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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something
strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.
                -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.
                -- David Bowie
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"
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a
statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious
to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look,
which morally we can do.  To affect the quality of the day, that is the
highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details,
worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.
                -- Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Live"
        Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she
lived with was made up of idiots.  Remember?  One of them was always
getting pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to
the farmhouse to alert the other ones.  She'd whimper and tug at their
sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: "Do
you think something's wrong?  Do you think she wants us to follow her?
What is it, girl?", etc., as if this had never happened before, instead
of every week.  What with all the time these people spent pinned under
the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops whatsoever.
They probably got by on federal crop supports, which Lassie filed the
applications for.
                -- Dave Barry
The streets were dark with something more than night.
                -- Raymond Chandler
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need
the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the
world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the
long winter evenings.
                -- Quentin Crisp
There's something the technicians need to learn from the artists.
If it isn't aesthetically pleasing, it's probably wrong.
        "What are you watching?"
        "I don't know."
        "Well, what's happening?"
        "I'm not sure...  I think the guy in the hat did something terrible."
        "Why are you watching it?"
        "You're so analytical.  Sometimes you just have to let art flow
over you."
                -- The Big Chill
Everyone *knows* cats are on a higher level of existence.  These silly humans
are just to big-headed to admit their inferiority.
        Just think what a nicer world this would be if it were controlled by
cats.
        You wouldn't see cats having waste disposal problems.
        They're neat.
        They don't have sexual hangups.  A cat gets horny, it does something
about it.
        They keep reasonable hours.  You *never* see a cat up before noon.
        They know how to relax.  Ever heard of a cat with an ulcer?  
        What are the chances of a cat starting a nuclear war?  Pretty neglible.
It's not that they can't, they just know that there are much better things to
do with ones time.  Like lie in the sun and sleep.  Or go exploring the world.
/*
* [...] Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum
* possible RTT.  I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP
* to talk to the University of Mars.
* PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented
* ftp to mars will work nicely.
*/
(from /usr/src/linux/net/inet/tcp.c, concerning RTT [retransmission timeout])
"If the future navigation system [for interactive networked services on
the NII] looks like something from Microsoft, it will never work."
(Chairman of Walt Disney Television & Telecommunications)
"Note that if I can get you to \"su and say\" something just by asking,
you have a very serious security problem on your system and you should
look into it."
(By Paul Vixie, vixie-cron 3.0.1 installation notes)
> The day people think linux would be better served by somebody else (FSF
> being the natural alternative), I'll "abdicate".  I don't think that
> it's something people have to worry about right now - I don't see it
> happening in the near future.  I enjoy doing linux, even though it does
> mean some work, and I haven't gotten any complaints (some almost timid
> reminders about a patch I have forgotten or ignored, but nothing
> negative so far).
>
> Don't take the above to mean that I'll stop the day somebody complains:
> I'm thick-skinned (Lasu, who is reading this over my shoulder commented
> that "thick-HEADED is closer to the truth") enough to take some abuse.
> If I weren't, I'd have stopped developing linux the day ast ridiculed me
> on c.o.minix.  What I mean is just that while linux has been my baby so
> far, I don't want to stand in the way if people want to make something
> better of it (*).
>
>                 Linus
>
> (*) Hey, maybe I could apply for a saint-hood from the Pope.  Does
> somebody know what his email-address is? I'm so nice it makes you puke.
(Taken from Linus's reply to someone worried about the future of Linux)
"What you end up with, after running an operating system concept through
these many marketing coffee filters, is something not unlike plain hot
water."
(By Matt Welsh)
A classic is something that everyone wants to have read
and nobody wants to read.
                -- Mark Twain, "The Disappearance of Literature"
"I wonder", he said to himself, "what's in a book while it's closed.  Oh, I
know it's full of letters printed on paper, but all the same, something must
be happening, because as soon as I open it, there's a whole story with people
I don't know yet and all kinds of adventures and battles."
                -- Bastian B. Bux
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
Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.
                -- Mark Twain
Something's rotten in the state of Denmark.
                -- Shakespeare
The Least Perceptive Literary Critic
        The most important critic in our field of study is Lord Halifax.  A
most individual judge of poetry, he once invited Alexander Pope round to
give a public reading of his latest poem.
        Pope, the leading poet of his day, was greatly surprised when Lord
Halifax stopped him four or five times and said, "I beg your pardon, Mr.
Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me."
        Pope was rendered speechless, as this fine critic suggested sizeable
and unwise emendations to his latest masterpiece.  "Be so good as to mark
the place and consider at your leisure.  I'm sure you can give it a better
turn."
        After the reading, a good friend of Lord Halifax, a certain Dr.
Garth, took the stunned Pope to one side.  "There is no need to touch the
lines," he said.  "All you need do is leave them just as they are, call on
Lord Halifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observation
on those passages, and then read them to him as altered.  I have known him
much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event."
        Pope took his advice, called on Lord Halifax and read the poem
exactly as it was before.  His unique critical faculties had lost none of
their edge.  "Ay", he commented, "now they are perfectly right.  Nothing can
be better."
                -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
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
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 successful [software] tool is one that was used to do something
undreamed of by its author.
                -- S. C. Johnson
===  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.
As part of an ongoing effort to keep you, the Fortune reader, abreast of
the valuable information the daily crosses the USENET, Fortune presents:

News articles that answer *your* questions, #1:

        Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
        Subject: how do I run C code received from sources
        Keywords: C sources
        Distribution: na

        I do not know how to run the C programs that are posted in the
        sources newsgroup.  I save the files, edit them to remove the
        headers, and change the mode so that they are executable, but I
        cannot get them to run.  (I have never written a C program before.)

        Must they be compiled?  With what compiler?  How do I do this?  If
        I compile them, is an object code file generated or must I generate
        it explicitly with the > character?  Is there something else that
        must be done?
Brace yourselves.  We're about to try something that borders on the unique:
an actually rather serious technical book which is not only (gasp) vehemently
anti-Solemn, but also (shudder) takes sides.  I tend to think of it as
`Constructive Snottiness.'
                -- Mike Padlipsky, "Elements of Networking Style"
Dear Emily:
        How can I choose what groups to post in?
                -- Confused

Dear Confused:
        Pick as many as you can, so that you get the widest audience.  After
all, the net exists to give you an audience.  Ignore those who suggest you
should only use groups where you think the article is highly appropriate.
Pick all groups where anybody might even be slightly interested.
        Always make sure followups go to all the groups.  In the rare event
that you post a followup which contains something original, make sure you
expand the list of groups.  Never include a "Followup-to:" line in the
header, since some people might miss part of the valuable discussion in
the fringe groups.
                -- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette
Dear Emily:
        I recently read an article that said, "reply by mail, I'll summarize."
What should I do?
                -- Doubtful

Dear Doubtful:
        Post your response to the whole net.  That request applies only to
dumb people who don't have something interesting to say.  Your postings are
much more worthwhile than other people's, so it would be a waste to reply by
mail.
                -- Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette
Ever wondered about the origins of the term "bugs" as applied to computer
technology?  U.S. Navy Capt. Grace Murray Hopper has firsthand explanation.
The 74-year-old captain, who is still on active duty, was a pioneer in
computer technology during World War II.  At the C.W. Post Center of Long
Island University, Hopper told a group of Long Island public school adminis-
trators that the first computer "bug" was a real bug--a moth.  At Harvard
one August night in 1945, Hopper and her associates were working on the
"granddaddy" of modern computers, the Mark I.  "Things were going badly;
there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass-enclosed
computer," she said.  "Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using
ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two-inch moth.  From then on, when
anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it."  Hopper
said that when the veracity of her story was questioned recently, "I referred
them to my 1945 log book, now in the collection of the Naval Surface Weapons
Center, and they found the remains of that moth taped to the page in
question."
                [actually, the term "bug" had even earlier usage in
                regard to problems with radio hardware.  Ed.]
If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever
to get a "fix" of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude
that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine.
                -- Rob Stampfli
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 teach your children to like computers and to know how to gamble
then they'll always be interested in something and won't come to no real harm.
"It runs like _x, where _x is something unsavory"
                -- Prof. Romas Aleliunas, CS 435
`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]
No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain.  All I'm after is
just a mediocre brain, something like the president of American Telephone
and Telegraph Company.
                -- Alan Turing on the possibilities of a thinking
                   machine, 1943.
        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"
        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.]
Rattling around the back of my head is a disturbing image of something I
saw at the airport ... Now I'm remembering, those giant piles of computer
magazines right next to "People" and "Time" in the airport store.  Does
it bother anyone else that half the world is being told all of our hard-won
secrets of computer technology?  Remember how all the lawyers cried foul
when "How to Avoid Probate" was published?  Are they taking no-fault
insurance lying down?  No way!  But at the current rate it won't be long
before there are stacks of the "Transactions on Information Theory" at the
A&P checkout counters.  Who's going to be impressed with us electrical
engineers then?  Are we, as the saying goes, giving away the store?
                -- Robert W. Lucky, IEEE President
Real software engineers don't like the idea of some inexplicable and
greasy hardware several aisles away that may stop working at any
moment.  They have a great distrust of hardware people, and wish that
systems could be virtual at *___all* levels.  They would like personal
computers (you know no one's going to trip over something and kill your
DFA in mid-transit), except that they need 8 megabytes to run their
Correctness Verification Aid packages.
        Something mysterious is formed, born in the silent void.  Waiting
alone and unmoving, it is at once still and yet in constant motion.  It is
the source of all programs.  I do not know its name, so I will call it the
Tao of Programming.
        If the Tao is great, then the operating system is great.  If the
operating system is great, then the compiler is great.  If the compiler is
greater, then the applications is great.  The user is pleased and there is
harmony in the world.
        The Tao of Programming flows far away and returns on the wind of
morning.
                -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at
least until we've finished building it.
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 process can check if this value is zero, and if it is, it does
something child-like.
                -- Forbes Burkowski, CS 454, University of Washington
Try to find the real tense of the report you are reading:  Was it done, is
it being done, or is something to be done?  Reports are now written in four
tenses:  past tense, present tense, future tense, and pretense.  Watch for
novel uses of CONGRAM (CONtractor GRAMmar), defined by the imperfect past,
the insufficient present, and the absolutely perfect future.
                -- Amrom Katz
Wasn't there something about a PASCAL programmer knowing the value of
everything and the Wirth of nothing?
Welcome to UNIX!  Enjoy your session!  Have a great time!  Note the
use of exclamation points!  They are a very effective method for
demonstrating excitement, and can also spice up an otherwise plain-looking
sentence!  However, there are drawbacks!  Too much unnecessary exclaiming
can lead to a reduction in the effect that an exclamation point has on
the reader!  For example, the sentence

        Jane went to the store to buy bread

should only be ended with an exclamation point if there is something
sensational about her going to the store, for example, if Jane is a
cocker spaniel or if Jane is on a diet that doesn't allow bread or if
Jane doesn't exist for some reason!  See how easy it is?!  Proper control
of exclamation points can add new meaning to your life!  Call now to receive
my free pamphlet, "The Wonder and Mystery of the Exclamation Point!"!
Enclose fifteen(!) dollars for postage and handling!  Operators are
standing by!  (Which is pretty amazing, because they're all cocker spaniels!)
Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers
something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.
Writers who use a computer swear to its liberating power in tones that bear
witness to the apocalyptic power of a new divinity.  Their conviction results
from something deeper than mere gratitude for the computer's conveniences.
Every new medium of writing brings about new intensities of religious belief
and new schisms among believers.  In the 16th century the printed book helped
make possible the split between Catholics and Protestants.  In the 20th
century this history of tragedy and triumph is repeating itself as a farce.
Those who worship the Apple computer and those who put their faith in the IBM
PC are equally convinced that the other camp is damned or deluded.  Each cult
holds in contempt the rituals and the laws of the other.  Each thinks that it
is itself the one hope for salvation.
                -- Edward Mendelson, "The New Republic", February 22, 1988
X windows:
        Something you can be ashamed of.
        30% more entropy than the leading window system.
        The first fully modular software disaster.
        Rome was destroyed in a day.
        Warn your friends about it.
        Climbing to new depths.  Sinking to new heights.
        An accident that couldn't wait to happen.
        Don't wait for the movie.
        Never use it after a big meal.
        Need we say less?
        Plumbing the depths of human incompetence.
        It'll make your day.
        Don't get frustrated without it.
        Power tools for power losers.
        A software disaster of Biblical proportions.
        Never had it.  Never will.
        The software with no visible means of support.
        More than just a generation behind.

Hindenburg.  Titanic.  Edsel.
        X windows.
X windows:
        We will dump no core before its time.
        One good crash deserves another.
        A bad idea whose time has come.  And gone.
        We make excuses.
        It didn't even look good on paper.
        You laugh now, but you'll be laughing harder later!
        A new concept in abuser interfaces.
        How can something get so bad, so quickly?
        It could happen to you.
        The art of incompetence.
        You have nothing to lose but your lunch.
        When uselessness just isn't enough.
        More than a mere hindrance.  It's a whole new barrier!
        When you can't afford to be right.
        And you thought we couldn't make it worse.

If it works, it isn't X windows.
I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty,
you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to
yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well that would be enough
immortality for me.
A man who carries a cat by its tail learns something he can learn
in no other way.
A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his
mouth.
A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets
people's attention.
It is common sense to take a method and try it.  If it fails,
admit it frankly and try another.  But above all, try something.
                -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
I just thought of something funny...your mother.
- Cheech Marin
If you're not careful, you're going to catch something.
Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the information on which he
has based it.  Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has
the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted
and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda
and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and
make him something less than a man.
-- Arthur Hays Sulzberger
I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder.  It's a
very powerful emotion.  All children feel it.  In a first grade classroom
everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or
at least acknowledges it.  Something happens between first and twelfth grade,
and it's not just puberty.  Not only do the schools and the media not teach
much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense
of wonder.  Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling.  Poor
popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.
- Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87
The vigor of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high
aims are worth-while.  Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of
objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal
gratifications.  All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of
a good job well done.  There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment,
the Peace brought by something worth-while.
- Alfred North Whitehead, 1963, in "The History of Manned Space Flight"
Most people exhibit what political scientists call "the conservatism of the
peasantry."  Don't lose what you've got.  Don't change.  Don't take a chance,
because you might end up starving to death.  Play it safe.  Buy just as much
as you need.  Don't waste time.

When  we think about risk, human beings and corporations realize in their
heads that risks are necessary to grow, to survive.  But when it comes down
to keeping good people when the crunch comes, or investing money in
something untried, only the brave reach deep into their pockets and play
the game as it must be played.

- David Lammers, "Yakitori", Electronic Engineering Times, January 18, 1988
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
It is better to never have tried anything than to have tried something and
failed.
- motto of jerks, weenies and losers everywhere
"Now here's something you're really going to like!"
-- Rocket J. Squirrel
"The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was."
-- Walt West
"And kids... learn something from Susie and Eddie.
If you think there's a maniacal psycho-geek in the
basement:
    1)        Don't give him a chance to hit you on the
        head with an axe!
    2)        Flee the premises... even if you're in your
        underwear.
    3)        Warn the neighbors and call the police.
But whatever else you do... DON'T GO DOWN IN THE DAMN BASEMENT!"
-- Saturday Night Live meets Friday the 13th
"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_
This is, of course, totally uninformed specualation that I engage in to help
support my bias against such meddling... but there you have it.
-- Peter da Silva, speculating about why a computer program that had been
changed to do something he didn't approve of, didn't work
"It's my cookie file and if I come up with something that's lame and I like it,
it goes in."
-- karl (Karl Lehenbauer)
There is something you must understand about the Soviet system.  They have the
ability to concentrate all their efforts on a given design, and develop all
components simulateously, but sometimes without proper testing.  Then they end
up with a technological disaster like the Tu-144.  In a technology race at
the time, that aircraft was two months ahead of the Concorde.  Four Tu-144s
were built; two have crashed, and two are in museums.  The Concorde has been
flying safely for over 10 years.
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
   "Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100
HP had a unique policy of allowing its engineers to take parts from stock as
long as they built something.  "They figured that with every design, they were
getting a better engineer.  It's a policy I urge all companies to adopt."
-- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, "Will Wozniak's class give Apple to teacher?"
   EE Times, June 6, 1988, pg 45
In his book, Mr. DePree tells the story of how designer George Nelson urged
that the company also take on Charles Eames in the late 1940s.  Max's father,
J. DePree, co-founder of the company with herman Miller in 1923, asked Mr.
Nelson if he really wanted to share the limited opportunities of a then-small
company with another designer.  "George's response was something like this:
'Charles Eames is an unusual talent.  He is very different from me.  The
company needs us both.  I want very much to have Charles Eames share in
whatever potential there is.'"
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
   Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988
"Call immediately.  Time is running out.  We both need to do something
monstrous before we die."
-- Message from Ralph Steadman to Hunter Thompson
David Brinkley: The daily astrological charts are precisely where, in my
  judgment, they belong, and that is on the comic page.
George Will:  I don't think astrology belongs even on the comic pages.
  The comics are making no truth claim.
Brinkley:  Where would you put it?
Will:  I wouldn't put it in the newspaper.  I think it's transparent rubbish.
  It's a reflection of an idea that we expelled from Western thought in the
  sixteenth century, that we are in the center of a caring universe.  We are
  not the center of the universe, and it doesn't care.  The star's alignment
  at the time of our birth -- that is absolute rubbish.  It is not funny to
  have it intruded among people who have nuclear weapons.
Sam Donaldson:  This isn't something new.  Governor Ronald Reagan was sworn
  in just after midnight in his first term in Sacramento because the stars
  said it was a propitious time.
Will:  They [horoscopes] are utter crashing banalities.  They could apply to
  anyone and anything.
Brinkley:  When is the exact moment [of birth]?  I don't think the nurse is
  standing there with a stopwatch and a notepad.
Donaldson:  If we're making decisions based on the stars -- that's a cockamamie
  thing.  People want to know.
-- "This Week" with David Brinkley, ABC Television, Sunday, May 8, 1988,
   excerpts from a discussion on Astrology and Reagan
[Astrology is] 100 percent hokum, Ted.  As a matter of fact, the first edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, written in 1771 -- 1771! -- said that this
belief system is a subject long ago ridiculed and reviled.  We're dealing with
beliefs that go back to the ancient Babylonians.  There's nothing there....
It sounds a lot like science, it sounds like astronomy.  It's got technical
terms.  It's got jargon.  It confuses the public....The astrologer is quite
glib, confuses the public, uses terms which come from science, come from
metaphysics, come from a host of fields, but they really mean nothing.  The
fact is that astrological beliefs go back at least 2,500 years.  Now that
should be a sufficiently long time for astrologers to prove their case.  They
have not proved their case....It's just simply gibberish.  The fact is, there's
no theory for it, there are no observational data for it.  It's been tested
and tested over the centuries.  Nobody's ever found any validity to it at
all.  It is not even close to a science.  A science has to be repeatable, it
has to have a logical foundation, and it has to be potentially vulnerable --
you test it.  And in that astrology is reqlly quite something else.
-- Astronomer Richard Berendzen, President, American University, on ABC
    News "Nightline," May 3, 1988
"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care
what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything
you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness.
Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to
insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the
destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be,
be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to
insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as
your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be
yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your
receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this
thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."

Madrak, in _Creatures of Light and Darkness_, by Roger Zelazny
        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
"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
"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will
fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."
-- Bertrand Russell
"Here's something to think about:  How come you never see a headline like
`Psychic Wins Lottery.'"
-- Comedian Jay Leno
                     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)
I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradictions to the sentiments of
others, and all positive assertion of my own.  I even forbade myself the use
of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion,
such as "certainly", "undoubtedly", etc.   I adopted instead of them "I
conceive", "I apprehend", or "I imagine" a thing to be so or so; or "so it
appears to me at present".

When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the
pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing him immediately some
absurdity in his proposition.  In answering I began by observing that in
certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present
case there appeared or semed to me some difference, etc.

I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I
engaged in went on more pleasantly.  The modest way in which I proposed my
opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction.  I had
less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily
prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I
happened to be in the right.
-- Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures.
                -- Daniel Webster
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.
People that can't find something to live for always seem to find something to
die for.  The problem is, they usually want the rest of us to die for it too.
        Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.  Five years later?
Six?  It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that
never comes again.  San Fransisco in the middle sixties was a very special time
and place to be a part of.  Maybe it meant something.  Maybe not, in the long
run...  There was madness in any direction, at any hour.  If not across the
Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda...  You could
strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we
were doing was right, that we were winning...
        And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil.  Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't
need that. Our energy would simply prevail.  There was no point in fighting
-- on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest
of a high and beautiful wave.  So now, less than five years later, you can go
up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes
you can almost ___see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally
broke and rolled back.
                -- Hunter S. Thompson
        The General disliked trying to explain the highly technical inner
workings of the U.S. Air Force.
        "$7,662 for a ten cup coffee maker, General?" the Senator asked.
        In his head he ran through his standard explanations.  "It's not so,"
he thought.  "It's a deterrent."  Soon he came up with, "It's computerized,
Senator.  Tiny computer chips make coffee that's smooth and full-bodied.  Try
a cup."
        The Senator did.  "Pfffttt!  Tastes like jet fuel!"
        "It's not so," the General thought.  "It's a deterrent."
        Then he remembered something.  "We bought a lot of untested computer
chips," the General answered.  "They got into everything.  Just a little
mix-up.  Nothing serious."
        Then he remembered something else.  It was at the site of the
mysterious B-1 crash.  A strange smell in the fuel lines.  It smelled like
coffee.  Smooth and full bodied...
                -- Another Episode of General's Hospital
There are only two things in this world that I am sure of, death and
taxes, and we just might do something about death one of these days.
                -- shades
We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.
                -- Calvin Coolidge
We the unwilling, led by the ungrateful, are doing the impossible.
We've done so much, for so long, with so little,
that we are now qualified to do something with nothing.
ADA:
        Something you need only know the name of to be an Expert in
        Computing.  Useful in sentences like, "We had better develop
        an ADA awareness.
                -- "Datamation", January 15, 1984
belief, n:
        Something you do not believe.
Boob's Law:
        You always find something in the last place you look.
brain-damaged, generalization of "Honeywell Brain Damage" (HBD), a
theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in
Multics, adj:
        Obviously wrong; cretinous; demented.  There is an implication
        that the person responsible must have suffered brain damage,
        because he/she should have known better.  Calling something
        brain-damaged is bad; it also implies it is unusable.
Brooke's Law:
        Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool
        discovers something which either abolishes the system or
        expands it beyond recognition.
Canonical, adj.:
        The usual or standard state or manner of something.  A true story:
One Bob Sjoberg, new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance at the use
of jargon.  Over his loud objections, we made a point of using jargon as
much as possible in his presence, and eventually it began to sink in.
Finally, in one conversation, he used the word "canonical" in jargon-like
fashion without thinking.
        Steele: "Aha!  We've finally got you talking jargon too!"
        Stallman: "What did he say?"
        Steele: "He just used `canonical' in the canonical way."
Compliment, n.:
        When you say something to another which everyone knows isn't true.
Crenna's Law of Political Accountability:
        If you are the first to know about something bad, you are going to be
        held responsible for acting on it, regardless of your formal duties.
Deja vu:
        French., already seen; unoriginal; trite.
        Psychol., The illusion of having previously experienced
        something actually being encountered for the first time.
        Psychol., The illusion of having previously experienced
        something actually being encountered for the first time.
Epperson's law:
        When a man says it's a silly, childish game, it's probably
        something his wife can beat him at.
Experience, n.:
        Something you don't get until just after you need it.
                -- Olivier
Finagle's Eighth Law:
        If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.

Finagle's Ninth Law:
        No matter what results are expected, someone is always willing to
        fake it.

Finagle's Tenth Law:
        No matter what the result someone is always eager to misinterpret it.

Finagle's Eleventh Law:
        No matter what occurs, someone believes it happened according to
        his pet theory.
Finagle's First Law:
        If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Fudd's First Law of Opposition:
        Push something hard enough and it will fall over.
gossip, n.:
        Hearing something you like about someone you don't.
                -- Earl Wilson
Hartley's First Law:
        You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float
        on his back, you've got something.
Hitchcock's Staple Principle:
        The stapler runs out of staples only while you are trying to
        staple something.
Hurewitz's Memory Principle:
        The chance of forgetting something is directly proportional
        to... to... uh.....
Imbesi's Law with Freeman's Extension:
        In order for something to become clean, something else must
        become dirty; but you can get everything dirty without getting
        anything clean.
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.
Laws of Serendipity:
        (1) In order to discover anything, you must be looking for something.
        (2) If you wish to make an improved product, you must already
            be engaged in making an inferior one.
learning curve, n.:
        An astonishing new theory, discovered by management consultants
        in the 1970's, asserting that the more you do something the
        quicker you can do it.
Magnet, n.:
        Something acted upon by magnetism.

Magnetism, n.:
        Something acting upon a magnet.

The two definition immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of
one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with
a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Mason's First Law of Synergism:
        The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
Moore's Constant:
        Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody
        does something, but no one does what he sets out to do.
Occam's eraser:
        The philosophical principle that even the simplest
        solution is bound to have something wrong with it.
Oliver's Law:
        Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
optimist, n.:
        A proponent of the belief that black is white.

        A pessimist asked God for relief.
        "Ah, you wish me to restore your hope and cheerfulness," said God.
        "No," replied the petitioner, "I wish you to create something that
would justify them."
        "The world is all created," said God, "but you have overlooked
something -- the mortality of the optimist."
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Ozman's Laws:
        (1)  If someone says he will do something "without fail," he won't.
        (2)  The more people talk on the phone, the less money they make.
        (3)  People who go to conferences are the ones who shouldn't.
        (4)  Pizza always burns the roof of your mouth.
Peterson's Rules:
        (1) Trucks that overturn on freeways are filled with something sticky.
        (2) No cute baby in a carriage is ever a girl when called one.
        (3) Things that tick are not always clocks.
        (4) Suicide only works when you're bluffing.
purpitation, n.:
        To take something off the grocery shelf, decide you
        don't want it, and then put it in another section.
                -- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends
QOTD:
        "Do you smell something burning or is it me?"
                -- Joan of Arc
Responsibility:
        Everyone says that having power is a great responsibility.  This is
a lot of bunk.  Responsibility is when someone can blame you if something
goes wrong.  When you have power you are surrounded by people whose job it
is to take the blame for your mistakes.  If they're smart, that is.
                -- Cerebus, "On Governing"
Rudin's Law:
        If there is a wrong way to do something, most people will
        do it every time.

Rudin's Second Law:
        In a crisis that forces a choice to be made among alternative
        courses of action, people tend to choose the worst possible
        course.
Snacktrek, n.:
        The peculiar habit, when searching for a snack, of constantly
        returning to the refrigerator in hopes that something new will have
        materialized.
                -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
Steele's Plagiarism of Somebody's Philosophy:
        Everybody should believe in something -- I believe I'll have
        another drink.
take forceful action:
        Do something that should have been done a long time ago.
theory, n.:
        System of ideas meant to explain something, chosen with a view to
        originality, controversialism, incomprehensibility, and how good
        it will look in print.
There are three ways to get something done:
        (1) Do it yourself.
        (2) Hire someone to do it for you.
        (3) Forbid your kids to do it.
travel, n.:
        Something that makes you feel like you're getting somewhere.
wok, n.:
        Something to thwow at a wabbit.
yo-yo, n.:
        Something that is occasionally up but normally down.
        (see also Computer).
Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac; you can always take something for it.
Dr. Jekyll had something to Hyde.
Every day it's the same thing -- variety.  I want something different.
I hate trolls.  Maybe I could metamorph it into something else -- like a
ravenous, two-headed, fire-breathing dragon.
                -- Willow
If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something
to do with a shortage of flowers.
                -- Doug Larson

        [Not to mention, butterfly would be flutterby. Ed.]
If the odds are a million to one against something occurring, chances
are 50-50 it will.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
                -- Carl Sagan
There is always something new out of Africa.
                -- Gaius Plinius Secundus
What you want, what you're hanging around in the world waiting for, is for
something to occur to you.
                -- Robert Frost

        [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when
         referring to AST's.]
When things go well, expect something to explode, erode, collapse or
just disappear.
A couple more shots of whiskey, women 'round here start looking good.

                [something about a 10 being a 4 after a six-pack?  Ed.]
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"
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.
Dear Freshman,
        You don't know who I am and frankly shouldn't care, but
unknown to you we have something in common.  We are both rather
prone to mistakes.  I was elected Student Government President by
mistake, and you came to school here by mistake.
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.
        "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff
and blow, "is to learn something.  That's the only thing that never fails.
You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at
night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love,
you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your
honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for
it then -- to learn.  Learn why the world wags and what wags it.  That is
the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be
tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.  Learning
is the only thing for you.  Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
                -- T.H. White, "The Once and Future King"
After two or three weeks of this madness, you begin to feel As One with
the man who said, "No news is good news." In twenty-eight papers, only
the rarest kind of luck will turn up more than two or three articles of
any interest...  but even then the interest items are usually buried deep
around paragraph 16 on the jump (or "Cont.  on ...") page...

The Post will have a story about Muskie making a speech in Iowa.  The
Star will say the same thing, and the Journal will say nothing at all.
But the Times might have enough room on the jump page to include a line
or so that says something like: "When he finished his speech, Muskie
burst into tears and seized his campaign manager by the side of the neck.
They grappled briefly, but the struggle was kicked apart by an oriental
woman who seemed to be in control."

Now that's good journalism.  Totally objective; very active and straight
to the point.
                -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"
I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens
who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known
something of what has been passing in their time.
                -- H. Truman
        Reporters like Bill Greider from the Washington Post and Him
Naughton of the New York Times, for instance, had to file long, detailed,
and relatively complex stories every day -- while my own deadline fell
every two weeks -- but neither of them ever seemed in a hurry about
getting their work done, and from time to time they would try to console
me about the terrible pressure I always seemed to be laboring under.
        Any $100-an-hour psychiatrist could probably explain this problem
to me, in thirteen or fourteen sessions, but I don't have time for that.
No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or
maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland...  On
the other hand, it might be something as simple & basically perverse as
whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last
possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car.
                -- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail"
You know the great thing about TV?  If something important happens
anywhere at all in the world, no matter what time of the day or night,
you can always change the channel.
                -- Jim Ignatowski
alta, v:        To change; make or become different; modify.
ansa, v:        A spoken or written reply, as to a question.
baa, n:                A place people meet to have a few drinks.
Baaston, n:        The capital of Massachusetts.
baaba, n:        One whose business is to cut or trim hair or beards.
beea, n:        An alcoholic beverage brewed from malt and hops, often
                        found in baas.
caaa, n:        An automobile.
centa, n:        A point around which something revolves; axis.  (Or
                        someone involved with the Knicks.)
chouda, n:        A thick seafood soup, often in a milk base.
dada, n:        Information, esp. information organized for analysis or
                        computation.
                -- Massachewsetts Unabridged Dictionary
For some reason a glaze passes over people's faces when you say
"Canada".  Maybe we should invade South Dakota or something.
                -- Sandra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian ambassador to the U.S.
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of
pre-Adamite ancestral descent.  You will understand this when I tell you
that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic
globule.  Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable.  I
can't help it.  I was born sneering.
                -- Pooh-Bah, "The Mikado"
There's just something I don't like about Virginia; the state.
There's something different about us -- different from people of Europe,
Africa, Asia ... a deep and abiding belief in the Easter Bunny.
                -- G. Gordon Liddy
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
Always think of something new; this helps you forget your last rotten idea.
                -- Seth Frankel
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you
really care to know.
FORTUNE'S GUIDE TO DEALING WITH REAL-LIFE SCIENCE FICTION: #2
What to do...
    if you get a phone call from Mars:
        Speak slowly and be sure to enunciate your words properly.  Limit
        your vocabulary to simple words.  Try to determine if you are
        speaking to someone in a leadership capacity, or an ordinary citizen.

    if he, she or it doesn't speak English?
        Hang up.  There's no sense in trying to learn Martian over the phone.
        If your Martian really had something important to say to you, he, she
        or it would have taken the trouble to learn the language before
        calling.

    if you get a phone call from Jupiter?
        Explain to your caller, politely but firmly, that being from Jupiter,
        he, she or it is not "life as we know it".  Try to terminate the
        conversation as soon as possible.  It will not profit you, and the
        charges may have been reversed.
I THINK THERE SHOULD BE SOMETHING in science called the "reindeer effect."
I don't know what it would be, but I think it'd be good to hear someone say,
"Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect."
                -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
If I set here and stare at nothing long enough, people might think
I'm an engineer working on something.
                -- S.R. McElroy
If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make
something out of you.
                -- Muhammad Ali
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really
good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change
their minds and you never hear that old view from them again.  They really
do it.  It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are
human and change is sometimes painful.  But it happens every day.  I cannot
recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
                -- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address
In the course of reading Hadamard's "The Psychology of Invention in the
Mathematical Field", I have come across evidence supporting a fact
which we coffee achievers have long appreciated:  no really creative,
intelligent thought is possible without a good cup of coffee.  On page
14, Hadamard is discussing Poincare's theory of fuchsian groups and
fuchsian functions, which he describes as "... one of his greatest
discoveries, the first which consecrated his glory ..."  Hadamard refers
to Poincare having had a "... sleepless night which initiated all that
memorable work ..." and gives the following, very revealing quote:

        "One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and
        could not sleep.  Ideas rose in crowds;  I felt them collide
        until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable
        combination."

Too bad drinking black coffee was contrary to his custom.  Maybe he
could really have amounted to something as a coffee achiever.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen:  whatever you say to them they translate
into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
                -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mathematicians often resort to something called Hilbert space, which is
described as being n-dimensional.  Like modern sex, any number can play.
                -- Dr. Thor Wald, "Beep/The Quincunx of Time", by James Blish
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..."
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what
the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be
replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.  There is another
theory which states that this has already happened.
                -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
        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"
        ... 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"
When you're dining out and you suspect something's wrong, you're probably right.
And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks with the one word, "unless."
Whatever THAT meant, well, I just couldn't guess.
That was long, long ago, and each day since that day,
I've worried and worried and worried away.
Through the years as my buildings have fallen apart,
I've worried about it with all of my heart.

"BUT," says the Oncler, "now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear!
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better - it's not.
So... CATCH!" cries the Oncler.  He lets something fall.
"It's a truffula seed.  It's the last one of all!

"You're in charge of the last of the truffula seeds.
And truffula trees are what everyone needs.
Plant a new truffula -- treat it with care.
Give it clean water and feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest -- protect it from axes that hack.
Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back!"
Children aren't happy without something to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for.
                -- Ogden Nash
Don't be concerned, it will not harm you,
It's only me pursuing something I'm not sure of,
Across my dreams, with neptive wonder,
I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love.
Have you seen the old man in the closed down market,
Kicking up the papers in his worn out shoes?
In his eyes you see no pride, hands hang loosely at his side
Yesterdays papers, telling yesterdays news.

How can you tell me you're lonely,
And say for you the sun don't shine?
Let me take you by the hand
Lead you through the streets of London
I'll show you something to make you change your mind...

Have you seen the old man outside the sea-man's mission
Memories fading like the metal ribbons that he wears.
In our winter city the rain cries a little pity
For one more forgotten hero and a world that doesn't care...
I 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"
If you had just a minute to breathe,
And they granted you one final wish,
Would you ask for something
Like another chance?
                -- Traffic, "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys"
Ladies and Gentlemen, Hobos and Tramps,
Cross-eyed mosquitos and bowlegged ants,
I come before you to stand behind you
To tell you of something I know nothing about.
Next Thursday (which is good Friday),
There will be a convention held in the
Women's Club which is strictly for Men.
Admission is free, pay at the door,
Pull up a chair, and sit on the floor.
It was a summer's day in winter,
And the snow was raining fast,
As a barefoot boy with shoes on,
Stood sitting in the grass.
Oh, that bright day in the dead of night,
Two dead men got up to fight.
Three blind men to see fair play,
Forty mutes to yell "Hooray"!
Back to back, they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
Came and arrested those two dead boys.
Ladles and Jellyspoons!
I come before you to stand behind you,
To tell you something I know nothing about.
Since next Thursday will be Good Friday,
There will be a fathers' meeting, for mothers only.
Wear your best clothes, if you don't have any,
And please stay at home if you can possibly be there.
Admission is free, please pay at the door.
Have a seat on me: please sit on the floor.
No matter where you manage to sit,
The man in the balcony will certainly spit.
We thank you for your unkind attention,
And would now like to present our next act:
"The Four Corners of the Round Table."
Some of them want to use you,
Some of them want to be used by you,
...Everybody's looking for something.
                -- Eurythmics
Stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time,
There's something wrong here, there can be no more denying,
One of us is changing, or maybe we just stopped trying,

And it's too late, baby, now, it's too late,
Though we really did try to make it,
Something inside has died and I can't hide and I just can't fake it...

It used to be so easy living here with you,
You were light and breezy and I knew just what to do
Now you look so unhappy and I feel like a fool.

There'll be good times again for me and you,
But we just can't stay together, don't you feel it too?
But I'm glad for what we had and that I once loved you...

But it's too late baby...
It's too late, now darling, it's too late...
                -- Carol King, "Tapestry"
Take a look around you, tell me what you see,
A girl who thinks she's ordinary lookin' she has got the key.
If you can get close enough to look into her eyes
There's something special right behind the bitterness she hides.
        And you're fair game,
        You never know what she'll decide, you're fair game,
        Just relax, enjoy the ride.
Find a way to reach her, make yourself a fool,
But do it with a little class, disregard the rules.
'Cause this one knows the bottom line, couldn't get a date.
The ugly duckling striking back, and she'll decide her fate.
        (chorus)
The ones you never notice are the ones you have to watch.
She's pleasant and she's friendly while she's looking at your crotch.
Try your hand at conversation, gossip is a lie,
And sure enough she'll take you home and make you wanna die.
        (chorus)
                -- Crosby, Stills, Nash, "Fair Game"
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 one L lama, he's a priest
The two L llama, he's a beast
And I will bet my silk pyjama
There isn't any three L lllama.
                -- O. Nash, to which a fire chief replied that occasionally
                his department responded to something like a "three L lllama."
The rhino is a homely beast,
For human eyes he's not a feast.
Farewell, farewell, you old rhinoceros,
I'll stare at something less prepoceros.
                -- Ogden Nash
There are places I'll remember
All my life though some have changed.
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain.
All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends I still recall.
Some are dead and some are living,
In my life I've loved them all.

But of all these friends and lovers,
There is no one compared with you,
All these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new.
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I'll love you more.
                -- Lennon/McCartney, "In My Life", 1965
There is something in the pang of change
More than the heart can bear,
Unhappiness remembering happiness.
                -- Euripides
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine                And then one day you find
Staying home to watch the rain                Ten years have got behind you
You are young and life is long                No one told you when to run
And there is time to kill today                You missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter                Hanging on in quiet desperation
                                                is the English way
Never seem to find the time                The time is gone, the song is over
Plans that either come to nought        Thought I'd something more to say...
Or half a page of scribbled lines
                -- Pink Floyd, "Time"
Do something unusual today.  Pay a bill.
Fine day to work off excess energy.  Steal something heavy.
Questionable day.

Ask somebody something.
You will remember something that you should not have forgotten.
"Ain't that something what happened today.  One of us got traded to
Kansas City."
                -- Casey Stengel, informing outfielder Bob Cerv he'd
                   been traded.
        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
Don't let go of what you've got hold of, until you have hold of something else.
                -- First Rule of Wing Walking
If a putt passes over the hole without dropping, it is deemed to have dropped.
The law of gravity holds that any object attempting to maintain a position
in the atmosphere without something to support it must drop.  The law of
gravity supercedes the law of golf.
                -- Donald A. Metz
In Brooklyn, we had such great pennant races, it made the World Series
just something that came later.
                -- Walter O'Malley, Dodgers owner
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.
Life is a game.  In order to have a game, something has to be more
important than something else.  If what already is, is more important
than what isn't, the game is over.  So, life is a game in which what
isn't, is more important than what is.  Let the good times roll.
                -- Werner Erhard
My first baseman is George "Catfish" Metkovich from our 1952 Pittsburgh
Pirates team, which lost 112 games.  After a terrible series against the
New York Giants, in which our center fielder made three throwing errors
and let two balls get through his legs, manager Billy Meyer pleaded, "Can
somebody think of something to help us win a game?"
        "I'd like to make a suggestion," Metkovich said.  "On any ball hit
to center field, let's just let it roll to see if it might go foul."
                -- Joe Garagiola, "It's Anybody's Ball Game"
"Oh, he [a big dog] hunts with papa," she said. "He says Don Carlos [the
dog] is good for almost every kind of game.  He went duck hunting one time
and did real well at it.  Then Papa bought some ducks, not wild ducks but,
you know, farm ducks.  And it got Don Carlos all mixed up.  Since the
ducks were always around the yard with nobody shooting at them he knew he
wasn't supposed to kill them, but he had to do something.  So one morning
last spring, when the ground was still soft, he took all the ducks and
buried them."  "What do you mean, buried them?"  "Oh, he didn't hurt them.
He dug little holes all over the yard and picked up the ducks in his mouth
and put them in the holes.  Then he covered them up with mud except for
their heads.  He did thirteen ducks that way and was digging a hole for
another one when Tony found him.  We talked about it for a long time.  Papa
said Don Carlos was afraid the ducks might run away, and since he didn't
know how to build a cage he put them in holes.  He's a smart dog."
                -- R. Bradford, "Red Sky At Morning"
Pedro Guerrero was playing third base for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1984
when he made the comment that earns him a place in my Hall of Fame.  Second
baseman Steve Sax was having trouble making his throws.  Other players were
diving, screaming, signaling for a fair catch.  At the same time, Guerrero,
at third, was making a few plays that weren't exactly soothing to manager
Tom Lasorda's stomach.  Lasorda decided it was time for one of his famous
motivational meetings and zeroed in on Guerrero: "How can you play third
base like that?  You've gotta be thinking about something besides baseball.
What is it?"
        "I'm only thinking about two things," Guerrero said.  "First, `I
hope they don't hit the ball to me.'"  The players snickered, and even
Lasorda had to fight off a laugh.  "Second, `I hope they don't hit the ball
to Sax.'"
                -- Joe Garagiola, "It's Anybody's Ball Game"
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.
You will think of something funnier than this to add to the fortunes.
        "It's hard to believe that something which is neither seen nor felt can
do so much harm."
        "That's true.  But an idea can't be seen or felt.  And that's what kept
the Troglytes in the mines all these centuries.  A mistaken idea."
                -- Vanna and Kirk, "The Cloud Minders", stardate 5819.0
You'll learn something about men and women -- the way they're supposed
to be.  Caring for each other, being happy with each other, being good
to each other.  That's what we call love.  You'll like that a lot.
                -- Kirk, "The Apple", stardate 3715.6
"`Hey this is terrific!' Zaphod said. `Someone down there
is trying to kill us!'
`Terrific,' said Arthur.
`But don't you see what this means?'
`Yes. We are going to die.'
`Yes, but apart from that.'
`APART from that?'
`It means we must be on to something!'
`How soon can we get off it?'"

- Zaphod and Arthur in a certain death situation over
Magrathea.
"`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.
BOOK        There is a theory which states that if ever anyone
discovers
        exactly what the Universe is for and why it is
here, it will
        instantly disappear and be replaced by something
even more
        bizarrely inexeplicable.
        There is another theory which states that this has
already happened.

- Introduction to Fit the Seventh.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that
anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely
by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the
final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove
that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and
without faith I am nothing.'
"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't
it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you
exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't.
QED.'
And now for something completely different.
And now for something completely the same.
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"
"Here's something to think about:  How come you never see a headline like
`Psychic Wins Lottery'?"
                -- Jay Leno
I thought there was something fishy about the butler.  Probably a Pisces,
working for scale.
                -- Firesign Theatre, "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger"
It looked like something resembling white marble, which was
probably what it was: something resembling white marble.
                -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"
        Obviously the subject of death was in the air, but more as something
to be avoided than harped upon.
        Possibly the horror that Zaphod experienced at the prospect of being
reunited with his deceased relatives led on to the thought that they might
just feel the same way about him and, what's more, be able to do something
about helping to postpone this reunion.
                -- Douglas Adams
FORTUNE'S RANDOM QUOTES FROM MATCH GAME 75, NO. 1:

Gene Rayburn: We'd like to close with a thought for the day, friends ---
               something ...

      Someone: (interrupting) Uh-oh

Gene Rayburn: ...pithy, full of wisdom --- and we call on the Poet
               Laureate, Lipsy Russell

Lipsy Russell: The young people are very different today, and there is
               one sure way to know: Kids to use to ask where they came
               from, now they'll tell you where you can go.

          All: (laughter)
"For something that does not exist, the Internet Engineering Task Force has has quite an impact."

  -- Scott Bradner (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)
Windows 95 is not a virus.  Viruses actually do something.
If Windows sucked it would be good for something.
In 1968 it took the computing power of 2 C-64's to fly a rocket to the moon.
Now, in 1998 it takes the Power of a Pentium 200 to run Microsoft Windows 95.
Something must have gone wrong.
Q: What do Bill Gates and Bill Clinton have in common?
A: Their ratings climb whenever they do something unethical.
You Might be a Microsoft Employee If...

1. Every night you dream of torturing Linus Torvalds
2. Every morning you say, "I pledge allegiance to the logo of the United
    Corporation of Microsoft. And to the stock options for which it stands, one
    company, under Bill, with headaches and buggy software for all."
3. Your favorite pick-up line is, "Hey baby...do you want to see a little
    ActiveX?"
4. Everytime you see a website with "Best viewed with Netscape" on it you
    feel like filing a lawsuit against its webmaster
5. You feel that all Anti-Microsoft websites should be censored because they
    are on the Internet, something Bill "invented."
6. You've set a goal to invent at least one new buzzword or acronym per day
7. You've ever been nervous because you haven't registered your Microsoft
    software yet.
8. You've trained your parrot to say "Unix sucks!" and "All hail Bill Gates!"
9. You own a limited edition Monopoly game in which Boardwalk is Microsoft and
    Jail is replaced by Justice Department Investigation
10. You've spent countless hours tracking down the source of the "Microsoft
    Acquires Vatican Church" rumor
What you end up with, after running an operating system concept through
these many marketing coffee filters, is something not unlike plain hot
water.

   -- Matt Welsh
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
Missouri Town Changes Name to 'Linux'

LINUX, MO -- The small Missouri town of Linn, county seat of Osage County,
announced yesterday that it will be henceforth called 'Linux'. Mayor Bob Farrow
said, "Linn needed something to put it on the map. A few weeks ago my daughter
mentioned that she installed Linux on her computer and how great she thought it
was. I thought to myself, 'Self, changing the town's name to 'Linux' could be
an opportunity to attract attention -- and money -- to our town. We could even
hold a Linux Convention at the community center.' So I approached the city
council about the idea, and they loved it. The rest is history."

Farrow's daughter is organizing the Linux Linux User Group. She hopes to be
able to hold a Linux Convention this fall. "The Linn, er, Linux community
center probably won't be big enough, we'll probably have to hold it in nearby
Jefferson City," she said.

The mayor does have one reservation. "How the hell do you pronounce Linux?" One
of the mayor's contenders in the next election, Mr. Noah Morals, says he will
start an ad campaign calling Bob Farrow "the Incumbent Liar of LIE-nucks".
Needless to say, the mayor usually pronounces Linux as "LIH-nucks".
Linux Infiltrates Windows NT Demo

SILICON VALLEY, CA -- Attendees at the Microsoft ActiveDemo Conference held
this week in San Jose were greeted by a pleasant surprise yesterday: Linux.
Somehow a group of Linux enthusiasts were able to replace a Windows NT box with
a Linux box right before the "ActiveDemo" of Windows NT 5 beta. "I have no clue
how they were able to pull off this prank," a Microserf spokesman said. "Rest
assured, Microsoft will do everything to investigate and prosecute the Linux
nuts who did this. Our bottom line must be protected."

Bill Gates said, "I was showing off the new features in Windows NT 5 when I
noticed something odd about the demo computer. It didn't crash. Plus, the font
used on the screen wasn't MS San Serif -- trust me, I know. My suspicions were
confirmed when, instead of the "Flying Windows" screensaver, a "Don't Fear the
Penguins" screensaver appeared. The audience laughed and applauded for five
straight minutes. It was so embarrasing -- even more so than the pie incident.

One attendee said, "Wow! This Linux is cool -- it didn't crash once during the
entire demo! I'd like to see NT do that." Another asked, "You guys got any
Linux CDs? I want one. Forget about vaporware NT." Yet another remarked, "I
didn't know it was possible to hack Linux to make it look like NT. I can
install Linux on my company's computers without my boss knowing!"
Microsoft Acquires Nothing

REDMOND, WA -- In an unprecedented move, Microsoft refrained from acquiring any
rival companies for a full week. "I can't believe it," one industry analyst
noted. "This is the first time in years that I haven't read any headlines about
Microsoft acquiring something."

The lack of Microsoft assimilation this week left a vacuum in computer industry
publications. "Microsoft acquisition stories make up 10% of our headlines," an
editor at Ziff-Slavis said. "We had to scramble to fill this void. We ran some
controversial Jessie Burst columns instead, hoping that we could recoup ad
revenue from people reading all the flames in the Talk Back forums. Jessie
Burst forums account for 15% of our total ad revenue."
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 #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.
BSOD Simulator

Users of Red Hat 6.0 are discovering a new feature that hasn't been widely
advertised: a Blue Screen of Death simulator.  By default, the bsodsim
program activates when the user hits the virtually unused SysRq key (this is
customizable) causing the system to switch to a character cell console to
display a ficticious Blue Screen.

Red Hat hails the bsodsim program as the "boss key" for the Linux world. One
RH engineer said, "Workers are smuggling Linux boxes into companies that
exclusively use Windows.  This is all good and well until the PHB walks by
and comments, 'That doesn't look like Windows...' With bsodsim, that problem
is solved.  The worker can hit the emergency SysRq key, and the system will
behave just like Windows..."

The bsodsim program doesn't stop at just showing a simulated error message.
If the boss doesn't walk away, the worker can continue the illusion by
hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL, which causes a simulated reboot.  After showing the
usual boot messages, bsodsim will run a simulated SCANDISK program
indefinitely. The boss won't be able to tell the difference.  If the boss
continues to hang around, the worker can say, "SCANDISK is really taking a
long time... maybe we should upgrade our computers.  And don't you have
something better to do than watch this computer reboot for the tenth time
today?"
Dave Finton gazes into his crystal ball...

January 2099: Rob Malda Finally Gets His Damned Nano-Technology

The Linux hacker community finally breathed a collective sigh of relief
when it was announced that Rob Malda finally got his damned
nanotechnology.

"It's about time!" exclaimed one Dothead. "He been going on about that
crap since god-knows-when. Now that he's got that and those wearable
computers, maybe we can read about something interesting on Slashdot!"

Observers were skeptical, however. Already the now-immortal Rob Malda
nano-cyborg (who reportedly changed his name to "18 of 49, tertiary
adjunct of something-or-other") has picked up a few new causes to shout
about to the high heavens until everyone's ears start bleeding. In one
Slashdot article, Malda writes "Here's an article about the potential of
large greyish high-tech mile-wide cubes flying through space, all
controlled by a collective mind set upon intergalactic conquest.
Personally, I can't wait. Yum."
Slashdot Effect Vaporizes Ganymede
  -- Submitted by Dave Finton
  
In one of the more bizarre consequences of the infamous "Slashdot Effect",
Ganymede, the largest moon in our solar system, was completely and utterly
destroyed when CmdrTaco posted an article about the Hubble Space
Telescope's latest round of images and discoveries.

"It all started when we put up some more info on our web page about
Jupiter and Ganymede," said one NASA guy whom we believe may be in charge
of something. "CmdrTaco got wind of it, and posted it on his site."

According to observers, the webserver promptly exploded thereafter,
damaging the nearby remote control system used to aim and focus the
Hubble's cameras from the ground.

"All of the sudden our controls went wacky!" said one engineer. "The
Hubble then started shooting these death rays all over the universe. One
of those rays hit Ganymede, and *POOF*. There it went! We were all like,
'COOOOOL! Let's aim it something else!'"
Jargon Coiner (#2)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

* SLASHDUP EFFECT, THE: Accidentally posting two or more duplicate
  comments to Slashdot, usually as the result of hitting ENTER at the
  wrong time or fumbling with the Preview option.

* YOU'VE GOT SLOGAN: The tendency for reporters to parody the stupid
  "You've Got Mail" saying when writing about AOL.

  Example: "You've Got Spam", "You've Got Merger" (the headline for an
  article about the Netscape/AOL Merger From Hell)

* PENGUINIZATION: Ongoing trend to slap a picture of Tux Penguin next to
  anything even remotely related to Linux.

* IDLESURF: Aimless surfing of the Internet; looking for something
  interesting to read while killing time. Often involves reloaded the
  Slashdot homepage every 5 minutes to see if a new article has been
  posted.
Jargon Coiner (#3)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

* LILOSPLAININ': Arduous process of explaining why there's now a LILO boot
  prompt on the office computer.

  Example: "John had some lilosplainin' to do after his boss turned on the
  computer and the Windows splash screen didn't appear."

* UPTIME DOWNER: Depression that strikes a Linux sysadmin after his uptime
  is ruined. Can be caused by an extended power outtage, a pet chewing
  through the power cord, a lightning bolt striking the power line, or an
  urgent need to reboot into Windows to read a stupid Word document.

* OSTR (Off-Switch Total Recall): The sudden recollection of something
  terribly important you need to do online that occurs exactly 0.157
  seconds after you've shut down your computer.
Jargon Coiner (#4)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

* FREE LECTURE: Attempting to explain the concepts of Linux, Open Source
  software, free software, and gift cultures to someone who is not
  familiar with them. Made extra difficult if the explainee has been
  misled by superficial mainstream news articles about the subject.

  Example: "Eric gave an hour-long free lecture to his mother-in-law after
  she asked him about this Linux thingy she read about in USA Today."

* LEXICON LAZINESS:  Filling a fortune file with a list of fake jargon
  instead of publishing something more substantive (and funny) that would
  take more effort to write.

* FOR(;;)TUNE LOOP: Repeatedly running fortune(6) for cheap entertainment.

  Example: "During a coffee break, Bob became bored and started a
  for(;;)tune loop. His boss had to issue a SIGTERM to get him to resume
  working."
Jargon Coiner (#6)

An irregular feature that aims to give you advance warning of new jargon
that we've just made up.

* STOP MIRAGE: Trying to click on an imaginary Stop button on a program's
  toolbar after doing something you didn't want to. Usually caused as the
  result of excessive use of Netscape.

* YA-PREFIX: Putting "another" or "yet another" in front of a name or
  tacking "YA" in front of an acronym.

  Example: "We could ya-prefix this fortune by titling it 'Yet Another
  Lame List of Fabricated Jargon'."

* DOMAINEERING: Using a service like Netcraft to determine what operating
  system and webserver a particular domain is running.

* NOT-A-SALTINE EXPLANATION: The canned response given to someone who
  uses the term "hacker" instead of "cracker".
Please please please don't use Word,
It really makes you look absurd!

The Dancing Paper Clip is crappy,
Use something else and be more happy!

   -- Protests shouted at a PR firm that issued a Linux press release
      obviously created with Microsoft Word.
Bill Gates Passes Turing Test

LONDON, ENGLAND -- Microsoft proclaimed that they have passed the Turing
Test by creating a Bill Gates multimedia simulacrum that crack BBC
interviewer Jeremy Paxman couldn't distinguish from the real thing. "I
never would have expected this," Paxman said about the Gates AI program.
"After all, this Microsoft program actually worked for an extended period
of time, something you don't see very often."

Microsoft has plans to mass-produce the Bill Gates holographic simulation
by 2010 or so. "The hardware just isn't there yet for home use," a
Microserf explained. "By then, though, Intel's Itanium 6 Super Pro Plus
III CPU running at 600 Ghz or whatever should be sufficient." Windows 2010
is expected to include the Bill Gates simulation, making the World's
Richest Man(tm) accessible to the entire world.

A newly printed brochure for the faux-Gates advertises, "Need help running
Windows 2010? Bill Gates will sit beside you and guide you through the
system. Have a question for the world's sexiest and smartest nerd? He'll
answer it. Wondering if free and open source software is a plot by
Communists freaks to overthrow the free market system? He'll be there to
explain. Want to ask for a personal loan? Sorry, won't happen."          
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.
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 (#27)

Microsoft's position as the 5,000 pound gorilla of the computer industry
didn't change during the 1990's. Indeed, this gorilla got even more
bloated with every passing Windows release. Bill Gates' business strategy
was simple:

1. Pre-announce vaporous product.
2. Hire monkeys (low-paid temps) to cruft something together in VB
3. It it compiles, ship it.
4. Launch marketing campaign for new product showcasing MS "innovation".
5. Repeat (GOTO 1).

With such a plan Microsoft couldn't fail. That is, unless some external
force popped up and ruined everything. Such as Linux and the Internet
perhaps. Both of these developments were well-known to Bill Gates in the
early and mid 1990's (a company as large as Microsoft can afford a decent
spy network, after all). He just considered both to be mere fads that
would go away when Microsoft announced some new innovation, like PDAs --
Personal Desktop Agents (i.e. Bob and Clippit).
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,"
Solving The Virus Problem Once And For All

System administrators across the globe have tried installing anti-virus
software. They've tried lecturing employees not to open unsolicited email
attachments. They've tried installing firewalls and the latest security
patches. But even with these precautions, email viruses continue to rank
third only to Solitaire and the Blue Screen Of Death in the amount of lost
productivity they cause. Meanwhile, Microsoft Exchange and LookOut! remain
as the number one virus delivery products on the market today.

But maybe not for much longer. A group of disgruntled administrators have
teamed up to produce and sell a brand new way to fight viruses, one that
attacks the root of the problem: stupid users.

Salivating Dogs, Inc. of Ohio has unveiled the "Clue Delivery System"
(CDS), a small device that plugs into the back of a standard PC keyboard
and delivers a mild electric shock whenever the luser does something
stupid. The device is triggered by a Windows program that detects when the
luser attempts to open an unsolicited email attachment or perform another
equally dangerous virus-friendly action.
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
                -- Victor Hugo
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 person who has nothing looks at all there is and wants something.
A person who has something looks at all there is and wants all the rest.
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
All men profess honesty as long as they can.  To believe all men honest
would be folly.  To believe none so is something worse.
                -- John Quincy Adams
Are your glasses mended with a strip of masking tape right over your nose?
Do you put pennies in the slots in your penny loafers?
Does your bow-tie flash "hey you kid" in red neon at parties?
Do you think pizza before noon is unhealthy?
Do you use the "greasy kid's stuff" to stick down your cowlick?
Do you wear a "nerd-pack" in your shirt pocket to keep the dozen
        or so pencils from marking the cloth?
Do you think Mary Jane is somebody's name?
Is illegal fishing something only a daring criminal would do?
Is Batman your hero?  Superman?  Green Lantern?  The Shadow?
Do you think girls who kiss on the first date are loose?
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and
finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us.  "He is full of
murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by
their ignorance the hard way."
                -- Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle"
But I find the old notions somehow appealing.  Not that I want to go back
to them -- it is outrageous to have some outer authority tell you what is
proper use and abuse of your own faculties, and it is ludicrous to hold
reason higher than body or feeling.  Still there is something true and
profoundly sane about the belief that acts like murder or theft or
assault violate the doer as well as the done to.  We might even, if we
thought this way, have less crime.  The popular view of crime, as far as
I can deduce it from the movies and television, is that it is a breaking
of a rule by someone who thinks they can get away with that; implicitly,
everyone would like to break the rule, but not everyone is arrogant
enough to imagine they can get away with it.  It therefore becomes very
important for the rule upholders to bring such arrogance down.
                -- Marilyn French, "The Woman's Room"
Conscious is when you are aware of something and conscience is when you
wish you weren't.
Everybody has something to conceal.
                -- Humphrey Bogart
Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.
Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye,
particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.
                -- Clifton Fadiman, "Enter Conversing"
Fess:        Well, you must admit there is something innately humorous about
        a man chasing an invention of his own halfway across the galaxy.
Rod:        Oh yeah, it's a million yuks, sure.  But after all, isn't that the
        basic difference between robots and humans?
Fess:        What, the ability to form imaginary constructs?
Rod:        No, the ability to get hung up on them.
                -- Christopher Stasheff, "The Warlock in Spite of Himself"
Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad
example.
                -- La Rouchefoucauld
Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't,
and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
        I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradictions to the sentiments
of others, and all positive assertion of my own.  I even forbade myself the use
of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such
as "certainly", "undoubtedly", etc.   I adopted instead of them "I conceive",
"I apprehend", or "I imagine" a thing to be so or so; or "so it appears to me
at present".
        When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied
myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing him
immediately some absurdity in his proposition.  In answering I began by
observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right,
but in the present case there appeared or semed to me some difference, etc.
        I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the
conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly.  The modest way in which I
proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction.
I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily
prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I
happened to be in the right.
                -- Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
If someone says he will do something "without fail", he won't.
If there is a wrong way to do something, then someone will do it.
                -- Edward A. Murphy Jr.
If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow
morning, sleep late.
                -- Henny Youngman
In the misfortune of our friends we find something that is not displeasing
to us.
                -- La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims"
It does not matter if you fall down as long as you pick up something
from the floor while you get up.
It's hard to keep your shirt on when you're getting something off your chest.
"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
Most of our lives are about proving something, either to ourselves or to
someone else.
Nobody is one block of harmony.  We are all afraid of something, or feel
limited in something.  We all need somebody to talk to.  It would be good
if we talked to each other--not just pitter-patter, but real talk.  We
shouldn't be so afraid, because most people really like this contact;
that you show you are vulnerable makes them free to be vulnerable too.
It's so much easier to be together when we drop our masks.
                -- Liv Ullman
Please don't put a strain on our friendship by asking me to do something
for you.
Say something you'll be sorry for, I love receiving apologies.
Something better...

1 (obvious): Excuse me.  Is that your nose or did a bus park on your face?
2 (meteorological): Everybody take cover.  She's going to blow.
3 (fashionable): You know, you could de-emphasize your nose if you wore
        something larger.  Like ... Wyoming.
4 (personal): Well, here we are.  Just the three of us.
5 (punctual): Alright gentlemen.  Your nose was on time but you were fifteen
        minutes late.
6 (envious): Oooo, I wish I were you.  Gosh.  To be able to smell your
        own ear.
7 (naughty): Pardon me, Sir.  Some of the ladies have asked if you wouldn't
        mind putting that thing away.
8 (philosophical): You know.  It's not the size of a nose that's important.
        It's what's in it that matters.
9 (humorous): Laugh and the world laughs with you.  Sneeze and it's goodbye,
        Seattle.
10 (commercial): Hi, I'm Earl Schibe and I can paint that nose for $39.95.
11 (polite): Ah.  Would you mind not bobbing your head.  The orchestra keeps
        changing tempo.
12 (melodic): Everybody! "He's got the whole world in his nose."
                -- Steve Martin, "Roxanne"
Something better...

13 (sympathetic): Oh, What happened?  Did your parents lose a bet with God?
14 (complimentary): You must love the little birdies to give them this to
        perch on.
15 (scientific): Say, does that thing there influence the tides?
16 (obscure): Oh, I'd hate to see the grindstone.
17 (inquiry): When you stop to smell the flowers, are they afraid?
18 (french): Say, the pigs have refused to find any more truffles until you
        leave.
19 (pornographic): Finally, a man who can satisfy two women at once.
20 (religious): The Lord giveth and He just kept on giving, didn't He.
21 (disgusting): Say, who mows your nose hair?
22 (paranoid): Keep that guy away from my cocaine!
23 (aromatic): It must be wonderful to wake up in the morning and smell the
        coffee ... in Brazil.
24 (appreciative): Oooo, how original.  Most people just have their teeth
        capped.
25 (dirty): Your name wouldn't be Dick, would it?
                -- Steve Martin, "Roxanne"
Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.
                -- Benjamin Disraeli
That's always the way when you discover something new; everyone thinks
you're crazy.
                -- Evelyn E. Smith
The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and
not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could
have materialized -- and never knowing.
                -- David Viscott
There are many people today who literally do not have a close personal
friend.  They may know something that we don't.  They are probably
avoiding a great deal of pain.
Thinking you know something is a sure way to blind yourself.
                -- Frank Herbert, "Chapterhouse: Dune"
What on earth would a man do with himself if something did not stand in his way?
                -- H.G. Wells
Whatever you want to do, you have to do something else first.
WHENEVER ANYBODY SAYS he's struggling to become a human being I have to
laugh because the apes beat him to it by about a million years.  Struggle
to become a parrot or something.
                -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.
Worrying is like rocking in a rocking chair -- It gives you something to do,
but it doesn't get you anywhere.
You are not a fool just because you have done something foolish --
only if the folly of it escapes you.
You don't have to explain something you never said.
                -- Calvin Coolidge
You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a "realist," he
is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing.
                -- Sydney Harris
You never gain something but that you lose something.
                -- Thoreau
He liked fishing a little too much, and he believed that work was
something a man did when he had to.  He had always been able to get
along well enough without it, especially for the last couple of
years.
                -- "The Stone Giant", James P. Blaylock
"If I have trouble installing Linux, something is wrong. Very wrong."

        - Linus Torvalds
"I've just come to this group and I don't know what it's all about.
I just feel it must be something really serious. Is it really ?"

        - H. J. Thomas on linux-activists
"This, btw, is not something I would suggest you do in your living room.
Getting a penguin to pee on demand is _messy_. We're talking yellow spots
on the walls, on the ceiling, yea verily even behind the fridge. However.
I would also advice against doing this outside - it may be a lot easier to
clean up, but you're likely to get reported and arrested for public
lewdness Never mind that you had a perfectly good explanation for it all."

         - Linus Torvalds on sprinkling holy penguin pee
        /* So there I am, in the middle of my `netfilter-is-wonderful'
           talk in Sydney, and someone asks `What happens if you try
           to enlarge a 64k packet here?'.  I think I said something
           eloquent like `fuck'. */

        - comment from net/ipc4/netfilter/ip_nat_ftp.c
cp -a fs/ext{2,69}
cp -a include/linux/ext{2,69}_fs.h
cp -a include/linux/ext{2,69}_fs_i.h
cp -a include/linux/ext{2,69}_fs_sb.h
for i in fs/ext69/* include/linux/ext69*; do
        vi '-cse ext|%s/(ext|EXT)2/\169/g|x' $i;
done
vi '-c/EXT/|y|pu|s/2/69/|s/Second/FUBAR/|x' fs/Config.in
vi '-c/ext2/|y|pu|s/ext2/ext69/g|//|y|pu|&g|//|y|pu|&g|//|y|pu|&g|x' \
  include/linux/fs.h

had done the trick last time I needed something like that, but that was long
time ago...

        - Al Viro explaining some simple commands on linux-kernel
I have a simple rule in life: If I don't understand something, it must be bad.

        - Linus Torvalds
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.

        - Linus Torvalds
<JALH> lxrbot, whereis olaf?
<lxrbot> olaf is Not used
* JALH runs
<Russ|werk> JALH: why
<Russ|werk> its not like you did something like this:
<Russ|werk> lxrbot, whereis lubrication
<lxrbot> lubrication is Not used
<JALH> muwhaha
<Russ|werk> then...it would be time to run

        - abusing lxrbot on #kernelnewbies
The fact that it takes more code to parse and interpret ACPI than it does to
route traffic on the internet backbones should be a hint something is badly
wrong either in ACPI the spec, ACPI the implenentation or both.

        - Alan Cox on linux-kernel
Having your own personal custom language dialect might be tempting but it is
normally something only the lisp community do.

        - Alan Cox on the linux-kernel mailing list
Something mysteriously formed,
Born before heaven and Earth.
In the silence and the void,
Standing alone and unchanging,
Ever present and in motion.
Perhaps it is the mother of ten thousand things.
I do not know its name
Call it Tao.
For lack of a better word, I call it great.

Being great, it flows
I flows far away.
Having gone far, it returns.

Therefore, "Tao is great;
Heaven is great;
Earth is great;
The king is also great."
These are the four great powers of the universe,
And the king is one of them.

Man follows Earth.
Earth follows heaven.
Heaven follows the Tao.
Tao follows what is natural.
A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.

When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order.

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.
Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.

Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower.
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.
When the Tao is present in the universe,
The horses haul manure.
When the Tao is absent from the universe,
War horses are bred outside the city.

There is no greater sin than desire,
No greater curse than discontent,
No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself.
Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.
In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.

Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

The world is ruled by letting things take their course.
It cannot be ruled by interfering.
        A young married couple had their first child.  Their original pride
and joy slowly turned to concern however, for after a couple of years the
child had never uttered any form of speech.  They hired the best speech
therapists, doctors, psychiatrists, all to no avail.  The child simply refused
to speak.  One morning when the child was five, while the husband was reading
the paper, and the wife was feeding the dog, the little kid looks up from
his bowl and said, "My cereal's cold."
        The couple is stunned.  The man, in tears, confronts his son.  "Son,
after all these years, why have you waited so long to say something?".
        Shrugs the kid, "Everything's been okay 'til now".
Are you a parent?  Do you sometimes find yourself unsure as to what to
say in those awkward situations?  Worry no more...

        When are you going to grow up?
        I'm only doing this for your own good.
        Why are you crying?  Stop crying, or I'll give you something to
                cry about.
        What's wrong with you?
        Someday you'll thank me for this.
        You'd lose your head if it weren't attached.
        Don't you have any sense at all?
        If you keep sucking your thumb, it'll fall off.
        Why?  Because I said so.
        I hope you have a kid just like yourself.
MEMORIES OF MY FAMILY MEETINGS still are a source of strength to me.  I
remember we'd all get into the car -- I forget what kind it was -- and
drive and drive.

I'm not sure where we'd go, but I think there were some bees there. The
smell of something was strong in the air as we played whatever sport we
played.  I remember a bigger, older guy whom we called "Dad."  We'd eat
some stuff or not and then I think we went home.

I guess some things never leave you.
                -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.
A fellow bought a new car, a Nissan, and was quite happy with his purchase.
He was something of an animist, however, and felt that the car really ought
to have a name.  This presented a problem, as he was not sure if the name
should be masculine or feminine.
        After considerable thought, he settled on an naming the car either
Belchazar or Beaumadine, but remained in a quandry about the final choice.
        "Is a Nissan male or female?" he began asking his friends.  Most of
them looked at him pecularly, mumbled things about urgent appointments, and
went on their way rather quickly.
        He finally broached the question to a lady he knew who held a black
belt in judo.  She thought for a moment and answered "Feminine."
        The swiftness of her response puzzled him. "You're sure of that?" he
asked.
        "Certainly," she replied. "They wouldn't sell very well if they were
masculine."
        "Unhhh...  Well, why not?"
        "Because people want a car with a reputation for going when you want
it to.  And, if Nissan's are female, it's like they say...  `Each Nissan, she
go!'"

        [No, we WON'T explain it; go ask someone who practices an oriental
        martial art.  (Tai Chi Chuan probably doesn't count.)  Ed.]
<stu> you should be afraid to use KDE because RMS might come to your
      house and cleave your monitor with an axe or something :)
If we want something nice to get born in nine months, then sex has to
happen.  We want to have the kind of sex that is acceptable and fun for both
people, not the kind where someone is getting screwed. Let's get some cross
fertilization, but not someone getting screwed.
        -- Larry Wall
Something must be Done
This is Something
Therefore, This must be Done
        -- The Thatcherite Syllogism
<MFGolfBal> rit/ara:  There's something really demented about UNIX
            underwear...
<jgoerzen> stu: ahh that machine.  Don't you think that something named
           stallman deserves to be an Alpha? :-)
<stu> jgoerzen: no, actually, I'd prolly be more inclined to name a 386
      with 4 megs of ram and a 40 meg hard drive stallman.
<stu> with a big fat case that makes tons of noise and rattles the floor
* Knghtbrd falls to the floor holding his sides laughing
<stu> and..
<stu> double-height hard drive
"As you journey through life take a minute every now and then to give a
thought for the other fellow. He could be plotting something."
        -- Hagar the Horrible
<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> mariab - I am a Debian developer.  Red Hat is "the enemy" or
           something like that I guess..  Still, typecasting RH users as
           idiots or their distribution as completely broken by default
           is complete and total FUD.
// Minor lesson: don't fuck about with something you don't fully understand
        -- the dosdoom source code
But modifying dpkg is infeasible, and we've agreed to, among other things,
keep the needs of our users at the forefront of our minds. And from a
user's perspective, something that keeps the system tidy in the normal
case, and works *now*, is much better than idealistic fantasies like a
working dpkg.
        -- Manoj Srivastava
If I have trouble installing Linux, something is wrong. Very wrong.
        -- Linus Torvalds
<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!
<cas> well there ya go.  say something stupid in irc and have it
      immortalised forever in someone's .sig file
<Tarzan> hey did you fall off your pirch or something?
<knghtbrd> me?  heh.
<Mercury> Knghtbrd: Using -3dfx or -svga?
<Knghtbrd> Mercury will do something sane with it
<Knghtbrd> Mercury: both---svga sig11's, -3dfx sig4's
<Knghtbrd> Mercury: that's not good right?  ;>
It's not usually cost effective time wise to go do it. But if something's
really pissing you off, you just go find the code and fix it and that's
really cool.
        -- John Carmack, on the advantages of open source
<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.
<BenC> CosmicRay: you complete me
<BenC> err...
<CosmicRay> heh
* BenC goes back to coding
* elmo looks at benc
<elmo> something we should know about you and cosmicray, Ben? :)
<doogie_> linux takes shit and turns it into something useful.
<doogie_> windows takes something useful and turns it into shit
<Knghtbrd> It is when the example source won't compile ...
<``Erik> then you fucked something up
<Knghtbrd> Nope, I followed their instructions
<``Erik> that may've been your problem :}
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really
good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change
their minds and you never hear that old view from them again.  They really
do it.  It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are
human and change is sometimes painful.  But it happens every day.  I cannot
recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
        -- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address
Linux supports the notion of a command line or a shell for the same reason
that only children read books with only pictures in them. Language, be it
English or something else, is the only tool flexible enough to accomplish
a sufficiently broad range of tasks.
        -- Bill Garrett
<hop_> i had something that i think was chicken that was coated with a red
       paste that seemed to be composed of lye based on how much of my
       tounge it burned away.
<hop_> our friend who is Indian said this is why most Indians are thin
       and i quote "It doesn't take very much of this food to get you
       satisfied enoguh to stop eating."
Men often believe -- or pretend -- that the "Law" is something sacred, or
at least a science -- an unfounded assumption very convenient to governments.
(1) Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.
(2) If your stomach antagonizes you, pacify it with cool thoughts.
(3) Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
(4) Go very lightly on the vices, such as carrying on in society, as
        the social ramble ain't restful.
(5) Avoid running at all times.
(6) Don't look back, something might be gaining on you.
                -- S. Paige, c. 1951
        Before he became a hermit, Zarathud was a young Priest, and
        took great delight in making fools of his opponents in front of
his followers.
        One day Zarathud took his students to a pleasant pasture and
there he confronted The Sacred Chao while She was contentedly grazing.
        "Tell me, you dumb beast," demanded the Priest in his
commanding voice, "why don't you do something worthwhile?  What is your
Purpose in Life, anyway?"
        Munching the tasty grass, The Sacred Chao replied "MU".  (The
Chinese ideogram for NO-THING.)
        Upon hearing this, absolutely nobody was enlightened.
        Primarily because nobody understood Chinese.
                -- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters"
Catharsis is something I associate with pornography and crossword puzzles.
                -- Howard Chaykin
Do not despair of life.  You have no doubt force enough to overcome your
obstacles.  Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night
for something to satisfy his hunger.  Notwithstanding cold and hounds and
traps, his race survives.  I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
                -- Henry David Thoreau
Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
                -- Oscar Levant
He who knows nothing, knows nothing.
But he who knows he knows nothing knows something.
And he who knows someone whose friend's wife's brother knows nothing,
        he knows something.  Or something like that.
If something has not yet gone wrong then it would ultimately have been
beneficial for it to go wrong.
If you fool around with something long enough, it will eventually break.
[Maturity consists in the discovery that] there comes a critical moment
where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand
more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.
                -- S. Kierkegaard
Nobody ever ruined their eyesight by looking at the bright side of something.
Standards are different for all things, so the standard set by man is by
no means the only 'certain' standard.  If you mistake what is relative for
something certain, you have strayed far from the ultimate truth.
                -- Chuang Tzu
To get something clean, one has to get something dirty.
To get something dirty, one does not have to get anything clean.
When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later
something marvelous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend
your parents' limitations...  At the same time, you feel sure that in all
the wilderness of possibility; in all the forests of opinion, there is a
vital something that can be known -- known and grasped.  That we will
eventually know it, and convert the whole mystery into a coherent
narrative.  So that then one's true life -- the point of everything --
will emerge from the mist into a pure light, into total comprehension.
But it isn't like that at all.  But if it isn't, where did the idea come
from, to torture and unsettle us?
                -- Brian Aldiss, "Helliconia Summer"
You will always find something in the last place you look.
Win95 is not a virus; a virus does something.
        -- unknown source
> The day people think linux would be better served by somebody else (FSF
> being the natural alternative), I'll "abdicate".  I don't think that
> it's something people have to worry about right now - I don't see it
> happening in the near future.  I enjoy doing linux, even though it does
> mean some work, and I haven't gotten any complaints (some almost timid
> reminders about a patch I have forgotten or ignored, but nothing
> negative so far).
>
> Don't take the above to mean that I'll stop the day somebody complains:
> I'm thick-skinned (Lasu, who is reading this over my shoulder commented
> that "thick-HEADED is closer to the truth") enough to take some abuse.
> If I weren't, I'd have stopped developing linux the day ast ridiculed me
> on c.o.minix.  What I mean is just that while linux has been my baby so
> far, I don't want to stand in the way if people want to make something
> better of it (*).
>
>                 Linus
>
> (*) Hey, maybe I could apply for a saint-hood from the Pope.  Does
> somebody know what his email-address is? I'm so nice it makes you puke.
        -- Taken from Linus's reply to someone worried about the future of Linux
Note that if I can get you to "su and say" something just by asking,
you have a very serious security problem on your system and you should
look into it.
        -- Paul Vixie, vixie-cron 3.0.1 installation notes
If the future navigation system [for interactive networked services on
the NII] looks like something from Microsoft, it will never work.
        -- Chairman of Walt Disney Television & Telecommunications
What you end up with, after running an operating system concept through
these many marketing coffee filters, is something not unlike plain hot
water.
        -- Matt Welsh
/*
* [...] Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum
* possible RTT.  I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP
* to talk to the University of Mars.
* PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented
* ftp to mars will work nicely.
*/
        -- from /usr/src/linux/net/inet/tcp.c, concerning RTT [round trip time]
I mean, well, if it were not for Linux I might be roaming the streets looking
for drugs or prostitutes or something.  Hannu and Linus have my highest
admiration (apple polishing mode off).
        -- Phil Lewis, plewis@nyx.nyx.net
Besides, its really not worthwhile to use more than two times your physical
ram in swap (except in a select few situations). The performance of the system
becomes so abysmal you'd rather heat pins under your toenails while reciting
Windows95 source code and staring at porn flicks of Bob Dole than actually try
to type something.
        -- seen on c.o.l.development.system, about the size of the swap space
The primary difference [...] is that the Java programm will reliably and
obviously crash, whereas the C Program will do something obscure
        -- Java Language Tutorial
There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of
something...hmm...yes...I've got it...there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit.
        -- Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution
I just uploaded xtoolplaces-1.6. It fixes all bugs but one: It still
coredumps instead of doing something useful.  The upstream author's
e-mail address bounces, Redhat doesn't provide it and I never used it.
        -- Sven Rudolph <sr1@os.inf.tu-dresden.de>
Ooh, mommy, mommy, what I have now doesn't work in this extremely
unlikely circumstance, so I'll just throw it away and write something
completely new.
        -- Linus Torvalds
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
I don't think 'It's better than hurling yourself into a meat grinder'
is a good rationale for doing something.
                -- Andrew Suffield in
                   <20030905221055.GA22354@doc.ic.ac.uk> on debian-devel
According to a recent and unscientific national survey, smiling is something
everyone should do at least 6 times a day.  In an effort to increase the
national average  (the US ranks third among the world's superpowers in
smiling), Xerox has instructed all personnel to be happy, effervescent, and
most importantly, to smile.  Xerox employees agree, and even feel strongly
that they can not only meet but surpass the national average...  except for
Tubby Ackerman.  But because Tubby does such a fine job of racing around
parking lots with a large butterfly net retrieving floating IC chips, Xerox
decided to give him a break.  If you see Tubby in a parking lot he may have
a sheepish grin.  This is where the expression, "Service with a slightly
sheepish grin" comes from.
"Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying around,
I'd rather lie around.  No contest."
                -- Eric Clapton
I never cheated an honest man, only rascals.  They wanted something for
nothing.  I gave them nothing for something.
                -- Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil
If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to
do something else.
        -- Gerald Weinberg, "The Secrets of Consulting"
If you do something right once, someone will ask you to do it again.
If you hype something and it succeeds, you're a genius -- it wasn't a
hype.  If you hype it and it fails, then it was just a hype.
                -- Neil Bogart
Keep your Eye on the Ball,
Your Shoulder to the Wheel,
Your Nose to the Grindstone,
Your Feet on the Ground,
Your Head on your Shoulders.
Now... try to get something DONE!
Some people have a great ambition: to build something
that will last, at least until they've finished building it.
Success is something I will dress for when I get there, and not until.
Telephone books are like dictionaries -- if you know the answer before
you look it up, you can eventually reaffirm what you thought you knew
but weren't sure.  But if you're searching for something you don't
already know, your fingers could walk themselves to death.
                -- Erma Bombeck
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 more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
                -- Richard Bach, "Illusions"
The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
The only promotion rules I can think of are that a sense of shame is to
be avoided at all costs and there is never any reason for a hustler to
be less cunning than more virtuous men.  Oh yes ... whenever you think
you've got something really great, add ten per cent more.
                -- Bill Veeck
The person who can smile when something goes wrong has thought of
someone to blame it on.
The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three
persons, two of them absent.
What they say:                                What they mean:

A major technological breakthrough...        Back to the drawing board.
Developed after years of research        Discovered by pure accident.
Project behind original schedule due        We're working on something else.
        to unforseen difficulties
Designs are within allowable limits        We made it, stretching a point or two.
Customer satisfaction is believed        So far behind schedule that they'll be
        assured                                        grateful for anything at all.
Close project coordination                We're gonna spread the blame, campers!
Test results were extremely gratifying        It works, and boy, were we surprised!
The design will be finalized...                We haven't started yet, but we've got
                                                to say something.
The entire concept has been rejected        The guy who designed it quit.
We're moving forward with a fresh        We hired three new guys, and they're
        approach                                kicking it around.
A number of different approaches...        We don't know where we're going, but
                                                we're moving.
Preliminary operational tests are        Blew up when we turned it on.
        inconclusive
Modifications are underway                We're starting over.
You are always doing something marginal when the boss drops by your desk.
Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate
to make 10 ways to do something.  :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <9695@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Hey, I had to let awk be better at *something*...  :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <1991Nov7.200504.25280@netlabs.com>1
If I don't document something, it's usually either for a good reason,
or a bad reason.  In this case it's a good reason.  :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <1992Jan17.005405.16806@netlabs.com>
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>
It won't be covered in the book.  The source code has to be useful for
something, after all...  :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <10160@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
There is, however, a strange, musty smell in the air that reminds me of
something...hmm...yes...I've got it...there's a VMS nearby, or I'm a Blit.
             -- Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution
If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new
witticism just for you.
             -- Larry Wall in <199702221943.LAA20388@wall.org>
Obviously I was either onto something, or on something.
             -- Larry Wall on the creation of Perl
But then it's a bit odd to think that declaring something int could
actually slow down the program, if it ended up forcing more conversions
back to string.
             -- Larry Wall in <199708040319.UAA16213@wall.org>
To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic.  It's something
that may or may not require explicit assistance.  See Billy Graham.  :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <199710141738.KAA22289@wall.org>
There's something to be said for returning the whole syntax tree.
             -- Larry Wall in <199710221833.LAA24741@wall.org>
The way these things go, there are probably 6 or 8 kludgey ways to do
it, and a better way that involves rethinking something that hasn't
been rethunk yet.
             -- Larry Wall in <199710221859.LAA24889@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>
        "I'll tell you what I know, then," he decided.  "The pin I'm wearing
means I'm a member of the IA.  That's Inamorati Anonymous.  An inamorato is
somebody in love.  That's the worst addiction of all."
        "Somebody is about to fall in love," Oedipa said, "you go sit with
them, or something?"
        "Right.  The whole idea is to get where you don't need it.  I was
lucky.  I kicked it young.  But there are sixty-year-old men, believe it or
not, and women even older, who might wake up in the night screaming."
        "You hold meetings, then, like the AA?"
        "No, of course not.  You get a phone number, an answering service
you can call.  Nobody knows anybody else's name; just the number in case
it gets so bad you can't handle it alone.  We're isolates, Arnold.  Meetings
would destroy the whole point of it."
                -- Thomas Pynchon, "The Crying of Lot 49"
Love is dope, not chicken soup.  I mean, love is something to be passed
around freely, not spooned down someone's throat for their own good by a
Jewish mother who cooked it all by herself.
That's life for you, said McDunn.  Someone always waiting for someone who
never comes home.  Always someone loving something more than that thing loves
them.  And after awhile you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it
can't hurt you no more.
                -- R. Bradbury, "The Fog Horn"
Under deadline pressure for the next week.  If you want something, it can wait.
Unless it's blind screaming paroxysmally hedonistic...
I am deeply CONCERNED and I want something GOOD for BREAKFAST!
I hope something GOOD came in the mail today so I have a REASON to live!!
I just remembered something about a TOAD!
I'm DESPONDENT ... I hope there's something DEEP-FRIED under this
miniature DOMED STADIUM ...
Is something VIOLENT going to happen to a GARBAGE CAN?
Yow!  Did something bad happen or am I in a drive-in movie??
Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about
problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that
if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be
embarrassingly good at it ...
                -- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"
After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that
brought tears to my eyes.  He said, "No hablo ingles."
                -- Ronnie Shakes
Sometimes the best medicine is to stop taking something.
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"
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2024
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