing Socks has banned the use of Microsoft Windows and Office on all employee computers. But don't get too excited; they aren't going to replace them with Linux. Instead, this government agency has decided to go back to using abucusses, slide rules, and manual typewriters. The banishment of Microsoft software stems from the agency's new policy against computer games. MS Office, which contains several games in the form of Easter Eggs, is now verboten on all agency computers. "Flight simulators, pinball games, magic eight balls... they all violate our policy," said the sub-adjunct administrator second-class. "So we can't use Office." Windows is forbidden for the same reason. "We've had way too many employees wasting time playing Solitaire," she said. "Unfortunately, Solitaire is an integral part of Windows -- Microsoft executives said so during the anti-trust trial. If Solitaire is removed, the operating system won't function properly. Therefore, we have no choice but to banish all Windows computers." The Bureau's Assistant Technology Consultant, Mr. Reginald "Red" Taype, asked, "Have you ever seen an abucus crash? Have you ever seen anybody have fun with a slide rule? Do adding machines contain undocumented easter eggs? No! That's why we're ditching our PCs." | |
The Socioeconomic Group Formerly Known As "Geeks" Nobody wants to be called a "geek" anymore. The label, once worn proudly by members of the tech community as a symbol of their separation from mainstream society, is now suddenly out of style. It all started last week when some clueless PR firm released a list of the "Top 100 Geeks", including such anti-geeks as Bill Gates, Janet Reno, Paul Allen, and Jeff "One-Click" Bezos. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that businessmen in South Korea are striving for the "Geek Chic" image by dressing like Bill Gates. Now that the Chief Bloatware Architect has been identified as a "geek", everybody else has bailed ship. Still undecided on a new label, the community now calls itself the S.E.G.K.A.G. (SocioEconomic Group formerly Known As Geeks). "I cannot tolerate belonging to the same subculture as Bill Gates!" explained one former geek. "If that manifestation of evil is called a 'geek', then so be it. I am now officially a nerd." | |
Microsoft Fights Linux -- By Contributing Kernel Patches If you can't beat 'em, join 'em... and then destory 'em. That seems to be the new Microsoft strategy for dealing with Linux. Instead of fighting a FUD or patent war, Microsoft operatives are doing something totally out of character: they are contributing patches for the Linux kernel and other programs. Don't worry, Microsoft is still evil. It's all part of a massive denial of service attack against Linus Torvalds designed to bring kernel development to a standstill. By sending over 10,000 patches per minute by email to Linus and other top kernel hackers, Microsoft has exposed Linux's Achilles heel. "I can't believe this is happening!" one stressed-out kernel hacker said at a press conference on IRC. "If this goes on, we may have to conduct kernel development over some other network protocol, like avian carriers... Aw crap, there's smoke coming from my email server! Ahh... it can't handle the load!" At this point the developer cut off and we haven't heard from him since. At first Linus was unsure where the deluge of patches was coming from. But when he saw one patch to replace kernel panics with bluescreens, the source was pretty obvious. "Oh, and the fact that all of the patches are covered by Microsoft's GPL [Grossly Private License] was a dead giveaway, too," | |
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." | |
Bill Gates Receives Slap On Wrist; Carpal Tunnel Flares Up The phrase "slap on the wrist" usually signifies an extremely minor punishment received for a crime. In Bill Gates' case, the punishment set forth in the tentative settlement with the Department Of Justice hasn't been quite so minor. After receiving a slap on the wrist from the DOJ, Bill Gates' is now suffering from a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome. "Mr. Gates was slapped on the left wrist earlier today by a DOJ lawyer," said the chief surgeon of the mini-hospital enclosed within the Gates Mansion. "Now he can't move that hand without extreme pain. It's obvious that years of sitting in front of a computer plotting world domination has caused his hands and nerves to become fragile and vulnerable to even the slightest touch." The Department of Justice proclaimed that the incident has vindicated their actions. Explained the lawyer who delivered the punishment, "We've been accused of selling out to Microsoft. We've been criticized for giving up even though we've already won the game. But that's all wrong. It's quite clear that the slap-on-the-wrist punishment has been anything but a slap on the wrist. We won this case and Microsoft lost. So there!" | |
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. | |
Press Release -- For Immediate Release Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA ...Virtually all version of Linux (and Unix) contain a security hole that allows unauthorized users to gain complete control over the machine. By simply typing "root" at the login prompt and supplying a password from a limited number of possibilities, a malicious user can easily gain administrator privileges. This hole can be breached in seconds with only a dozen or so keystrokes... We suspect this issue has been known to Red Hat and other Linux distributors for years and they have refused to acknowlege its existence or supply a patch preventing users from exploiting the "root" login loophole... By ignoring the problem, the Linux community has proven that installing Linux is a dangerous proposition that could get you fired. We would like to point out that Windows XP does not suffer from this gaping hole... Tests conducted by both Ziff-Davis and Mindcraft prove that Windows XP is indeed the most secure operating system ever produced... | |
A "practical joker" deserves applause for his wit according to its quality. Bastinado is about right. For exceptional wit one might grant keelhauling. But staking him out on an anthill should be reserved for the very wittiest. -- Lazarus Long | |
A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselvse, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul. -- John Kennedy Toole, "Confederacy of Dunces" | |
A man would still do something out of sheer perversity - he would create destruction and chaos - just to gain his point... and if all this could in turn be analyzed and prevented by predicting that it would occur, then man would deliberately go mad to prove his point. -- Feodor Dostoevsky, "Notes From the Underground" | |
A pretty foot is one of the greatest gifts of nature... please send me your last pair of shoes, already worn out in dancing... so I can have something of yours to press against my heart. -- Goethe | |
An elderly couple were flying to their Caribbean hideaway on a chartered plane when a terrible storm forced them to land on an uninhabited island. When several days passed without rescue, the couple and their pilot sank into a despondent silence. Finally, the woman asked her husband if he had made his usual pledge to the United Way Campaign. "We're running out of food and water and you ask *that*?" her husband barked. "If you really need to know, I not only pledged a half million but I've already paid them half of it." "You owe the U.W.C. a *quarter million*?" the woman exclaimed euphorically. "Don't worry, Harry, they'll find us! They'll find us!" | |
Any man can work when every stroke of his hand brings down the fruit rattling from the tree to the ground; but to labor in season and out of season, under every discouragement, by the power of truth -- that requires a heroism which is transcendent. -- Henry Ward Beecher | |
Buck-passing usually turns out to be a boomerang. | |
Class: when they're running you out of town, to look like you're leading the parade. -- Bill Battie | |
Creativity is not always bred in an environment of tranquility; sometimes you have to squeeze a little to get the paste out of the tube. | |
Do you realize how many holes there could be if people would just take the time to take the dirt out of them? | |
Go out and tell a lie that will make the whole family proud of you. -- Cadmus, to Pentheus, in "The Bacchae" by Euripides | |
"I don't think they could put him in a mental hospital. On the other hand, if he were already in, I don't think they'd let him out." | |
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. -- William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic" | |
I think I'm schizophrenic. One half of me's paranoid and the other half's out to get him. | |
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. -- Oscar Wilde, "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young" | |
If people see that you mean them no harm, they'll never hurt you, nine times out of ten! | |
If you go out of your mind, do it quietly, so as not to disturb those around you. | |
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. -- George Santayana | |
"Just out of curiosity does this actually mean something or have some of the few remaining bits of your brain just evaporated?" -- Patricia O Tuama, rissa@killer.DALLAS.TX.US | |
Justice always prevails ... three times out of seven! -- Michael J. Wagner | |
Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up to. | |
Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in. -- Sydney J. Harris | |
More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice. -- R.S. Surtees | |
Never, ever lie to someone you love unless you're absolutely sure they'll never find out the truth. | |
Only two of my personalities are schizophrenic, but one of them is paranoid and the other one is out to get him. | |
Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made. -- Immanuel Kant | |
Paranoia doesn't mean the whole world isn't out to get you. | |
Pelorat sighed. "I will never understand people." "There's nothing to it. All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else. How would Seldon have worked out his Plan -- and I don't care how subtle his mathematics was -- if he didn't understand people; and how could he have done that if people weren't easy to understand? You show me someone who can't understand people and I'll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself -- no offense intended." -- Asimov, "Foundation's Edge" | |
People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out on the pleasure. -- Russell Baker | |
Rincewind looked down at him and grinned slowly. It was a wide, manic, and utterly humourless rictus. It was the sort of grin that is normally accompanied by small riverside birds wandering in and out, picking scraps out of the teeth. -- Terry Pratchett, "The Lure of the Wyrm" | |
Some men are discovered; others are found out. | |
Sometimes I get the feeling that I went to a party on Perry Lane in 1962, and the party spilled out of the house, and came down the street, and covered the world. -- Robert Stone | |
Stupidity got us into this mess -- why can't it get us out? | |
Subtlety is the art of saying what you think and getting out of the way before it is understood. | |
The difference between common-sense and paranoia is that common-sense is thinking everyone is out to get you. That's normal -- they are. Paranoia is thinking that they're conspiring. -- J. Kegler | |
The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit hits a pedestrian. -- Frank Herbert, "The White Plague" | |
The Least Successful Defrosting Device The all-time record here is held by Mr. Peter Rowlands of Lancaster whose lips became frozen to his lock in 1979 while blowing warm air on it. "I got down on my knees to breathe into the lock. Somehow my lips got stuck fast." While he was in the posture, an old lady passed an inquired if he was all right. "Alra? Igmmlptk", he replied at which point she ran away. "I tried to tell her what had happened, but it came out sort of... muffled," explained Mr. Rowlands, a pottery designer. He was trapped for twenty minutes ("I felt a bit foolish") until constant hot breathing brought freedom. He was subsequently nicknamed "Hot Lips". -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas. -- H.G. Wells, "Time After Time" | |
Uh-oh -- I've let the cat out of the bag. Let me, then, straightforwardly state the thesis I shall now elaborate: Making variations on a theme is really the crux of creativity. -- Douglas R. Hofstadter, "Metamagical Themas" | |
What's this stuff about people being "released on their own recognizance"? Aren't we all out on our own recognizance? | |
When you dig another out of trouble, you've got a place to bury your own. | |
Why my thoughts are my own, when they are in, but when they are out they are another's. -- Susanna Martin, executed for witchcraft, 1681 | |
You can always tell the people that are forging the new frontier. They're the ones with arrows sticking out of their backs. | |
You give me space to belong to myself yet without separating me from your own life. May it all turn out to your happiness. -- Goethe | |
You know you're in trouble when... (1) You wake up face down on the pavement. (2) Your wife wakes up feeling amorous and you have a headache. (3) You turn on the news and they're showing emergency routes out of the city. (4) Your twin sister forgot your birthday. (5) You wake up and discover your waterbed broke and then remember that you don't have a waterbed. (6) Your doctor tells you you're allergic to chocolate. | |
You know you're in trouble when... (1) You've been at work for an hour before you notice that your skirt is caught in your pantyhose. Especially if you're a man. (2) Your blind date turns out to be your ex-wife. (3) Your income tax check bounces. (4) You put both contact lenses in the same eye. (5) Your wife says, "Good morning, Bill" and your name is George. (6) You wake up to the soothing sound of flowing water... the day after you bought a waterbed. (7) You go on your honeymoon to a remote little hotel and the desk clerk, bell hop, and manager have a "Welcome Back" party for your spouse. | |
You men out there probably think you already know how to dress for success. You know, for example, that you should not wear leisure suits or white plastic belts and shoes, unless you are going to a costume party disguised as a pig farmer vacationing at Disney World. -- Dave Barry, "How to Dress for Real Success" | |
Your Co-worker Could Be a Space Alien, Say Experts ...Here's How You Can Tell Many Americans work side by side with space aliens who look human -- but you can spot these visitors by looking for certain tip-offs, say experts. They listed 10 signs to watch for: (3) Bizarre sense of humor. Space aliens who don't understand earthly humor may laugh during a company training film or tell jokes that no one understands, said Steiger. (6) Misuses everyday items. "A space alien may use correction fluid to paint its nails," said Steiger. (8) Secretive about personal life-style and home. "An alien won't discuss details or talk about what it does at night or on weekends." (10) Displays a change of mood or physical reaction when near certain high-tech hardware. "An alien may experience a mood change when a microwave oven is turned on," said Steiger. The experts pointed out that a co-worker would have to display most if not all of these traits before you can positively identify him as a space alien. -- National Enquirer, Michael Cassels, August, 1984. [I thought everybody laughed at company training films. Ed.] | |
"If we can't keep this sort of thing out of the kernel, we might as well pack it up and go run Solaris." - Larry McVoy | |
"THIS time it really is fixed. I mean, how many times can we get it wrong? At some point, we just have to run out of really bad ideas.." - Linus Torvalds" | |
"Thanks, and THIS time it really is fixed. I mean, how many times can we get it wrong? At some point, we just have to run out of really bad ideas.." - Linus Torvalds | |
"The debugger is akin to giving the _rabbits_ a bazooka. The poor wolf doesn't get any sharper teeth. Yeah, it sure helps against wolves. They explode in pretty patterns of red drops flying _everywhere_. Cool. But it doesn't help against a rabbit gene pool that is slowly deteriorating because there is nothing to keep them from breeding, and no darwin to make sure that it's the fastest and strongest that breeds. You mentioned how NT has the nicest debugger out there. Contemplate it." - Linus Torvalds | |
Understatement of the century: "Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones" - Linus Torvalds, August 1991 | |
Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote: > > Running with page aging convinces me that 2.2.19 we need to sort some > of the vm issues out badly, and make it faster than 2.4test 8) Ahh.. The challenge is out! You and me. Mano a mano. Linus | |
"Rusty? Help me out, and I won't ever call "netfilter" a heap of stinking dung again. Do we have a deal?" - Linus | |
> 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 | |
David Brownell wrote: > AMD told me I'd need an NDA to learn their workaround, and I've not > pursued it. (Does anyone already know what kind of NDA they use?) It varies depending on the info. They may well be able to sort out a sane NDA with you. If they dont want to then I guess it would be best if the ohci driver printing a message explaining the component has an undocumented errata fix, gave AMD's phone number and refused to load.. - Alan Cox | |
/* Sun, you just can't beat me, you just can't. Stop trying, * give up. I'm serious, I am going to kick the living shit * out of you, game over, lights out. */ - comment from arch/sparc/lib/checksum.S | |
Actually you would still need the other fixes otherwise you might as well put the root password in /etc/motd - Alan Cox pointing out some security holes in binfmt_misc | |
Dennis wrote: > whatever you do dont buy a gigabit card with a small buffer and 32bits. > 32bits isnt enough to do gigabit, even with a large buffer. Never underestimate what will come out of Taiwan in massive quantities :) - Jeff Garzik about gigabit ethernet cards on linux-kernel | |
David Wagner wrote: > Is this a bad coding? Yes. Not to mention side effects, it's just plain ugly. Anyone who invents identifiers of _that_ level of ugliness should be forced to read them aloud for a week or so, until somebody will shoot him out of mercy. Out of curiosity: who was the author? It looks unusually nasty, even for SGI. - Al Viro on coding style | |
You know, if you really do not understand the implications of running everything with permissions equivalent to root - get the hell out of any UNIX-related programming until you learn. - Al Viro explaining the merits of doing everything as root | |
You don't get out much, do you :-)? Lighten up a little, this is supposed to be fun.......We could argue all day, but there was lots of computer work done before PCI and PCs. I'm more than old enough to know, so just leave it at that....... - Dan Malek on the linuxppc-embedded list | |
Were they afraid that "e" being the most widely used letter in the English language was going to war out thir xpnsiv kyboards if thy usd it all th tim? - Mike A. Harris 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 | |
> Not that the kernel list is the best place to bring this up, but NVIDIA > would NOT be on that list. They are by far one of the best companies out > there providing support for their cards. I bought my GF2 for exactly that > reason too.... Sure. I spent much happy time telling people to report bugs to nvidia because their closed drivers mean that only nvidia can debug all the crashes people see with them loaded - at least some of which dont occur without the modules - Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
But in my experience you have a better chance of getting a straight answer out of a politician than intels networking folks. Maybe they have reformed - Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
Basically, I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules, it's THEIR problem. I want people to know that in their bones, and I want it shouted out from the rooftops. I want people to wake up in a cold sweat every once in a while if they use binary-only modules. - Linus Torvalds on linux-kernel | |
As you point out below, contract law is also involved. Add the DMCA, UCITA, and Bush 2.0 to the mix, and any lawyer who says he actually knows what's legal is lying. - Ian Pilcher on Microsoft "shared source" licensing | |
> That is reimplementing file system functionality in user space. > I'm in doubts that this is considered good design... Keeping things out of the kernel is good design. Your block indirections are no different to other database formats. Perhaps you think we should have fsql_operation() and libdb in kernel 8) - Alan Cox on linux-kernel | |
(But Intel has redefined the memory ordering so many times that they might redefine it in the future too and say that dependent loads are ok. I suspect most of the definitions are of the type "Oh, it used to be ok in the implementation even though it wasn't defined, and it turns out that Windows doesn't work if we change it, so we'll define darkness to be the new standard"..) - Linus Torvalds | |
Oh, and before people start telling me that RCU was successfully used in AIX/projectX/xxxx/etc, you have to realize that I don't give a rats *ss about the fact that there are OS's out there that are "more scalable". - Linus Torvalds | |
On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Martin Dalecki wrote: > Every BASTARD out there telling the world, that parsing ASCII formatted > files What was your username, again? - Alexander Viro in BOFH mode on linux-kernel | |
Yield and overcome; Bend and be straight; Empty and be full; Wear out and be new; Have little and gain; Have much and be confused. Therefore the wise embrace the one And set an example to all. Not putting on a display, They shine forth. Not justifying themselves, They are distinguished. Not boasting, They receive recognition. Not bragging, They never falter. They do not quarrel, So no one quarrels with them. Therefore the ancients say, "Yield and overcome." Is that an empty saying? Be really whole, And all things will come to you. | |
These things from ancient times arise from one: The sky is whole and clear. The earth is whole and firm. The spirit is whole and strong. The valley is whole and full. The ten thousand things are whole and alive. Kings and lords are whole, and the country is upright. All these are in virtue of wholeness. The clarity of the sky prevents its falling. The firmness of the earth prevents its splitting. The strength of the spirit prevents its being used up. The fullness of the valley prevents its running dry. The growth of the ten thousand things prevents their drying out. The leadership of kings and lords prevents the downfall of the country. Therefore the humble is the root of the noble. The low is the foundation of the high. Princes and lords consider themselves "orphaned", "widowed" and "worthless". Do they not depend on being humble? Too much success is not an advantage. Do not tinkle like jade Or clatter like stone chimes. | |
And he climbed with the lad up the Eiffelberg Tower. "This," cried the Mayor, "is your town's darkest hour! The time for all Whos who have blood that is red to come to the aid of their country!" he said. "We've GOT to make noises in greater amounts! So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!" Thus he spoke as he climbed. When they got to the top, the lad cleared his throat and he shouted out, "YOPP!" And that Yopp... That one last small, extra Yopp put it over! Finally, at last! From the speck on that clover their voices were heard! They rang out clear and clean. And they elephant smiled. "Do you see what I mean?" They've proved they ARE persons, no matter how small. And their whole world was saved by the smallest of All!" "How true! Yes, how true," said the big kangaroo. "And, from now on, you know what I'm planning to do? From now on, I'm going to protect them with you!" And the young kangaroo in her pouch said, "ME TOO! From the sun in the summer. From rain when it's fall-ish, I'm going to protect them. No matter how small-ish!" -- Dr. Seuss "Horton Hears a Who" | |
Are you a parent? Do you sometimes find yourself unsure as to what to say in those awkward situations? Worry no more... You wouldn't understand. You ask too many questions. In order to be a man, you have to learn to follow orders. That's for me to know and you to find out. Don't let those bullies push you around. Go in there and stick up for yourself. You're acting too big for your britches. Well, you broke it. Now are you satisfied? Wait till your father gets home. Bored? If you're bored, I've got some chores for you. Shape up or ship out. | |
Article the Third: Where a crime of the kidneys has been committed, the accused should enjoy the right to a speedy diaper change. Public announcements and guided tours of the aforementioned are not necessary. Article the Fourth: The decision to eat strained lamb or not should be with the "feedee" and not the "feeder". Blowing the strained lamb into the feeder's face should be accepted as an opinion, not as a declaration of war. Article the Fifth: Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize, whether it be in church, a public meeting place, during a movie, or after hours when the lights are out. They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have to last a lifetime and must be conserved. -- Erma Bombeck, "A Baby's Bill of Rights" | |
-- 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" | |
I opened the drawer of my little desk and a single letter fell out, a letter from my mother, written in pencil, one of her last, with unfinished words and an implicit sense of her departure. It's so curious: one can resist tears and "behave" very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window... or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed... or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses. -- Letters From Colette | |
My ritual differs slightly. What I do, first thing [in the morning], is I hop into the shower stall. Then I hop right back out, because when I hopped in I landed barefoot right on top of See Threepio, a little plastic robot character from "Star Wars" whom my son, Robert, likes to pull the legs off of while he showers. Then I hop right back into the stall because our dog, Earnest, who has been alone in the basement all night building up powerful dog emotions, has come bounding and quivering into the bathroom and wants to greet me with 60 or 70 thousand playful nips, any one of which -- bear in mind that I am naked and, without my contact lenses, essentially blind -- could result in the kind of injury where you have to learn a whole new part if you want to sing the "Messiah," if you get my drift. Then I hop right back out, because Robert, with that uncanny sixth sense some children have -- you cannot teach it; they either have it or they don't -- has chosen exactly that moment to flush one of the toilets. Perhaps several of them. -- Dave Barry | |
On this morning in August when I was 13, my mother sent us out pick tomatoes. Back in April I'd have killed for a fresh tomato, but in August they are no more rare or wonderful than rocks. So I picked up one and threw it at a crab apple tree, where it made a good *splat*, and then threw a tomato at my brother. He whipped one back at me. We ducked down by the vines, heaving tomatoes at each other. My sister, who was a good person, said, "You're going to get it." She bent over and kept on picking. What a target! She was 17, a girl with big hips, and bending over, she looked like the side of a barn. I picked up a tomato so big it sat on the ground. It looked like it had sat there a week. The underside was brown, small white worms lived in it, and it was very juicy. I stood up and took aim, and went into the windup, when my mother at the kitchen window called my name in a sharp voice. I had to decide quickly. I decided. A rotten Big Boy hitting the target is a memorable sound, like a fat man doing a belly-flop. With a whoop and a yell the tomatoee came after faster than I knew she could run, and grabbed my shirt and was about to brain me when Mother called her name in a sharp voice. And my sister, who was a good person, obeyed and let go -- and burst into tears. I guess she knew that the pleasure of obedience is pretty thin compared with the pleasure of hearing a rotten tomato hit someone in the rear end. -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days" | |
Out of the mouths of babes does often come cereal. | |
The courtroom was pregnant (pun intended) with anxious silence as the judge solemnly considered his verdict in the paternity suit before him. Suddenly, he reached into the folds of his robes, drew out a cigar and ceremoniously handed it to the defendant. "Congratulations!" declaimed the jurist. "You have just become a father!" | |
"Actually, the only distribution of Linux I've ever used that passed the rootshell test out of the box (hit rootshell at the time the dist is released and see if you can break the OS with scripts from there) is Debian." -- seen on the Linux security-audit mailing list | |
<SirDibos> does Johnie Ingram hang out here on IRC? | |
* Twilight1 will have to hang his Mozilla beanie dinosaur in effigy if Netscape sells-out to Alot Of Losers.. | |
Most of us feel that marketing types are like a dangerous weapon - keep 'em unloaded and locked up in a cupboard, and only bring them out when you need them to do a job. -- Craig Sanders | |
<_Anarchy_> Argh.. who's handing out the paper bags 8) | |
* dark greets liw with a small yellow frog. * liw kisses the frog and watches it transform to a beautiful nerd girl, takes her out to ice cream, and lives happily forever after with her <dark> liw: Umm it's too late to have the frog back? | |
Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me. -- Linus Torvalds | |
<rcw> those apparently-bacteria-like multicolor worms coming out of microsoft's backorifice <rcw> that's the backoffice logo | |
Basically, I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules, it's THEIR problem. I want people to know that in their bones, and I want it shouted out from the rooftops. I want people to wake up in a cold sweat every once in a while if they use binary-only modules. -- Linus Torvalds | |
> >I don't really regard bible-kjv-text as a technical document, > > but... :) > It's a manual -- for living. But it hasn't been updated in a long time, many would say that it's sadly out of date, and the upstream maintainer doesn't respond to his email. :-) -- Branden Robinson, Oliver Elphick, and Chris Waters in a message to debian-policy | |
<Slackware> uh oh, what have I started :) <Debian> rofl... distro nick wars. * Slackware just waits for /nick Gnome, /nick KDE, and then world war 4 to break out <WinNT> :oP <OpenBSD> <duck> <PalmOS> :) <Slackware> no'one would dare /nick RedHat <tru64> mew. | |
<Knghtbrd> Okay, you people have started talking about BSDM applications of network hardware... I think I'll run off and do something useful and Debianish and stay OUT of this one... <Knghtbrd> (for a change) | |
<Knghtbrd> It's a trackball for one <wichert> so it's not a rodent <wichert> it's a turd with a ball sticking out <wichert> which you fondle constantly | |
In fact.. based on this model of what the NSA is and isn't... many of the people reading this are members of the NSA... /. is afterall 'News for Nerds'. NSA MONDAY MORNING {at the coffee machine): NSA AGENT 1: Hey guys, did you check out slashdot over the weekend? AGENT 2: No, I was installing Mandrake 6.1 and I coulnd't get the darn ppp connection up.. AGENT 1: Well check it out... they're on to us. -- Chris Moyer <cdmoyer@starmail.com> | |
I think irc isn't going to work though---we're running out of topic space! -- Joseph Carter | |
<knghtbrd> If charging someone for violation of US crypto laws would get you laughed out of court, just "investigate" them on hte charge of TREASON! <knghtbrd> Tea, anyone? <Espy> I'd rather drown politicians instead of tea :) <stu> espy: politicians have gills, duh <Espy> weasels don't have gills | |
It's as BAD as you think, and they ARE out to get you. | |
<Espy> be careful, some twit might quote you <Espy> out of context... | |
* cesarb wonders if in less than a week Carmack will end up receiving in e-mail a courtesy copy of a version of the Quake source which is four times faster than what went out of his virtual hands... | |
<Palisade> knght, sheesh, are you pasting my words out of context in #debian or something? <Palisade> ;) <Knghtbrd> no, but I probably should be ;> <Palisade> d'oh! | |
<Knghtbrd> it's too bad most old unices turned out y2k compliant <Knghtbrd> because it means people will STILL BE RUNNING THEM in 30 years =p <Knghtbrd> it would have been so much nicer if y2k effectively killed off hpux, aix, sunos, etc ;> <Espy> Knghtbrd: since when are PH-UX, aches, and solartus "old"? | |
Feb 5 13:27:01 trinity lp0 on fire -- the Linux kernel, alerting me that there was some unknown problem with my printer (ie, it was out of ink) | |
* Dry-ice can't code his way out of a paper bag <Coderjoe> dry-ice: int main() { ExitPaperBag(); return 0; } <Knghtbrd> Is that how that's done then? *takes notes* | |
Granted, Win95's look wasn't all that new either - Apple tried to sue Microsoft for copying the Macintosh UI / trash can icon, until Microsoft pointed out that Apple got many of its Mac ideas (including the trash can icon) from Xerox ParcPlace. Xerox is probably still wondering why everyone is interested in their trash cans. -- Danny Thorpe, Borland Delphi R&R | |
<calc> knghtbrd: gnome 2.0 will be out in a few months, not sure how it will compare to kde 2.0 though <knghtbrd> calc: Just as bloated, just as buggy, and every Gnome 2 app will depend on 30 libraries. <Slimer> knghtbrd: so what changes from 1.0 ? | |
<Deek> Exactly how much of a PITA is this in C? <Knghtbrd> It's written in C++. <Deek> Hence my question. <Knghtbrd> I could do something like it in C. Anyone who saw the results would think I was either a genius or out of my fucking mind. They'd be right on either count. | |
A subversive is anyone who can out-argue their government. | |
* knghtbrd ponders how to scare the living shit out of 87 people at once.. <knghtbrd> AHH! I can do it in 3 words!: <knghtbrd> Microsoft Visual COBOL. | |
<mao> why do they insist on ading -Werror... <Misty-chan> Mesa would not compile out of the box if it were done by you guys ;) <knghtbrd> Uh, Mesa DOESN'T compile out of the box most of the time. | |
<Knghtbrd> This font is starting to come out very nicely <stu> Knghtbrd: oh dear, are you hacking up another quake font in vi? :) | |
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 | |
<|Rain|> with sane code, maybe I could figure out the renderer :) <LordHavoc> rain: I'd probably be the one writing the renderer <|Rain|> well, er, uh | |
Isn't it embarrassing when you have to go to the drugstore for some "special items", and when you're checking out, the cashier looks at you like, "oh, I know what YOU'RE doing tonight..." Yep, that cashier read all the signs... canned chicken soup, TheraFlu, Halls, NyQuil, the bigass bottles of OJ and grapefruit juice... he knew and I knew that I had a date with the teevee and a down comforter. Awww yeah. -- Elizabeth Kirkindall | |
NOTICE: anyone seen smoking will be assumed to be on fire and will be summarily put out. | |
<hoponpop> my program works if i take out the bugs. | |
<DannyS> Hit the monkey to win $20(*)! * knghtbrd gets out his mallet. * knghtbrd plants it firmly on DannyS' head. * knghtbrd will take his $20 now. =D | |
"Nvidia's OpenGL drivers are my "gold standard", and it has been quite a while since I have had to report a problem to them, and even their brand new extensions work as documented the first time I try them. When I have a problem on an Nvidia, I assume that it is my fault. With anyone else's drivers, I assume it is their fault. This has turned out correct almost all the time." -- John Carmack | |
<hoponpop> the difference between netbsd, freebsd, and openbsd, as an insider is freebsd is interested in getting things done, and doesn't mind hurting people who get in their way. <hoponpop> netbsd is interested in making sure nothing gets done, and doesn't mind hurting people who try to accomplish things. <hoponpop> openbsd is interested in looking good, and doesn't hurt anyone in their own little community, but look out everybody else! | |
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." | |
An attorney was defending his client against a charge of first-degree murder. "Your Honor, my client is accused of stuffing his lover's mutilated body into a suitcase and heading for the Mexican border. Just north of Tijuana a cop spotted her hand sticking out of the suitcase. Now, I would like to stress that my client is *___not* a murderer. A sloppy packer, maybe..." | |
For three years, the young attorney had been taking his brief vacations at this country inn. The last time he'd finally managed an affair with the innkeeper's daughter. Looking forward to an exciting few days, he dragged his suitcase up the stairs of the inn, then stopped short. There sat his lover with an infant on her lap! "Helen, why didn't you write when you learned you were pregnant?" he cried. "I would have rushed up here, we could have gotten married, and the baby would have my name!" "Well," she said, "when my folks found out about my condition, we sat up all night talkin' and talkin' and finally decided it would be better to have a bastard in the family than a lawyer." | |
Fortune Documents the Great Legal Decisions: We can imagine no reason why, with ordinary care, human toes could not be left out of chewing tobacco, and if toes are found in chewing tobacco, it seems to us that someone has been very careless. -- 78 So. 365. | |
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. | |
Fortune's Real-Life Courtroom Quote #3: Q: When he went, had you gone and had she, if she wanted to and were able, for the time being excluding all the restraints on her not to go, gone also, would he have brought you, meaning you and she, with him to the station? MR. BROOKS: Objection. That question should be taken out and shot. | |
Getting kicked out of the American Bar Association is liked getting kicked out of the Book-of-the-Month Club. -- Melvin Belli on the occcasion of his getting kicked out of the American Bar Association | |
"Hi, I'm Preston A. Mantis, president of Consumers Retail Law Outlet. As you can see by my suit and the fact that I have all these books of equal height on the shelves behind me, I am a trained legal attorney. Do you have a car or a job? Do you ever walk around? If so, you probably have the makings of an excellent legal case. Although of course every case is different, I would definitely say that based on my experience and training, there's no reason why you shouldn't come out of this thing with at least a cabin cruiser. "Remember, at the Preston A. Mantis Consumers Retail Law Outlet, our motto is: 'It is very difficult to disprove certain kinds of pain.'" -- Dave Barry, "Pain and Suffering" | |
Humor in the Court: Q: So, after the anesthesia, when you came out of it, what did you observe with respect to your scalp? A: I didn't see my scalp the whole time I was in the hospital. Q: It was covered? A: Yes, bandaged. Q: Then, later on.. what did you see? A: I had a skin graft. My whole buttocks and leg were removed and put on top of my head. | |
I suppose some of the variation between Boston drivers and the rest of the country is due to the progressive Massachusetts Driver Education Manual which I happen to have in my top desk drawer. Some of the Tips for Better Driving are worth considering, to wit: [110.13]: "When traveling on a one-way street, stay to the right, so as not to interfere with oncoming traffic." [22.17b]: "Learning to change lanes takes time and patience. The best recommendation that can be made is to go to a Celtics [basketball] game; study the fast break and then go out and practice it on the highway." [41.16]: "Never bump a baby carriage out of a crosswalk unless the kid's really asking for it." | |
If a jury in a criminal trial stays out for more than twenty-four hours, it is certain to vote acquittal, save in those instances where it votes guilty. -- Joseph C. Goulden | |
In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment was expressed by Thomas K. Connellan, president of The Management Group, Inc. Speaking to business executives in Chicago and quoted in Automotive News, Connellan attributed a measure of America's falling productivity to an excess of attorneys and accountants, and a dearth of production experts. Lawyers and accountants "do not make the economic pie any bigger; they only figure out how the pie gets divided. Neither profession provides any added value to product." According to Connellan, the highly productive Japanese society has 10 lawyers and 30 accountants per 100,000 population. The U.S. has 200 lawyers and 700 accountants. This suggests that "the U.S. proportion of pie-bakers and pie-dividers is way out of whack." Could Dick Butcher have been an efficiency expert? -- Motor Trend, May 1983 | |
It seems these two guys, George and Harry, set out in a Hot Air balloon to cross the United States. After forty hours in the air, George turned to Harry, and said, "Harry, I think we've drifted off course! We need to find out where we are." Harry cools the air in the balloon, and they descend to below the cloud cover. Slowly drifting over the countryside, George spots a man standing below them and yells out, "Excuse me! Can you please tell me where we are?" The man on the ground yells back, "You're in a balloon, approximately fifty feet in the air!" George turns to Harry and says, "Well, that man *must* be a lawyer". Replies Harry, "How can you tell?". "Because the information he gave us is 100% accurate, and totally useless!" That's the end of The Joke, but for you people who are still worried about George and Harry: they end up in the drink, and make the front page of the New York Times: "Balloonists Soaked by Lawyer". | |
Just remember: when you go to court, you are trusting your fate to twelve people that weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty! | |
Pittsburgh Driver's Test (7) The car directly in front of you has a flashing right tail light but a steady left tail light. This means (a) one of the tail lights is broken; you should blow your horn to call the problem to the driver's attention. (b) the driver is signaling a right turn. (c) the driver is signaling a left turn. (d) the driver is from out of town. The correct answer is (d). Tail lights are used in some foreign countries to signal turns. | |
Some of the most interesting documents from Sweden's middle ages are the old county laws (well, we never had counties but it's the nearest equivalent I can find for "landskap"). These laws were written down sometime in the 13th century, but date back even down into Viking times. The oldest one is the Vastgota law which clearly has pagan influences, thinly covered with some Christian stuff. In this law, we find a page about "lekare", which is the Old Norse word for a performing artist, actor/jester/musician etc. Here is an approximate translation, where I have written "artist" as equivalent of "lekare". "If an artist is beaten, none shall pay fines for it. If an artist is wounded, one such who goes with hurdie-gurdie or travels with fiddle or drum, then the people shall take a wild heifer and bring it out on the hillside. Then they shall shave off all hair from the heifer's tail, and grease the tail. Then the artist shall be given newly greased shoes. Then he shall take hold of the heifer's tail, and a man shall strike it with a sharp whip. If he can hold her, he shall have the animal. If he cannot hold her, he shall endure what he received, shame and wounds." | |
The Least Successful Equal Pay Advertisement In 1976 the European Economic Community pointed out to the Irish Government that it had not yet implemented the agreed sex equality legislation. The Dublin Government immediately advertised for an equal pay enforcement officer. The advertisement offered different salary scales for men and women. -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they remain fixed, then with good laws that are constantly being altered, that the lack of learning combined with sound common sense is more helpful than the kind of cleverness that gets out of hand, and that as a general rule, states are better governed by the man in the street than by intellectuals. These are the sort of people who want to appear wiser than the laws, who want to get their own way in every general discussion, because they feel that they cannot show off their intelligence in matters of greater importance, and who, as a result, very often bring ruin on their country. -- Cleon, Thucydides, III, 37 translation by Rex Warner | |
When alerted to an intrusion by tinkling glass or otherwise, 1) Calm yourself 2) Identify the intruder 3) If hostile, kill him. Step number 3 is of particular importance. If you leave the guy alive out of misguided softheartedness, he will repay your generosity of spirit by suing you for causing his subsequent paraplegia and seek to force you to support him for the rest of his rotten life. In court he will plead that he was depressed because society had failed him, and that he was looking for Mother Teresa for comfort and to offer his services to the poor. In that lawsuit, you will lose. If, on the other hand, you kill him, the most that you can expect is that a relative will bring a wrongful death action. You will have two advantages: first, there be only your story; forget Mother Teresa. Second, even if you lose, how much could the bum's life be worth anyway? A Lot less than 50 years worth of paralysis. Don't play George Bush and Saddam Hussein. Finish the job. -- G. Gordon Liddy's "Forbes" column on personal security | |
A lifetime isn't nearly long enough to figure out what it's all about. | |
A neighbor came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey. "It is out on loan," the teacher replied. At that moment, the donkey brayed loudly inside the stable. "But I can hear it bray, over there." "Whom do you believe," asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?" | |
An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible. -- Russell Hoban, "Pilgermann" | |
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around -- nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye. I know it; I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy. -- J.D. Salinger, "Catcher in the Rye" | |
Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive. | |
"Do you think there's a God?" "Well, ____SOMEbody's out to get me!" -- Calvin and Hobbs | |
Don't make a big deal out of everything; just deal with everything. | |
Don't take life seriously, you'll never get out alive. | |
During the voyage of life, remember to keep an eye out for a fair wind; batten down during a storm; hail all passing ships; and fly your colors proudly. | |
Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential death in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters. -- Henry James Sr., writing to his sons Henry and William | |
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 | |
I do not seek the ignorant; the ignorant seek me -- I will instruct them. I ask nothing but sincerity. If they come out of habit, they become tiresome. -- I Ching | |
It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations. | |
Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it. -- Tom Lehrer | |
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all. -- Thomas J. Kopp | |
Most of what I really need to know about how to live, and what to do, and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain but there in the sandbox at nursery school. These are the things I learned: Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you're sorry when you hurt someone. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life. Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work some every day. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the plastic cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the plastic cup -- they all die. So do we. And then remember the book about Dick and Jane and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK. Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and sane living. Think of what a better world it would be if we all -- the whole world -- had cookies and milk about 3 o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap. Or if we had a basic policy in our nation and other nations to always put things back where we found them and cleaned up our own messes. And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out into the world it is best to hold hands and stick together. -- Robert Fulghum, "All I ever really needed to know I learned in kindergarten" | |
Nasrudin called at a large house to collect for charity. The servant said "My master is out." Nasrudin replied, "Tell your master that next time he goes out, he should not leave his face at the window. Someone might steal it." | |
Nasrudin returned to his village from the imperial capital, and the villagers gathered around to hear what had passed. "At this time," said Nasrudin, "I only want to say that the King spoke to me." All the villagers but the stupidest ran off to spread the wonderful news. The remaining villager asked, "What did the King say to you?" "What he said -- and quite distinctly, for everyone to hear -- was 'Get out of my way!'" The simpleton was overjoyed; he had heard words actually spoken by the King, and seen the very man they were spoken to. | |
Ninety percent of the time things turn out worse than you thought they would. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect that much. -- Augustine | |
Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in. -- H.R. Haldeman | |
One monk said to the other, "The fish has flopped out of the net! How will it live?" The other said, "When you have gotten out of the net, I'll tell you." | |
Since everything in life is but an experience perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter. -- Long Chen Pa | |
Once upon a time there was a DOS user who saw Unix, and saw that it was good. After typing cp on his DOS machine at home, he downloaded GNU's unix tools ported to DOS and installed them. He rm'd, cp'd, and mv'd happily for many days, and upon finding elvis, he vi'd and was happy. After a long day at work (on a Unix box) he came home, started editing a file, and couldn't figure out why he couldn't suspend vi (w/ ctrl-z) to do a compile. -- Erik Troan, ewt@tipper.oit.unc.edu | |
> : Any porters out there should feel happier knowing that DEC is shipping > : me an AlphaPC that I intend to try getting linux running on: this will > : definitely help flush out some of the most flagrant unportable stuff. > : The Alpha is much more different from the i386 than the 68k stuff is, so > : it's likely to get most of the stuff fixed. > > It's posts like this that almost convince us non-believers that there > really is a god. -- Anthony Lovell, to Linus's remarks about porting | |
...very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two noted exceptions: being struck by lightning, or worse, your *computer* being struck by lightning. -- Matt Welsh | |
Now I know someone out there is going to claim, "Well then, UNIX is intuitive, because you only need to learn 5000 commands, and then everything else follows from that! Har har har!" -- Andy Bates on "intuitive interfaces", slightly defending Macs | |
+#if defined(__alpha__) && defined(CONFIG_PCI) + /* + * The meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Plus + * this makes the year come out right. + */ + year -= 42; +#endif -- From the patch for 1.3.2: (kernel/time.c), submitted by Marcus Meissner | |
Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)" series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets and deliver this message of joy to the masses. -- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.27 | |
Keep me informed on the behaviour of this kernel.. As the "BugFree(tm)" series didn't turn out too well, I'm starting a new series called the "ItWorksForMe(tm)" series, of which this new kernel is yet another shining example. -- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.29 | |
(I tried to get some documentation out of Digital on this, but as far as I can tell even _they_ don't have it ;-) -- Linus Torvalds, in an article on a dnserver | |
Eh, that's it, I guess. No 300 million dollar unveiling event for this kernel, I'm afraid, but you're still supposed to think of this as the "happening of the century" (at least until the next kernel comes along). Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)" series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets and deliver this message of joy to the masses. -- Linus Torvalds, on releasing 1.3.27 | |
We apologize for the inconvenience, but we'd still like yout to test out this kernel. -- Linus Torvalds, announcing another kernel patch | |
> You know you are "there" when you are known by your first name, and > are recognized. > Lemmie see, there is Madonna, and Linus, and ..... help me out here! Bill ? ;-) -- From some postings on comp.os.linux.misc | |
> What does ELF stand for (in respect to Linux?) ELF is the first rock group that Ronnie James Dio performed with back in the early 1970's. In constrast, a.out is a misspelling of the French word for the month of August. What the two have in common is beyond me, but Linux users seem to use the two words together. -- seen on c.o.l.misc | |
Shoot me again. Just proving that the quickest way to solve the problem is to post a whine to the newsgroups: within moments the solution presents itself to me, and meanwhile my ass is hanging out on the Net... *sigh*... -- Dave Phillips, dlphilp@bright.net, about problem solving via news | |
The linuX Files -- The Source is Out There. -- Sent in by Craig S. Bell, goat@aracnet.com | |
Just to remind everyone. Today, Sept 17, is Linux's 5th birthday. So happy birthday to all on the list. Thanks go out to Linus and all the other hard-working maintainers for 5 wonderful fast paced years! -- William E. Roadcap <roadcapw@cfw.com> | |
1648 files (84%) out of the files that I mirror disappeared. Since my delete threshold was set at 90%, all those files are now missing from my hard drive. It's going to take a loooong time to fetch those again via 14.4kbps! -- Brian C. White | |
Check it out, send me comments, and dance joyously in the streets, -- Linus Torvalds announcing 2.0.27 | |
This is a scsi driver, scraes the shit out of me, therefore I tapdanced and wrote a unix clone around it (C) by linus -- Somewhere in the kernel tree | |
The only really good reason I can think to not release specs is embarrassment on just how crappy some hardware out there is, or just how buggy it is. -- Chris Wedgwood <cw@ix.net.nz> | |
<dark> eat Depends: cook | eat-out. But eat-out is non-free so that's out. And cook Recommends: clean-pans. -- Seen on #Debian | |
I've seen people with new children before, they go from ultra happy to looking like something out of a zombie film in about a week. -- Alan Cox about Linus after his 2nd daughter | |
<james> Are we going to make an emacs out of apt? APT - Debian in a program. It even does your laundry -- Seen on #Debian | |
Arnold's Laws of Documentation: (1) If it should exist, it doesn't. (2) If it does exist, it's out of date. (3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the first two laws. | |
The most effective has probably been Linux/8086 - that was a joke that got out of hand. So far out of hand in fact its almost approaching usability because other folks thought it worth doing - Alistair Riddoch especially. -- Alan Cox | |
<dark> Turns out that grep returns error code 1 when there are no matches. I KNEW that. Why did it take me half an hour? -- Seen on #Debian | |
Perhaps the RBLing (Realtime Black Hole) of msn.com recently, which prevented a large amount of mail going out for about 4 days, has had a positive influence in Redmond. They did agree to work on their anti-relay capabilities at their POPs to get the RBL lifted. -- Bill Campbell on Smail3-users | |
A feed salesman is on his way to a farm. As he's driving along at forty m.p.h., he looks out his car window and sees a three-legged chicken running alongside him, keeping pace with his car. He is amazed that a chicken is running at forty m.p.h. So he speeds up to forty-five, fifty, then sixty m.p.h. The chicken keeps right up with him the whole way, then suddenly takes off and disappears into the distance. The man pulls into the farmyard and says to the farmer, "You know, the strangest thing just happened to me; I was driving along at at least sixty miles an hour and a chicken passed me like I was standing still!" "Yeah," the farmer replies, "that chicken was ours. You see, there's me, and there's Ma, and there's our son Billy. Whenever we had chicken for dinner, we would all want a drumstick, so we'd have to kill two chickens. So we decided to try and breed a three-legged chicken so each of us could have a drumstick." "How do they taste?" said the farmer. "Don't know," replied the farmer. "We haven't been able to catch one yet." | |
A traveling salesman was driving past a farm when he saw a pig with three wooden legs executing a magnificent series of backflips and cartwheels. Intrigued, he drove up to the farmhouse, where he found an old farmer sitting in the yard watching the pig. "That's quite a pig you have there, sir" said the salesman. "Sure is, son," the farmer replied. "Why, two years ago, my daughter was swimming in the lake and bumped her head and damned near drowned, but that pig swam out and dragged her back to shore." "Amazing!" the salesman exlaimed. "And that's not the only thing. Last fall I was cuttin' wood up on the north forty when a tree fell on me. Pinned me to the ground, it did. That pig run up and wiggled underneath that tree and lifted it off of me. Saved my life." "Fantastic! the salesman said. But tell me, how come the pig has three wooden legs?" The farmer stared at the newcomer in amazement. "Mister, when you got an amazin' pig like that, you don't eat him all at once." | |
All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too, provided you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: "Where else are you going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains?" -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes" | |
By the middle 1880's, practically all the roads except those in the South, were of the present standard gauge. The southern roads were still five feet between rails. It was decided to change the gauge of all southern roads to standard, in one day. This remarkable piece of work was carried out on a Sunday in May of 1886. For weeks beforehand, shops had been busy pressing wheels in on the axles to the new and narrower gauge, to have a supply of rolling stock which could run on the new track as soon as it was ready. Finally, on the day set, great numbers of gangs of track layers went to work at dawn. Everywhere one rail was loosened, moved in three and one-half inches, and spiked down in its new position. By dark, trains from anywhere in the United States could operate over the tracks in the South, and a free interchange of freight cars everywhere was possible. -- Robert Henry, "Trains", 1957 | |
For every bloke who makes his mark, there's half a dozen waiting to rub it out. -- Andy Capp | |
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" | |
If I want your opinion, I'll ask you to fill out the necessary form. | |
If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are real good, you will get out of it. | |
In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter, "The Peter Principle" | |
It's very glamorous to raise millions of dollars, until it's time for the venture capitalist to suck your eyeballs out. -- Peter Kennedy, chairman of Kraft & Kennedy. | |
Let's organize this thing and take all the fun out of it. | |
Look, we trade every day out there with hustlers, deal-makers, shysters, con-men. That's the way businesses get started. That's the way this country was built. -- Hubert Allen | |
Men's skin is different from women's skin. It is usually bigger, and it has more snakes tattooed on it. Also, if you examine a woman's skin very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her ... [EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important world events such as agriculture, we're going to delete the next few square feet of the woman's skin. Thank you.] ... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first, without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from below. -- Dave Barry, "Saving Face" | |
Please try to limit the amount of "this room doesn't have any bazingas" until you are told that those rooms are "punched out." Once punched out, we have a right to complain about atrocities, missing bazingas, and such. -- N. Meyrowitz | |
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. -- Bill Vaughn | |
The annual meeting of the "You Have To Listen To Experience" Club is now in session. Our Achievement Awards this year are in the fields of publishing, advertising and industry. For best consistent contribution in the field of publishing our award goes to editor, R.L.K., [...] for his unrivalled alle- giance without variation to the statement: "Personally I'd love to do it, we'd ALL love to do it. But we're not going to do it. It's not the kind of book our house knows how to handle." Our superior performance award in the field of advertising goes to media executive, E.L.M., [...] for the continu- ally creative use of the old favorite: "I think what you've got here could be very exciting. Why not give it one more try based on the approach I've out- lined and see if you can come up with something fresh." Our final award for courageous holding action in the field of industry goes to supervisor, R.S., [...] for her unyielding grip on "I don't care if they fire me, I've been arguing for a new approach for YEARS but are we SURE that this is the right time--" I would like to conclude this meeting with a verse written specially for our prospectus by our founding president fifty years ago -- and now, as then, fully expressive of the emotion most close to all our hearts -- Treat freshness as a youthful quirk, And dare not stray to ideas new, For if t'were tried they might e'en work And for a living what woulds't we do? | |
The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form. -- Stanley J. Randall | |
The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic devices, such as television sets and VCR's, to the destruction centers, where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with sledgehammers. With their devices thus permanently destroyed, consumers would then be free to go out and buy new devices, rather than have to fritter away years of their lives trying to have the old ones repaired at so-called "factory service centers," which in fact consist of two men named Lester poking at the insides of broken electronic devices with cheap cigars and going, "Lookit all them WIRES in there!" -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants" | |
Then there was the ScoutMaster who got a fantastic deal on this case of Tates brand compasses for his troup; only $1.25 each! Only problem was, when they got them out in the woods, the compasses were all stuck pointing to the "W" on the dial. Moral: He who has a Tates is lost! | |
There is one way to find out if a man is honest -- ask him. If he says "Yes" you know he is crooked. -- Groucho Marx | |
They are fools that think that wealth or women or strong drink or even drugs can buy the most in effort out of the soul of a man. These things offer pale pleasures compared to that which is greatest of them all, that task which demands from him more than his utmost strength, that absorbs him, bone and sinew and brain and hope and fear and dreams -- and still calls for more. They are fools that think otherwise. No great effort was ever bought. No painting, no music, no poem, no cathedral in stone, no church, no state was ever raised into being for payment of any kind. No parthenon, no Thermopylae was ever built or fought for pay or glory; no Bukhara sacked, or China ground beneath Mongol heel, for loot or power alone. The payment for doing these things was itself the doing of them. To wield onself -- to use oneself as a tool in one's own hand -- and so to make or break that which no one else can build or ruin -- THAT is the greatest pleasure known to man! To one who has felt the chisel in his hand and set free the angel prisoned in the marble block, or to one who has felt sword in hand and set homeless the soul that a moment before lived in the body of his mortal enemy -- to those both come alike the taste of that rare food spread only for demons or for gods." -- Gordon R. Dickson, "Soldier Ask Not" | |
This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has "deregulated" the airline industry. What this means for you, the consumer, is that the airlines are no longer required to follow any rules whatsoever. They can show snuff movies. They can charge for oxygen. They can hire pilots right out of Vending Machine Refill Person School. They can conserve fuel by ejecting husky passengers over water. They can ram competing planes in mid-air. These innovations have resulted in tremendous cost savings which have been passed along to you, the consumer, in the form of flights with amazingly low fares, such as $29. Of course, certain restrictions do apply, the main one being that all these flights take you to Newark, and you must pay thousands of dollars if you want to fly back out. -- Dave Barry, "Iowa -- Land of Secure Vacations" | |
To understand this important story, you have to understand how the telephone company works. Your telephone is connected to a local computer, which is in turn connected to a regional computer, which is in turn connected to a loudspeaker the size of a garbage truck on the lawn of Edna A. Bargewater of Lawrence, Kan. Whenever you talk on the phone, your local computer listens in. If it suspects you're going to discuss an intimate topic, it notifies the computer above it, which listens in and decides whether to alert the one above it, until finally, if you really humiliate yourself, maybe break down in tears and tell your closest friend about a sordid incident from your past involving a seedy motel, a neighbor's spouse, an entire religious order, a garden hose and six quarts of tapioca pudding, the top computer feeds your conversation into Edna's loudspeaker, and she and her friends come out on the porch to listen and drink gin and laugh themselves silly. -- Dave Barry, "Won't It Be Just Great Owning Our Own Phones?" | |
When a Banker jumps out of a window, jump after him--that's where the money is. -- Robespierre | |
When you go out to buy, don't show your silver. | |
When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers. -- The Wall Street Journal | |
XXXVI: The thickness of the proposal required to win a multimillion dollar contract is about one millimeter per million dollars. If all the proposals conforming to this standard were piled on top of each other at the bottom of the Grand Canyon it would probably be a good idea. XXXVII: Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other 10 percent of the time you had no right to expect so much. XXXVIII: The early bird gets the worm. The early worm ... gets eaten. XXXIX: Never promise to complete any project within six months of the end of the year -- in either direction. XL: Most projects start out slowly -- and then sort of taper off. -- Norman Augustine | |
In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it usually is. :-) -- Larry Wall in <1991Jul31.174523.9447@netlabs.com> | |
No, I'm not going to explain it. If you can't figure it out, you didn't want to know anyway... :-) -- Larry Wall in <1991Aug7.180856.2854@netlabs.com> | |
I hope I'm not getting so famous that I can't think out load [sic] anymore. -- Larry Wall in <199709032332.QAA21669@wall.org> | |
As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says "optimize the heck out of this routine", and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer. -- Larry Wall in <199709081854.LAA20830@wall.org> | |
It's getting harder and harder to think out loud. One of these days someone's gonna go off and kill Thomas a'Becket for me... -- Larry Wall in <199709242015.NAA10312@wall.org> | |
But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl. -- Larry Wall in <199709251614.JAA15718@wall.org> | |
As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct. -- Larry Wall in <199710161841.LAA13208@wall.org> | |
That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns... :-) -- Larry Wall in <199710171838.LAA24968@wall.org> | |
Er, Tom, I hate to be the one to point this out, but your fix list is starting to resemble a feature list. You must be human or something. -- Larry Wall in <199801081824.KAA29602@wall.org> | |
Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fires. -- La Rochefoucauld | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I did my own thing and now I've got to undo it." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I have to floss my cat." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I have to stay home and see if I snore." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I never go out on days that end in `Y.'" | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I want to spend more time with my blender." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm attending the opening of my garage door." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm converting my calendar watch from Julian to Gregorian." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm doing door-to-door collecting for static cling." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm having all my plants neutered." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm staying home to work on my cottage cheese sculpture." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm taking punk totem pole carving." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but I've been scheduled for a karma transplant." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but it's my parakeet's bowling night." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but my favorite commercial is on TV." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but the last time I went out, I never came back." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but the man on television told me to stay tuned." | |
"I'd love to go out with you, but there are important world issues that need worrying about." | |
Sometime when you least expect it, Love will tap you on the shoulder... and ask you to move out of the way because it still isn't your turn. -- N.V. Plyter | |
The myth of romantic love holds that once you've fallen in love with the perfect partner, you're home free. Unfortunately, falling out of love seems to be just as involuntary as falling into it. | |
The story of the butterfly: "I was in Bogota and waiting for a lady friend. I was in love, a long time ago. I waited three days. I was hungry but could not go out for food, lest she come and I not be there to greet her. Then, on the third day, I heard a knock." "I hurried along the old passage and there, in the sunlight, there was nothing." "Just," Vance Joy said, "a butterfly, flying away." -- Peter Carey, BLISS | |
There are some micro-organisms that exhibit characteristics of both plants and animals. When exposed to light they undergo photosynthesis; and when the lights go out, they turn into animals. But then again, don't we all? | |
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear. | |
Why I Can't Go Out With You: I'd LOVE to, but ... -- I have to floss my cat. -- I've dedicated my life to linguini. -- I need to spend more time with my blender. -- it wouldn't be fair to the other Beautiful People. -- it's my night to pet the dog/ferret/goldfish. -- I'm going downtown to try on some gloves. -- I have to check the freshness dates on my dairy products. -- I'm going down to the bakery to watch the buns rise. -- I have an appointment with a cuticle specialist. -- I have some really hard words to look up. -- I've got a Friends of the Lowly Rutabaga meeting. -- I promised to help a friend fold road maps. | |
Why I Can't Go Out With You: I'd LOVE to, but... -- I have to answer all of my "occupant" letters. -- None of my socks match. -- I'm having all my plants neutered. -- I changed the lock on my door and now I can't get out. -- My yucca plant is feeling yucky. -- I'm touring China with a wok band. -- My chocolate-appreciation class meets that night. -- I'm running off to Yugoslavia with a foreign-exchange student named Basil Metabolism. -- There are important world issues that need worrying about. -- I'm going to count the bristles in my toothbrush. -- I prefer to remain an enigma. -- I think you want the OTHER Peggy/Cathy/Mike/whomever. -- I feel a song coming on. | |
Why I Can't Go Out With You: I'd LOVE to, but... -- I have to draw "Cubby" for an art scholarship. -- I have to sit up with a sick ant. -- I'm trying to be less popular. -- My bathroom tiles need grouting. -- I'm waiting to see if I'm already a winner. -- My subconscious says no. -- I just picked up a book called "Glue in Many Lands" and I can't seem to put it down. -- My favorite commercial is on TV. -- I have to study for my blood test. -- I've been traded to Cincinnati. -- I'm having my baby shoes bronzed. -- I have to go to court for kitty littering. | |
Why I Can't Go Out With You: I'd LOVE to, but... -- I'm trying to see how long I can go without saying yes. -- I'm attending the opening of my garage door. -- The monsters haven't turned blue yet, and I have to eat more dots. -- I'm converting my calendar watch from Julian to Gregorian. -- I have to fulfill my potential. -- I don't want to leave my comfort zone. -- It's too close to the turn of the century. -- I have to bleach my hare. -- I'm worried about my vertical hold knob. -- I left my body in my other clothes. | |
Why I Can't Go Out With You: I'd LOVE to, but... -- I've got a Friends of the Lowly Rutabaga meeting. -- I promised to help a friend fold road maps. -- I've been scheduled for a karma transplant. -- I'm staying home to work on my cottage cheese sculpture. -- It's my parakeet's bowling night. -- I'm building a plant from a kit. -- There's a disturbance in the Force. -- I'm doing door-to-door collecting for static cling. -- I'm teaching my ferret to yodel. -- My crayons all melted together. | |
Yeah, there are more important things in life than money, but they won't go out with you if you don't have any. | |
A dwarf is passing out somewhere in Detroit! | |
Did I SELL OUT yet?? | |
How many retured bricklayers from FLORIDA are out purchasing PENCIL SHARPENERS right NOW?? | |
I always have fun because I'm out of my mind!!! | |
I love ROCK 'N ROLL! I memorized the all WORDS to "WIPE-OUT" in 1965!! | |
I think I'll KILL myself by leaping out of this 14th STORY WINDOW while reading ERICA JONG'S poetry!! | |
I want to so HAPPY, the VEINS in my neck STAND OUT!! | |
I'm thinking about DIGITAL READ-OUT systems and computer-generated IMAGE FORMATIONS ... | |
Is this an out-take from the "BRADY BUNCH"? | |
Now, let's SEND OUT for QUICHE!! | |
... the HIGHWAY is made out of LIME JELLO and my HONDA is a barbequeued OYSTER! Yum! | |
"These are DARK TIMES for all mankind's HIGHEST VALUES!" "These are DARK TIMES for FREEDOM and PROSPERITY!" "These are GREAT TIMES to put your money on BAD GUY to kick the CRAP out of MEGATON MAN!" | |
UH-OH!! We're out of AUTOMOBILE PARTS and RUBBER GOODS! | |
Was my SOY LOAF left out in th'RAIN? It tastes REAL GOOD!! | |
What I want to find out is -- do parrots know much about Astro-Turf? | |
YOW!! Everybody out of the GENETIC POOL! | |
"How do you know she is a unicorn?" Molly demanded. "And why were you afraid to let her touch you? I saw you. You were afraid of her." "I doubt that I will feel like talking for very long," the cat replied without rancor. "I would not waste time in foolishness if I were you. As to your first question, no cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them. As for your second question --" Here he faltered, and suddenly became very interested in washing; nor would he speak until he had licked himself fluffy and then licked himself smooth again. Even then he would not look at Molly, but examined his claws. "If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again." -- Peter S. Beagle, "The Last Unicorn" | |
It is a well known fact that warriors and wizards do not get along, because one side considers the other side to be a collection of bloodthirsty idiots who can't walk and think at the same time, while the other side is naturally suspicious of a body of men who mumble a lot and wear long dresses. Oh, say the wizards, if we're going to be like that, then, what about all those studded collars and oiled muscles down at the Young Men's Pagan Association? To which the heroes reply, that's a pretty good allegation from a bunch of wimpsoes who won't go near a woman on account, can you believe it, of their mystical power being sort of drained out. Right, say the wizards, that just about does it, you and your leather posing pouches. Oh yeah, say the the heroes, why don't you ... -- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic" | |
It seems there's this magician working one of the luxury cruise ships for a few years. He doesn't have to change his routines much as the audiences change over fairly often, and he's got a good life. The only problem is the ship's parrot, who perches in the hall and watches him night after night, year after year. Finally, the parrot figures out how almost every trick works and starts giving it away for the audience. For example, when the magician makes a bouquet of flowers disappear, the parrot squawks "Behind his back! Behind his back!" Well, the magician is really annoyed at this, but there's not much he can do about it as the parrot is a ship's mascot and very popular with the passengers. One night, the ship strikes some floating debris, and sinks without a trace. Almost everyone aboard was lost, except for the magician and the parrot. For three days and nights they just drift, with the magician clinging to one end of a piece of driftwood and the parrot perched on the other end. As the sun rises on the morning of the fourth day, the parrot walks over to the magician's end of the log. With obvious disgust in his voice, he snaps "OK, you win, I give up. Where did you hide the ship?" | |
Rincewind had generally been considered by his tutors to be a natural wizard in the same way that fish are natural mountaineers. He probably would have been thrown out of Unseen University anyway--he couldn't remember spells and smoking made him feel ill. -- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic" | |
Somewhere, just out of sight, the unicorns are gathering. | |
The seven eyes of Ningauble the Wizard floated back to his hood as he reported to Fafhrd: "I have seen much, yet cannot explain all. The Gray Mouser is exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in the palace of Gilpkerio Kistomerces. Even though twenty-four parts in twenty-five of him are dead, he is alive. "Now about Lankhmar. She's been invaded, her walls breached everywhere and desperate fighting is going on in the streets, by a fierce host which out-numbers Lankhamar's inhabitants by fifty to one -- and equipped with all modern weapons. Yet you can save the city." "How?" demanded Fafhrd. Ningauble shrugged. "You're a hero. You should know." -- Fritz Leiber, "The Swords of Lankhmar" | |
Watch Rincewind. Look at him. Scrawny, like most wizards, and clad in a dark red robe on which a few mystic sigils were embroidered in tarnished sequins. Some might have taken him for a mere apprentice enchanter who had run away from his master out of defiance, boredom, fear and a lingering taste for heterosexuality. Yet around his neck was a chain bearing the bronze octagon that marked him as an alumnus of Unseen University, the high school of magic whose time-and-space transcendent campus is never precisely Here or There. Graduates were usually destined for mageship at least, but Rincewind--after an unfortunate event--had left knowing only one spell and made a living of sorts around the town by capitalizing on an innate gift for languages. He avoided work as a rule, but had a quickness of wit that put his acquaintances in mind of a bright rodent. -- Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic" | |
A woman went into a hospital one day to give birth. Afterwards, the doctor came to her and said, "I have some... odd news for you." "Is my baby all right?" the woman anxiously asked. "Yes, he is," the doctor replied, "but we don't know how. Your son (we assume) was born with no body. He only has a head." Well, the doctor was correct. The Head was alive and well, though no one knew how. The Head turned out to be fairly normal, ignoring his lack of a body, and lived for some time as typical a life as could be expected under the circumstances. One day, about twenty years after the fateful birth, the woman got a phone call from another doctor. The doctor said, "I have recently perfected an operation. Your son can live a normal life now: we can graft a body onto his head!" The woman, practically weeping with joy, thanked the doctor and hung up. She ran up the stairs saying, "Johnny, Johnny, I have a *wonderful* surprise for you!" "Oh no," cried The Head, "not another HAT!" | |
Stress has been pinpointed as a major cause of illness. To avoid overload and burnout, keep stress out of your life. Give it to others instead. Learn the "Gaslight" treatment, the "Are you talking to me?" technique, and the "Do you feel okay? You look pale." approach. Start with negotiation and implication. Advance to manipulation and humiliation. Above all, relax and have a nice day. | |
The New England Journal of Medicine reports that 9 out of 10 doctors agree that 1 out of 10 doctors is an idiot. | |
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" | |
"Welcome back for you 13th consecutive week, Evelyn. Evelyn, will you go into the auto-suggestion booth and take your regular place on the psycho-prompter couch?" "Thank you, Red." "Now, Evelyn, last week you went up to $40,000 by properly citing your rivalry with your sibling as a compulsive sado-masochistic behavior pattern which developed out of an early post-natal feeding problem." "Yes, Red." "But -- later, when asked about pre-adolescent oedipal phantasy repressions, you rationalized twice and mental blocked three times. Now, at $300 per rationalization and $500 per mental block you lost $2,100 off your $40,000 leaving you with a total of $37,900. Now, any combination of two more mental blocks and either one rationalization or three defensive projections will put you out of the game. Are you willing to go ahead?" "Yes, Red." "I might say here that all of Evelyn's questions and answers have been checked for accuracy with her analyst. Now, Evelyn, for $80,000 explain the failure of your three marriages." "Well, I--" "We'll get back to Evelyn in one minute. First a word about our product." -- Jules Feiffer |