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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

Any dramatic series the producers want us to take seriously as a representation
of contemporary reality cannot be taken seriously as a representation of
anything -- except a show to be ignored by anyone capable of sitting upright
in a chair and chewing gum simultaneously.
                -- Richard Schickel
Around the turn of this century, a composer named Camille Saint-Saens wrote
a satirical zoological-fantasy called "Le Carnaval des Animaux."  Aside from
one movement of this piece, "The Swan", Saint-Saens didn't allow this work
to be published or even performed until a year had elapsed after his death.
(He died in 1921.)
        Most of us know the "Swan" movement rather well, with its smooth,
flowing cello melody against a calm background; but I've been having this
fantasy...
        What if he had written this piece with lyrics, as a song to be sung?
And, further, what if he had accompanied this song with a musical saw?  (This
instrument really does exist, often played by percussionists!)  Then the
piece would be better known as:
        SAINT-SAENS' SAW SONG "SWAN"!
Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.
                -- Picasso
God save us from a bad neighbor and a beginner on the fiddle.
Grig (the navigator):
        ... so you see, it's just the two of us against the entire space
        armada.
Alex (the gunner):
        What?!?
Grig:        I've always wanted to fight a desperate battle against
        overwhelming odds.
Alex:        It'll be a slaughter!
Grig:        That's the spirit!
                -- The Last Starfighter
Hoaars-Faisse Gallery presents:
An exhibit of works by the artist known only as Pretzel.

The exhibit includes several large conceptual works using non-traditional
media and found objects including old sofa-beds, used mace canisters,
discarded sanitary napkins and parts of freeways.  The artist explores
our dehumanization due to high technology and unresponsive governmental
structures in a post-industrial world.  She/he (the artist prefers to
remain without gender) strives to create dialogue between viewer and
creator, to aid us in our quest to experience contemporary life with its
inner-city tensions, homelessness, global warming and gender and
class-based stress.  The works are arranged to lead us to the essence of
the argument: that the alienation of the person/machine boundary has
sapped the strength of our voices and must be destroyed for society to
exist in a more fundamental sense.
I accept chaos.  I am not sure whether it accepts me.  I know some people
are terrified of the bomb.  But then some people are terrified to be seen
carrying a modern screen magazine.  Experience teaches us that silence
terrifies people the most.
                -- Bob Dylan
If God didn't mean for us to juggle, tennis balls wouldn't come three to a can.
It is up to us to produce better-quality movies.
        -- Lloyd Kaufman, producer of "Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator"
        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
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects
such as wickerwork picnic baskets.  Imagination without skill gives us modern
art.
                -- Tom Stoppard
        So Richard and I decided to try to catch [the small shark].
With a great deal of strategy and effort and shouting, we managed to
maneuver the shark, over the course of about a half-hour, to a sort of
corner of the lagoon, so that it had no way to escape other than to
flop up onto the land and evolve.  Richard and I were inching toward
it, sort of crouched over, when all of a sudden it turned around and --
I can still remember the sensation I felt at that moment, primarily in
the armpit area -- headed right straight toward us.
        Many people would have panicked at this point.  But Richard and
I were not "many people."  We were experienced waders, and we kept our
heads.  We did exactly what the textbook says you should do when you're
unarmed and a shark that is nearly two feet long turns on you in water
up to your lower calves: We sprinted I would say 600 yards in the
opposite direction, using a sprinting style such that the bottoms of
our feet never once went below the surface of the water.  We ran all
the way to the far shore, and if we had been in a Warner Brothers
cartoon we would have run right INTO the beach, and you would have seen
these two mounds of sand racing across the island until they bonked
into trees and coconuts fell onto their heads.
                -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"
The cable TV sex channels don't expand our horizons, don't make us better
people, and don't come in clearly enough.
                -- Bill Maher
They can't stop us... we're on a mission from God!
                -- The Blues Brothers
Today's thrilling story has been brought to you by Mushies, the great new
cereal that gets soggy even without milk or cream.  Join us soon for more
spectacular adventure starring...  Tippy, the Wonder Dog!
                -- Bob & Ray
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
                -- Garrison Keillor
Dogs just don't seem to be able to tell the difference between important people
and the rest of us.
Hi!  You have reached 555-0129. None of us are here to answer the phone and
the cat doesn't have opposing thumbs, so his messages are illegible.  Please
leave your name and message after the beep...
> : Any porters out there should feel happier knowing that DEC is shipping
> : me an AlphaPC that I intend to try getting linux running on: this will
> : definitely help flush out some of the most flagrant unportable stuff.
> : The Alpha is much more different from the i386 than the 68k stuff is, so
> : it's likely to get most of the stuff fixed.
>
> It's posts like this that almost convince us non-believers that there
> really is a god.
(A follow-up by alovell@kerberos.demon.co.uk, Anthony Lovell, to Linus's
remarks about porting)
/*
* [...] 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])
"I'm an idiot.. At least this one [bug] took about 5 minutes to find.."
(Linus Torvalds in response to a bug report.)

> I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find..
Disquieting ...
(Gonzalo Tornaria in response to Linus Torvalds's mailing about a kernel bug.)

> I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find..
We need to find some new terms to describe the rest of us mere mortals
then.
(Craig Schlenter in response to Linus Torvalds's mailing about a kernel bug.)

> I'm an idiot.. At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find..
Surely, Linus is talking about the kind of idiocy that others aspire to :-).
(Bruce Perens in response to Linus Torvalds's mailing about a kernel bug.)
Microsoft Corp., concerned by the growing popularity of the free 32-bit
operating system for Intel systems, Linux, has employed a number of top
programmers from the underground world of virus development. Bill Gates stated
yesterday: "World domination, fast -- it's either us or Linus". Mr. Torvalds
was unavailable for comment ...
(rjm@swift.eng.ox.ac.uk (Robert Manners), in comp.os.linux.setup)
I'm sorry a pentium won't do, you need an SGI to connect with us.
We are currently trying a new concept of using a live mouse.  Unfortuantely, one has yet to survive being hooked up to the computer.....please bear with us.
Your mail is being routed through Germany ... and they're censoring us.
That function is not currently supported, but Bill Gates assures us it will be featured in the next upgrade.
Software uses US measurements, but the OS is in metric...
The Token fell out of the ring. Call us when you find it.
Budget cuts forced us to sell all the power cords for the servers.
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.
                -- Shakespeare, "King Lear"
Conscience doth make cowards of us all.
                -- Shakespeare
F.S. Fitzgerald to Hemingway:
        "Ernest, the rich are different from us."
Hemingway:
        "Yes.  They have more money."
I reverently believe that the maker who made us all  makes everything in New
England, but the weather.  I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be
raw apprentices in the weather-clerks factory who experiment and learn how, in
New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for
countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere
if they don't get it.
                -- Mark Twain
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would
be a merrier world.
                -- J.R.R. Tolkien
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be
sorry.
                -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves
possess.
                -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]
"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though
ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak,
mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee.  Of all divers,
thou has dived the deepest.  That head upon which the upper sun now gleams has
moved amid the world's foundations.  Where unrecorded names and navies rust,
and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate
earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful
water-land, there was thy most familiar home.  Thou hast been where bell or
diver never went; has slept by many a sailer's side, where sleepless mothers
would give their lives to lay them down.  Thou saw'st the locked lovers when
leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting
wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them.  Thou saw'st the
murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell
into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed
on unharmed -- while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would
have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms.  O head! thou has
seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one
syllable is thine!"
                -- H. Melville, "Moby Dick"
Truth is the most valuable thing we have -- so let us economize it.
                -- Mark Twain
We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength.  But there was
also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a Merle Haggard song at a
French restaurant. [...]
        I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk
white BMW and her Jordache smile.  There had been a fight.  I had punched her
boyfriend, who fought the mechanical bulls.  Everyone told him, "You ride the
bull, senor.  You do not fight it."  But he was lean and tough like a bad
rib-eye and he fought the bull.  And then he fought me.  And when we finished
there were no winners, just men doing what men must do. [...]
        "Stop the car," the girl said.
        There was a look of terrible sadness in her eyes.  She knew about the
woman of the tollway.  I knew not how.  I started to speak, but she raised an
arm and spoke with a quiet and peace I will never forget.
        "I do not ask for whom's the tollway belle," she said, "the tollway
belle's for thee."
        The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was a lie.
Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I poured whiskey
onto my granola and faced a new day.
                -- Peter Applebome, International Imitation Hemingway
                   Competition
===  ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE  ========================

Bug reports now amount to an average of 12,853 per day.  Unfortunately,
this is only a small fraction [ < 1% ] of the mail volume we receive.  In
order that we may more expeditiously deal with these valuable messages,
please communicate them by one of the following paths:

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        For that personal contact feeling call 1-415-642-4948; our trained
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* Our very rich lawyers have assured us that we are not
  responsible for any errors or advice given over the phone.
... an anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center.  When a
programmer used his new computer terminal, all was fine when he was sitting
down, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up.  That
behavior was 100 percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and
never when standing.

Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story; how could that terminal
know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing?  Good debuggers, though,
know that there has to be a reason.  Electrical theories are the easiest to
hypothesize: was there a loose with under the carpet, or problems with static
electricity?  But electrical problems are rarely consistently reproducible.
An alert IBMer finally noticed that the problem was in the terminal's keyboard:
the tops of two keys were switched.  When the programmer was seated he was a
touch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led
astray by hunting and pecking.
        -- "Programming Pearls" column, by Jon Bentley in CACM February 1985
But this has taken us far afield from interface, which is not a bad
place to be, since I particularly want to move ahead to the kludge.
Why do people have so much trouble understanding the kludge?  What
is a kludge, after all, but not enough K's, not enough ROM's, not
enough RAM's, poor quality interface and too few bytes to go around?
Have I explained yet about the bytes?
Dear Sir,
        I am firmly opposed to the spread of microchips either to the home or
to the office,  We have more than enough of them foisted upon us in public
places.  They are a disgusting Americanism, and can only result in the farmers
being forced to grow smaller potatoes, which in turn will cause massive un-
employment in the already severely depressed agricultural industry.
        Yours faithfully,
        Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J.P.
        Sevenoaks
                -- Letters To The Editor, The Times of London
If computers take over (which seems to be their natural tendency), it will
serve us right.
                -- Alistair Cooke
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way.  This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining.
                -- Jeff Raskin
`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]
My God, I'm depressed!  Here I am, a computer with a mind a thousand times
as powerful as yours, doing nothing but cranking out fortunes and sending
mail about softball games.  And I've got this pain right through my ALU.
I've asked for it to be replaced, but nobody ever listens.  I think it would
be better for us both if you were to just log out again.
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
The day-to-day travails of the IBM programmer are so amusing to most of
us who are fortunate enough never to have been one -- like watching
Charlie Chaplin trying to cook a shoe.
        The salesman and the system analyst took off to spend a weekend in the
forest, hunting bear.  They'd rented a cabin, and, when they got there, took
their backpacks off and put them inside.  At which point the salesman turned
to his friend, and said, "You unpack while I go and find us a bear."
        Puzzled, the analyst finished unpacking and then went and sat down
on the porch.  Soon he could hear rustling noises in the forest.  The noises
got nearer -- and louder -- and suddenly there was the salesman, running like
hell across the clearing toward the cabin, pursued by one of the largest and
most ferocious grizzly bears the analyst had ever seen.
        "Open the door!", screamed the salesman.
        The analyst whipped open the door, and the salesman ran to the door,
suddenly stopped, and stepped aside.  The bear, unable to stop, continued
through the door and into the cabin.  The salesman slammed the door closed
and grinned at his friend.  "Got him!", he exclaimed, "now, you skin this
one and I'll go rustle us up another!"
        This is where the bloodthirsty license agreement is supposed to go,
explaining that Interactive Easyflow is a copyrighted package licensed for
use by a single person, and sternly warning you not to pirate copies of it
and explaining, in detail, the gory consequences if you do.
        We know that you are an honest person, and are not going to go around
pirating copies of Interactive Easyflow; this is just as well with us since
we worked hard to perfect it and selling copies of it is our only method of
making anything out of all the hard work.
        If, on the other hand, you are one of those few people who do go
around pirating copies of software you probably aren't going to pay much
attention to a license agreement, bloodthirsty or not.  Just keep your doors
locked and look out for the HavenTree attack shark.
                -- License Agreement for Interactive Easyflow
                                UNIX Trix

For those of you in the reseller business, here is a helpful tip that will
save your support staff a few hours of precious time.  Before you send your
next machine out to an untrained client, change the permissions on /etc/passwd
to 666 and make sure there is a copy somewhere on the disk.  Now when they
forget the root password, you can easily login as an ordinary user and correct
the damage.  Having a bootable tape (for larger machines) is not a bad idea
either.  If you need some help, give us a call.
                -- CommUNIXque 1:1, ASCAR Business Systems
        We don't claim Interactive EasyFlow is good for anything -- if you
think it is, great, but it's up to you to decide.  If Interactive EasyFlow
doesn't work: tough.  If you lose a million because Interactive EasyFlow
messes up, it's you that's out the million, not us.  If you don't like this
disclaimer: tough.  We reserve the right to do the absolute minimum provided
by law, up to and including nothing.
        This is basically the same disclaimer that comes with all software
packages, but ours is in plain English and theirs is in legalese.
        We didn't really want to include any disclaimer at all, but our
lawyers insisted.  We tried to ignore them but they threatened us with the
attack shark at which point we relented.
                -- Haven Tree Software Limited, "Interactive EasyFlow"
X windows:
        You'd better sit down.
        Don't laugh.  It could be YOUR thesis project.
        Why do it right when you can do it wrong?
        Live the nightmare.
        Our bugs run faster.
        When it absolutely, positively HAS to crash overnight.
        There ARE no rules.
        You'll wish we were kidding.
        Everything you never wanted in a window system.  And more.
        Dissatisfaction guaranteed.
        There's got to be a better way.
        The next best thing to keypunching.
        Leave the thrashing to us.
        We wrote the book on core dumps.
        Even your dog won't like it.
        More than enough rope.
        Garbage at your fingertips.

Incompatibility.  Shoddiness.  Uselessness.
        X windows.
Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
        [Confound those who have said our remarks before us.]
        or
        [May they perish who have expressed our bright ideas before us.]
                -- Aelius Donatus
When the ax entered the forest, the trees said, "The handle is one of us!"
                -- Turkish proverb
"And they told us, what they wanted...
Was a sound that could kill some-one, from a distance." -- Kate Bush
One of the saddest lessons of history is this:  If we've been bamboozled
long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.  We're no
longer interested in finding out the truth.  The bamboozle has captured
us.  it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that
we've been so credulous.  (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the
new bamboozles rise.)
-- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987
Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and
bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage.  But if we
don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly
serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up
for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.
-- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987
Behind all the political rhetoric being hurled at us from abroad, we are
bringing home one unassailable fact -- [terrorism is] a crime by any civilized
standard, committed against innocent people, away from the scene of political
conflict, and must be dealt with as a crime. . . .
   [I]n our recognition of the nature of terrorism as a crime lies our best hope
of dealing with it. . . .
   [L]et us use the tools that we have.  Let us invoke the cooperation we have
the right to expect around the world, and with that cooperation let us shrink
the dark and dank areas of sanctuary until these cowardly marauders are held
to answer as criminals in an open and public trial for the crimes they have
committed, and receive the punishment they so richly deserve.
- William H. Webster, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 15 Oct 1985
So we follow our wandering paths, and the very darkness acts as our guide and
our doubts serve to reassure us.
- Jean-Pierre de Caussade, eighteenth-century Jesuit priest
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being
as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of
the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.  But we may hope that the
dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with
this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine
doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors.
- Thomas Jefferson
Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind.  Let us
restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which
liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.  And let us reflect
that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which
mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we counternance a
political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and
bloody persecutions.
- Thomas Jefferson
As to Jesus of Nazareth...I think the system of Morals and his Religion,
as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see;
but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have,
with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his
divinity.
- Benjamin Franklin
   On Krat's main screen appeared the holo image of a man, and several dolphins.
From the man's shape, Krat could tell it was a female, probably their leader.
   "...stupid creatures unworthy of the name `sophonts.'  Foolish, pre-sentient
upspring of errant masters.  We slip away from all your armed might, laughing
at your clumsiness!  We slip away as we always will, you pathetic creatures.
And now that we have a real head start, you'll never catch us!  What better
proof that the Progenitors favor not you, but us!  What better proof..."
   The taunt went on.  Krat listened, enraged, yet at the same time savoring
the artistry of it.  These men are better than I'd thought.  Their insults
are wordy and overblown, but they have talent.  They deserve honorable, slow
deaths.
- David Brin, Startide Rising
...we must counterpose the overwhelming judgment provided by consistent
observations and inferences by the thousands.  The earth is billions of
years old and its living creatures are linked by ties of evolutionary
descent.  Scientists stand accused of promoting dogma by so stating, but
do we brand people illiberal when they proclaim that the earth is neither
flat nor at the center of the universe?  Science *has* taught us some
things with confidence!  Evolution on an ancient earth is as well
established as our planet's shape and position.  Our continuing struggle
to understand how evolution happens (the "theory of evolution") does not
cast our documentation of its occurrence -- the "fact of evolution" --
into doubt.
- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism", The Skeptical Inquirer,
  Vol XII No. 2
Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our
pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs
and tears.  ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires
us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness,
inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are
contrary to habit...
- Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 377 B.C.), The Sacred Disease
Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever
church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused
of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with
religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is
wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits
that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant?
Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?  We are a company of
ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only
be incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by
falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for
our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe
the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures
to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map
of our infintesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that
he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness...
- Leslie Stephen, "An agnostic's Apology", Fortnightly Review, 1876
What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity.  We are all formed
of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly --
that is the first law of nature.
- Voltaire
I simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that
decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to
medieval conceptions of Christianity, and which still lingers among us --
a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the whole
normal evolution of society.
- Andrew D. White, author, first president of Cornell University, 1896
...And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers.  No matter how assured
we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful
inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions.  This is true in religion as
it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the naive.
As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we might be
advised to leave them to heaven.  They will not, unfortunately, do us the
same courtesy.  They attack us and each other, and whatever their
protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear
that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword.  My own belief in
God, then, is just that -- a matter of belief, not knowledge.  My respect
for Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the
most virtuous inhabitant of Planet Earth.  But even well-educated Christians
are frustated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure
of Jesus because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record.
Such ambiguity is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every
recognized Bible scholar is perfectly aware of it.  Some Christians, alas,
resort to formal lying to obscure such reality.
- Steve Allen, comdeian, from an essay in the book "The Courage of
  Conviction", edited by Philip Berman
It is inconceivable that a judicious observer from another solar system
would see in our species -- which has tended to be cruel, destructive,
wasteful, and irrational -- the crown and apex of cosmic evolution.
Viewing us as the culmination of *anything* is grotesque; viewing us
as a transitional species makes more sense -- and gives us more hope.
- Betty McCollister, "Our Transitional Species",
  Free Inquiry magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1
In arguing that current theories of brain function cast suspicion on ESP,
psychokinesis, reincarnation, and so on, I am frequently challenged with
the most popular of all neuro-mythologies -- the notion that we ordinarily
use only 10 percent of our brains...

This "cerebral spare tire" concept continues to nourish the clientele of
"pop psychologists" and their many recycling self-improvement schemes.  As
a metaphor for the fact that few of us fully exploit our talents, who could
deny it?  As a refuge for occultists seeking a neural basis of the miraculous,
it leaves much to be desired.
-- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Consciousness:  Implications for
   Psi Phenomena", The Skeptical Enquirer, Vol. XII, No. 2, pg. 171
"Our journeys to the stars will be made on spaceships created by determined,
hardworking scientists and engineers applying the principles of science, not
aboard flying saucers piloted by little gray aliens from some other dimension."
-- Robert A. Baker, "The Aliens Among Us:  Hypnotic Regression Revisited",
   The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 2
"The triumph of libertarian anarchy is nearly (in historical terms) at
hand... *if* we can keep the Left from selling us into slavery and the
Right from blowing us up for, say, the next twenty years."
-- Eric Rayman, usenet guy, about nanotechnology
"Lead us in a few words of silent prayer."
-- Bill Peterson, former Houston Oiler football coach
"Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons
for it afterwards."
-- Soren F. Petersen
The game of life is a game of boomerangs.  Our thoughts, deeds and words
return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.
        "During the race
         We may eat your dust,
         But when you graduate,
         You'll work for us."
        -- Reed College cheer
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it  2) The rest of us
"We Americans, we're a simple people... but piss us off, and we'll bomb
your cities."
-- Robin Williams, _Good Morning Vietnam_
A good USENET motto would be:
a. "Together, a strong community."
b. "Computers R Us."
c. "I'm sick of programming, I think I'll just screw around for a while on
     company time."
-- A Sane Man
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
Now, if the leaders of the world -- people who are leaders by virtue of
political, military or financial power, and not necessarily wisdom or
consideration for mankind -- if these leaders manage not to pull us
over the brink into planetary suicide, despite their occasional pompous
suggestions that they may feel obliged to do so, we may survive beyond
1988.  
-- George Rostky, EE Times, June 20, 1988 p. 45
"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble.  It's the
things we know that ain't so."
-- Artemus Ward aka Charles Farrar Brown
"Let us condemn to hellfire all those who disagree with us."
-- militant religionists everywhere
... The cable had passed us by; the dish was the only hope, and eventually
we were all forced to turn to it.  By the summer of '85, the valley had more
satellite dishes per capita than an Eskimo village on the north slope of
Alaska.

Mine was one of the last to go in.  I had been nervous from the start about
the hazards of too much input, which is a very real problem with these
things.  Watching TV becomes a full-time job when you can scan 200 channels
all day and all night and still have the option of punching Night Dreams
into the video machine, if the rest of the world seems dull.
-- Hunter Thompson, "Full-time scrambling", _Generation of Swine_
Even if we put all these nagging thoughts [four embarrassing questions about
astrology] aside for a moment, one overriding question remains to be asked.
Why would the positions of celestial objects at the moment of birth have an
effect on our characters, lives, or destinies?  What force or influence,
what sort of energy would travel from the planets and stars to all human
beings and affect our development or fate?  No amount of scientific-sounding
jargon or computerized calculations by astrologers can disguise this central
problem with astrology -- we can find no evidence of a mechanism by which
celestial objects can influence us in so specific and personal a way. . . .
Some astrologers argue that there may be a still unknown force that represents
the astrological influence. . . .If so, astrological predictions -- like those
of any scientific field -- should be easily tested. . . . Astrologers always
claim to be just a little too busy to carry out such careful tests of their
efficacy, so in the last two decades scientists and statisticians have
generously done such testing for them.  There have been dozens of well-designed
tests all around the world, and astrology has failed every one of them. . . .
I propose that we let those beckoning lights in the sky awaken our interest
in the real (and fascinating) universe beyond our planet, and not let them
keep us tied to an ancient fantasy left over from a time when we huddled by
the firelight, afraid of the night.
-- Andrew Fraknoi, Executive Officer, Astronomical Society of the Pacific,
    "Why Astrology Believers Should Feel Embarrassed," San Jose Mercury
    News, May 8, 1988
"Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor
of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated,
it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."
                                        - Oscar Wilde
"We cannot put off living until we are ready.  The most salient characteristic
of life is its coerciveness; it is always urgent, "here and now," without any
possible postponement.  Life is fired at us point blank."
-- Ortega y Gasset
   "Are those cocktail-waitress fingernail marks?"  I asked Colletti as he
showed us these scratches on his chest.  "No, those are on my back," Colletti
answered.  "This is where a case of cocktail shrimp fell on me.  I told her
to slow down a little, but you know cocktail waitresses, they seem to have
a mind of their own."
-- The Incredibly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs
   National Lampoon, October 1982
        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
"It says he made us all to be just like him.  So if we're dumb, then god is
dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side."
-- Frank Zappa
"I've seen the forgeries I've sent out."
-- John F. Haugh II (jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US), about forging net news articles
"Just out of curiosity does this actually mean something or have some
of the few remaining bits of your brain just evaporated?"
-- Patricia O Tuama, rissa@killer.DALLAS.TX.US
"The question is rather: if we ever succeed in making a mind 'of nuts and
bolts', how will we know we have succeeded?
-- Fergal Toomey

"It will tell us."
-- Barry Kort
"Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is to a
cockatoo."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"It is the creationists who blasphemously are claiming that God is cheating
us in a stupid way."
-- J. W. Nienhuys
"The simple rights, the civil liberties from generations of struggle must not
be just fine words for patriotic holidays, words we subvert on weekdays, but
living, honored rules of conduct amongst us...I'm glad the American Civil
Liberties Union gets indignant, and I hope this will always be so."
-- Senator Adlai E. Stevenson
A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.
                -- Alexander Hamilton
Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity.  It
eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."
                -- Johnny Hart
Has the great art and mystery of politics no apparent utility? Does it
appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene and low down,
and its salient virtuosi a gang of umitigated scoundrels?  Then let us
not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickel the midriff, its
incomparable services as a maker of entertainment.
                -- H.L. Mencken, "A Carnival of Buncombe"
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have
exhausted all other alternatives.
                -- Abba Eban
I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as
the greatest of dangers to be feared.  To preserve our independence, we must
not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.  If we run into such debts, we
must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts,
in our labor and in our amusements.  If we can prevent the government from
wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they
will be happy.
                -- Thomas Jefferson
I see where we are starting to pay some attention to our neigbors to
the south.  We could never understand why Mexico wasn't just crazy about
us; for we have always had their good will, and oil and minerals, at heart.
                -- The Best of Will Rogers
If God had meant for us to be in the Army, we would have been born with
green, baggy skin.
If God wanted us to have a President, He would have sent us a candidate.
                -- Jerry Dreshfield
Interesting poll results reported in today's New York Post: people on the
street in midtown Manhattan were asked whether they approved of the US
invasion of Grenada.  Fifty-three percent said yes; 39 percent said no;
and 8 percent said "Gimme a quarter?"
                -- David Letterman
Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.
                -- John F. Kennedy
Mr. Salter's side of the conversation was limited to expressions of assent.
When Lord Copper was right he said "Definitely, Lord Copper"; when he was
wrong, "Up to a point."
        "Let me see, what's the name of the place I mean?  Capital of Japan?
Yokohama isn't it?"
        "Up to a point, Lord Copper."
        "And Hong Kong definitely belongs to us, doesn't it?"
        "Definitely, Lord Copper."
                -- Evelyn Waugh, "Scoop"
My own life has been spent chronicling the rise and fall of human systems,
and I am convinced that we are terribly vulnerable.  ...  We should be
reluctant to turn back upon the frontier of this epoch. Space is indifferent
to what we do; it has no feeling, no design, no interest in whether or not
we grapple with it. But we cannot be indifferent to space, because the grand,
slow march of intelligence has brought us, in our generation, to a point
from which we can explore and understand and utilize it. To turn back now
would be to deny our history, our capabilities.
                -- James A. Michener
Our swords shall play the orators for us.
                -- Christopher Marlowe
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.
The Least Successful Executions
        History has furnished us with two executioners worthy of attention.
The first performed in Sydney in Australia.  In 1803 three attempts were
made to hang a Mr. Joseph Samuels.  On the first two of these the rope
snapped, while on the third Mr. Samuels just hung there peacefully until he
and everyone else got bored.  Since he had proved unsusceptible to capital
punishment, he was reprieved.
        The most important British executioner was Mr. James Berry who
tried three times in 1885 to hang Mr. John Lee at Exeter Jail, but on each
occasion failed to get the trap door open.
        In recognition of this achievement, the Home Secretary commuted
Lee's sentence to "life" imprisonment.  He was released in 1917, emigrated
to America and lived until 1933.
                -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
"The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as
we could with both of them."
                -- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment.
To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.
                -- Buckminster Fuller
The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday
they might force their beliefs on us.
                -- Mario Cuomo
The Worst Prison Guards
        The largest number of convicts ever to escape simultaneously from a
maximum security prison is 124.  This record is held by Alcoente Prison,
near Lisbon in Portugal.
        During the weeks leading up to the escape in July 1978 the prison
warders had noticed that attendances had fallen at film shows which
included "The Great Escape", and also that 220 knives and a huge quantity
of electric cable had disappeared.  A guard explained, "Yes, we were
planning to look for them, but never got around to it."  The warders had
not, however, noticed the gaping holes in the wall because they were
"covered with posters".  Nor did they detect any of the spades, chisels,
water hoses and electric drills amassed by the inmates in large quantities.
The night before the breakout one guard had noticed that of the 36
prisoners in his block only 13 were present.  He said this was "normal"
because inmates sometimes missed roll-call or hid, but usually came back
the next morning.
        "We only found out about the escape at 6:30 the next morning when
one of the prisoners told us," a warder said later.  [...]  When they
eventually checked, the prison guards found that exactly half of the gaol's
population was missing.  By way of explanation the Justice Minister, Dr.
Santos Pais, claimed that the escape was "normal" and part of the
"legitimate desire of the prisoner to regain his liberty."
                -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
There is Jackson standing like a stone wall.  Let us determine to die,
and we will conquer.  Follow me.
                -- General Barnard E. Bee (CSA)
        Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of
legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does.
        As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about it.  I
am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily sane.  But we
will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his exterior
a sort of Dorian Gray facade.  Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by tinhorn
politicians.
        The disease is fatal.  There is no known cure.  The most we can do
for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor.
From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily
led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to
bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson's disease.  I don't
have it this morning.  It comes and goes.  This morning I don't have Hunter
Thompson's disease.
                -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: Excerpt
                from "A Political Disease", Vonnegut's review of "Fear and
                Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72"
To make tax forms true they should read "Income Owed Us" and "Incommode You".
We are all born equal... just some of us are more equal than others.
We should be glad we're living in the time that we are.  If any of us had been
born into a more enlightened age, I'm sure we would have immediately been taken
out and shot.
                -- Strange de Jim
What does it take for Americans to do great things; to go to the moon, to
win wars, to dig canals linking oceans, to build railroads across a continent?
In independent thought about this question, Neil Armstrong and I concluded
that it takes a coincidence of four conditions, or in Neil's view, the
simultaneous peaking of four of the many cycles of American life.  First, a
base of technology must exist from which to do the thing to be done.  Second,
a period of national uneasiness about America's place in the scheme of human
activities must exist.  Third, some catalytic event must occur that focuses
the national attention upon the direction to proceed.  Finally, an articulate
and wise leader must sense these first three conditions and put forth with
words and action the great thing to be accomplished.  The motivation of young
Americans to do what needs to be done flows from such a coincidence of
conditions. ...  The Thomas Jeffersons, The Teddy Roosevelts, The John
Kennedys appear.  We must begin to create the tools of leadership which they,
and their young frontiersmen, will require to lead us onward and upward.
                -- Dr. Harrison H. Schmidt
"What George Washington did for us was to throw out the British, so that we
wouldn't have a fat, insensitive government running our country. Nice try
anyway, George."
                -- D.J. on KSFO/KYA
        Will Rogers, having paid too much income tax one year, tried in
vain to claim a rebate.  His numerous letters and queries remained
unanswered.  Eventually the form for the next year's return arrived.  In
the section marked "DEDUCTIONS," Rogers listed: "Bad debt, US Government
-- $40,000."
Adler's Distinction:
        Language is all that separates us from the lower animals,
        and from the bureaucrats.
curtation, n.:
        The enforced compression of a string in the fixed-length field
environment.
        The problem of fitting extremely variable-length strings such as names,
addresses, and item descriptions into fixed-length records is no trivial
matter.  Neglect of the subtle art of curtation has probably alienated more
people than any other aspect of data processing.  You order Mozart's "Don
Giovanni" from your record club, and they invoice you $24.95 for MOZ DONG.
The witless mapping of the sublime onto the ridiculous!  Equally puzzling is
the curtation that produces the same eight characters, THE BEST, whether you
order "The Best of Wagner", "The Best of Schubert", or "The Best of the Turds".
Similarly, wine lovers buying from computerized wineries twirl their glasses,
check their delivery notes, and inform their friends, "A rather innocent,
possibly overtruncated CAB SAUV 69 TAL."  The squeezing of fruit into 10
columns has yielded such memorable obscenities as COX OR PIP.  The examples
cited are real, and the curtational methodology which produced them is still
with us.

MOZ DONG n.
        Curtation of Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da
Ponte, as performed by the computerized billing ensemble of the Internat'l
Preview Society, Great Neck (sic), N.Y.
                -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary"
Emerson's Law of Contrariness:
        Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we
        can.  Having found them, we shall then hate them for it.
Famous last words:
        (1) Don't unplug it, it will just take a moment to fix.
        (2) Let's take the shortcut, he can't see us from there.
        (3) What happens if you touch these two wires tog--
        (4) We won't need reservations.
        (5) It's always sunny there this time of the year.
        (6) Don't worry, it's not loaded.
        (7) They'd never (be stupid enough to) make him a manager.
        (8) Don't worry!  Women love it!
IBM:
        [International Business Machines Corp.]  Also known as Itty Bitty
        Machines or The Lawyer's Friend.  The dominant force in computer
        marketing, having supplied worldwide some 75% of all known hardware
        and 10% of all software.  To protect itself from the litigious envy
        of less successful organizations, such as the US government, IBM
        employs 68% of all known ex-Attorneys' General.
Infancy, n.:
        The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, "Heaven lies
        about us."  The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
                -- Ambrose Bierce
Katz' Law:
        Men and nations will act rationally when
        all other possibilities have been exhausted.

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have
exhausted all other alternatives.
                -- Abba Eban
QOTD:
        I looked out my window, and saw Kyle Pettys' car upside down,
        then I thought 'One of us is in real trouble'.
                -- Davey Allison, on a 150 m.p.h. crash
Rules for Writers:
        Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.  Don't use no double
negatives.  Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate;
and never where it isn't.  Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and
omit it when its not needed.  No sentence fragments. Avoid commas, that are
unnecessary.  Eschew dialect, irregardless.  And don't start a sentence with
a conjunction.  Hyphenate between sy-llables and avoid un-necessary hyphens.
Write all adverbial forms correct.  Don't use contractions in formal writing.
Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.  It is incumbent on
us to avoid archaisms.  Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have
snuck in the language.  Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.  If I've
told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.  Also,
avoid awkward or affected alliteration.  Don't string too many prepositional
phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of
death.  "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'"
Stult's Report:
        Our problems are mostly behind us.  What we have to do now is
        fight the solutions.
Personality Tithe:
        A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing
human beings become boring: "Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I
are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight.  Afterward we're going
to watch the shopping channel."
                -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
                   Culture"
A furore Normanorum libera nos, O Domine!
        [From the fury of the norsemen deliver us, O Lord!]
                -- Medieval prayer
It is better never to have been born.  But who among us has such luck?
One in a million, perhaps.
Please remain calm, it's no use both of us being hysterical at the same time.
The rose of yore is but a name, mere names are left to us.
Not all men who drink are poets.  Some of us drink because we aren't poets.
        Split                1/4 bottle        .187 liters
        Half                1/2 bottle
        Bottle                750 milliliters
        Magnum                2 bottles        1.5 liters
        Jeroboam        4 bottles
        Rehoboam        6 bottles        Not available in the US
        Methuselah        8 bottles
        Salmanazar        12 bottles
        Balthazar        16 bottles
        Nebuchadnezzar        20 bottles        15 liters
        Sovereign        34 bottles        26 liters

        The Sovereign is a new bottle, made for the launching of the
largest cruise ship in the world.  The bottle alone cost 8,000 dollars
to produce and they only made 8 of them.
        Most of the funny names come from Biblical people.
A mother mouse was taking her large brood for a stroll across the kitchen
floor one day when the local cat, by a feat of stealth unusual even for
its species, managed to trap them in a corner.  The children cowered,
terrified by this fearsome beast, plaintively crying, "Help, Mother!
Save us!  Save us!  We're scared, Mother!"
        Mother Mouse, with the hopeless valor of a parent protecting its
children, turned with her teeth bared to the cat, towering huge above them,
and suddenly began to bark in a fashion that would have done any Doberman
proud.  The startled cat fled in fear for its life.
        As her grateful offspring flocked around her shouting "Oh, Mother,
you saved us!" and "Yay!  You scared the cat away!" she turned to them
purposefully and declared, "You see how useful it is to know a second
language?"
... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand.  Human
intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as
we can tell.  If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues
that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding
of their world, not in their distorted perceptions.  Even the standard
example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads --
makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing
whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a
finite or an infinite number.
                -- S. J. Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds"
The only thing that experience teaches us is that experience teaches us nothing.
                -- Andre Maurois (Emile Herzog)
A Hen Brooding Kittens
        A friend informs us that he saw at the Novato ranch, Marin county,
a few days since, a hen actually brooding and otherwise caring for three
kittens!  The gentleman upon whose premises this strange event is transpiring
says the hen adopted the kittens when they were but a few days old, and that
she has devoted them her undivided care for several weeks past.  The young
felines are now of respectable size, but they nevertheless follow the hen at
her cluckings, and are regularly brooded at night beneath her wings.
                -- Sacramento Daily Union, July 2, 1861
Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism
in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with
the ignorance of the community.
                -- Oscar Wilde
Inglish Spocken Hier: some mangled translations

        Sign on a cabin door of a Soviet Black Sea cruise liner:
                Helpsavering apparata in emergings behold many whistles!
                Associate the stringing apparata about the bosums and meet
                behind, flee then to the indifferent lifesaveringshippen
                obedicing the instructs of the vessel.

        On the door in a Belgrade hotel:
                Let us know about any unficiency as well as leaking on
                the service. Our utmost will improve it.

                -- Colin Bowles
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
Air pollution is really making us pay through the nose.
Everyone knows that dragons don't exist.  But while this simplistic
formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific
mind.  The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned
with what ____does exist.  Indeed, the banality of existence has been
so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further
here.  The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically,
discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical,
and the purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent,
but each nonexisted in an entirely different way ...
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical
lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach your
hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings.  Did you
notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in pain?  This
teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never
use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical lesson.
        It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works.  When you scuffed
your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects
that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will attract dirt.
The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger,
where they form a spark that leaps to your friend's filling, then travels
down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
        Amazing Electronic Fact: If you scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger
would explode!  But this is nothing to worry about unless you have
carpeting.
                -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres
and planets.  Build a ring 93 million miles in radius -- one Earth orbit
-- around the sun.  If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if
we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand
feet for the base.

And it has advantages.  The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson
sphere.  We can spin it on its axis for gravity.  A rotation speed of 770
m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal.  We wouldn't even need to
roof it over.  Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the
sun.  Very little air will leak over the edges.

Lord knows the thing is roomy enough.  With three million times the surface
area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the
crowding.
                -- Larry Niven, "Ringworld"
"It could be that Walter's horse has wings" does not imply that there is
any such animal as Walter's horse, only that there could be; but "Walter's
horse is a thing which could have wings" does imply Walter's horse's
existence.  But the conjunction "Walter's horse exists, and it could be
that Walter's horse has wings" still does not imply "Walter's horse is a
thing that could have wings", for perhaps it can only be that Walter's
horse has wings by Walter having a different horse.  Nor does "Walter's
horse is a thing which could have wings" conversely imply "It could be that
Walter's horse has wings"; for it might be that Walter's horse could only
have wings by not being Walter's horse.

I would deny, though, that the formula [Necessarily if some x has property P
then some x has property P] expresses a logical law, since P(x) could stand
for, let us say "x is a better logician than I am", and the statement "It is
necessary that if someone is a better logician than I am then someone is a
better logician than I am" is false because there need not have been any me.
                -- A.N. Prior, "Time and Modality"
More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads.  One path
leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.
Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
                -- Woody Allen, "Side Effects"
Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.
She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep.
                -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Once upon a time, when I was training to be a mathematician, a group of
us bright young students taking number theory discovered the names of the
smaller prime numbers.

2:  The Odd Prime --
        It's the only even prime, therefore is odd.  QED.
3:  The True Prime --
        Lewis Carroll: "If I tell you 3 times, it's true."
31: The Arbitrary Prime --
        Determined by unanimous unvote.  We needed an arbitrary prime in
        case the prof asked for one, and so had an election.  91 received
        the most votes (well, it *looks* prime) and 3+4i the next most.
        However, 31 was the only candidate to receive none at all.
41: The Female Prime --
        The polynomial X**2 - X + 41 is
        prime for integer values from 1 to 40.
43: The Male Prime - they form a prime pair.

Since the composite numbers are formed from primes, their qualities
are derived from those primes.  So, for instance, the number 6 is "odd
but true", while the powers of 2 are all extremely odd numbers.
"Picture the sun as the origin of two intersecting 6-dimensional
hyperplanes from which we can deduce a certain transformational
sequence which gives us the terminal velocity of a rubber duck ..."
        "Reintegration complete," ZORAC advised.  "We're back in the
universe again..."  An unusually long pause followed, "...but I don't
know which part.  We seem to have changed our position in space."  A
spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the
starfield surrounding the ship.
        "Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us,"
ZORAC announced after a short pause.  "The designs are not familiar, but
they are obviously the products of intelligence.  Implications: we have
been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown,
and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown.
Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious."
                -- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star"
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means
for going backwards.
                -- Aldous Huxley
The ark lands after The Flood.  Noah lets all the animals out.  Says he, "Go
and multiply."  Several months pass.  Noah decides to check up on the animals.
All are doing fine except a pair of snakes.  "What's the problem?" says Noah.
"Cut down some trees and let us live there", say the snakes.  Noah follows
their advice.  Several more weeks pass.  Noah checks on the snakes again.
Lots of little snakes, everybody is happy.  Noah asks, "Want to tell me how
the trees helped?"  "Certainly", say the snakes. "We're adders, and we need
logs to multiply."
The best rebuttal to this kind of statistical argument came from the
redoubtable John W. Campbell:

        The laws of population growth tell us that approximately half the
        people who were ever born in the history of the world are now
        dead.  There is therefore a 0.5 probability that this message is
        being read by a corpse.
The meek shall inherit the earth; the rest of us will go to the stars.
The meek shall inherit the earth; the rest of us, the Universe.
There is no choice before us. Either we must Succeed in providing the
rational coordination of impulses and guts, or for centuries civilization
will sink into a mere welter of minor excitements. We must provide a
Great Age or see the collapse of the upward striving of the human race.
                -- Alfred North Whitehead
This place just isn't big enough for all of us.  We've got to find a way
off this planet.
To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic contrivances
may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.
                -- Joseph Glanvill, 1661
Two men are in a hot-air balloon.  Soon, they find themselves lost in a
canyon somewhere.  One of the three men says, "I've got an idea.  We can
call for help in this canyon and the echo will carry our voices to the
end of the canyon.  Someone's bound to hear us by then!"
        So he leans over the basket and screams out, "Helllloooooo!  Where
are we?"  (They hear the echo several times).
        Fifteen minutes later, they hear this echoing voice: "Helllloooooo!
You're lost!"
        The shouter comments, "That must have been a mathematician."
        Puzzled, his friend asks, "Why do you say that?"
        "For three reasons.  First, he took a long time to answer, second,
he was absolutely correct, and, third, his answer was absolutely useless."
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy.  The question which divides us is
whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.  My own feeling
is that it is not crazy enough.
                -- Niels Bohr
... we must counterpose the overwhelming judgment provided by consistent
observations and inferences by the thousands.  The earth is billions of
years old and its living creatures are linked by ties of evolutionary
descent.  Scientists stand accused of promoting dogma by so stating, but
do we brand people illiberal when they proclaim that the earth is neither
flat nor at the center of the universe?  Science *has* taught us some
things with confidence!  Evolution on an ancient earth is as well
established as our planet's shape and position.  Our continuing struggle
to understand how evolution happens (the "theory of evolution") does not
cast our documentation of its occurrence -- the "fact of evolution" --
into doubt.
                -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism",
                   The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2.
Life is like a tin of sardines.  We're, all of us, looking for the key.
                -- Beyond the Fringe
The cow is nothing but a machine which makes grass fit for us people to eat.
                -- John McNulty
Angels we have heard on High
Tell us to go out and Buy.
                -- Tom Lehrer
But scientists, who ought to know
Assure us that it must be so.
Oh, let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about.
                -- Hilaire Belloc
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain
For promised joy.
        -- Robert Burns, "To a Mouse", 1785
Christmas time is here, by Golly;        Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens;
Disapproval would be folly;                Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens;
Deck the halls with hunks of holly;        Even though the prospect sickens,
Fill the cup and don't say when...        Brother, here we go again.

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

It doesn't matter how sincere                Hark The Herald-Tribune sings,
It is, nor how heartfelt the spirit;        Advertising wondrous things.
Sentiment will not endear it;                God Rest Ye Merry Merchants,
What's important is... the price.        May you make the Yuletide pay.
                                        Angels We Have Heard On High,
Let the raucous sleighbells jingle;        Tell us to go out and buy.
Hail our dear old friend, Kris Kringle,        Sooooo...
Driving his reindeer across the sky,
Don't stand underneath when they fly by!
                -- Tom Lehrer
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to _n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
Come, muse, let us sing of rats!
                -- From a poem by James Grainger, 1721-1767
        Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
        Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
        Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
        Swaller dollar cauliflower, alleygaroo!

        Don't we know archaic barrel,
        Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou.
        Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
        Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!
                -- Pogo, "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie" [Walt Kelly]
Ever Onward!  Ever Onward!
That's the sprit that has brought us fame.
We're big but bigger we will be,
We can't fail for all can see, that to serve humanity
Has been our aim.
Our products now are known in every zone.
Our reputation sparkles like a gem.
We've fought our way thru
And new fields we're sure to conquer, too
For the Ever Onward IBM!
                -- Ever Onward, from the 1940 IBM Songbook
Farewell we call to hearth and hall!
Though wind may blow and rain may fall,
We must away ere break of day
Far over wood and mountain tall.

        To Rivendell, where Elves yet dwell
        In glades beneath the misty fell,
        Through moor and waste we ride in haste,
        And whither then we cannot tell.

With foes ahead, behind us dread,
Beneath the sky shall be our bed,
Until at last our toil be passed,
Our journey done, our errand sped.

        We must away!  We must away!
        We ride before the break of day!
                -- J. R. R. Tolkien
Gibson's Springtime Song (to the tune of "Deck the Halls"):

'Tis the season to chase mousies (Fa la la la la, la la la la)
Snatch them from their little housies (...)
First we chase them 'round the field (...)
Then we have them for a meal (...)

Toss them here and catch them there (...)
See them flying through the air (...)
Watch them fly and hear them squeal (...)
Falling mice have great appeal (...)

See the hunter stretched before us (...)
He's chased the mice in field and forest (...)
Watch him clean his long white whiskers (...)
Of the blood of little critters (...)
"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,                But ranged as infantry,
We should have sat us down to wet        And staring face to face,
Right many a nipperkin!                        I shot at him as he at me,
                                        And killed him in his place.
I shot him dead because --
Because he was my foe,                        He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Just so: my foe of course he was;        Off-hand-like -- just as I --
That's clear enough; although                Was out of work -- had sold his traps
                                        No other reason why.
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is
Or help to half-a-crown."
                -- Thomas Hardy
Hark, the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things.

Angels we have heard on High
Tell us to go out and Buy.
                -- Tom Lehrer
Hey! Come derry dol!  Hop along, my hearties!
Hobbits!  Ponies all!  We are fond of parties.
Now let the fun begin!  Let us sing together!
                -- J. R. R. Tolkien
Ho! Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo!
By water, wood and hill, by reed and willow,
By fire, sun and moon, harken now and hear us!
Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us!
                -- J. R. R. Tolkien
Let us go then you and I
while the night is laid out against the sky
like a smear of mustard on an old pork pie.

"Nice poem Tom.  I have ideas for changes though, why not come over?"
        -- Ezra
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
                -- T.S. Eliot, "Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Let us treat men and women well;
Treat them as if they were real;
Perhaps they are.
                -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is like a tin of sardines.
We're, all of us, looking for the key.
                -- Beyond the Fringe
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has bought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
                -- James Weldon Johnson
Love, which is quickly kindled in a gentle heart,
        seized this one for the fair form
        that was taken from me-and the way of it afficts me still.
Love, which absolves no loved one from loving,
        seized me so strongly with delight in him,
        that, as you see, it does not leave me even now.
Love brought us to one death.
                -- La Divina Commedia: Inferno V, vv. 100-06
No one likes us.
I don't know why.
We may not be perfect,                        We give them money,
But heaven knows we try.                But are they grateful?
But all around,                                No, they're spiteful,
Even our old friends put us down.        And they're hateful.
Let's drop the big one,                        They don't respect us,
And see what happens.                        So let's surprise them
                                        We'll drop the big one,
                                        And pulverize 'em.
Asia's crowded,
Europe's too old,
Africa is far too hot,                        We'll save Australia.
And Canada's too cold.                        Don't wanna hurt no kangaroos.
And South America stole our name        We'll build an All-American amusement
Let's drop the big one,                                park there--
There'll be no one left to blame us.        They got surfin', too!

Boom! goes London,
And Boom! Paree.
More room for you,                        Oh, how peaceful it'll be!
And more room for me,                        We'll set everybody free!
And every city,                                You'll wear a Japanese kimono, babe;
The whole world round,                        There'll be Italian shoes for me!
Will just be another American town.        They all hate us anyhow,
                                        So, let's drop the big one now.
                                        Let's drop the big one now!
                -- Randy Newman, "Drop the Big One"
Now let the song begin!  Let us sing together
Of sun, star, moon and mist, rain and cloudy weather,
Light on the budding leag, dew on the feather,
Wind on the open hill, bells on the heather,
Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water:
Old Tom Bombadil and the River-daughter!
                -- J. R. R. Tolkien
Oh give me your pity!
I'm on a committee,                        We attend and amend
Which means that from morning                And contend and defend
        to night,                        Without a conclusion in sight.

We confer and concur,
We defer and demur,                        We revise the agenda
And reiterate all of our thoughts.        With frequent addenda
                                        And consider a load of reports.

We compose and propose,
We suppose and oppose,                        But though various notions
And the points of procedure are fun;        Are brought up as motions,
                                        There's terribly little gets done.

We resolve and absolve;
But we never dissolve,
Since it's out of the question for us
To bring our committee
To end like this ditty,
Which stops with a period, thus.
                -- Leslie Lipson, "The Committee"
"Oh, 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments such prosperi-ty?"
"Oh, didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

"You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!"
"Yes: That's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

"At home in the barton you said `thee' and `thou,'
And `thik oon' and `theas oon' and `t'other;' but now
Your talking quite fits 'ee for compa-ny!"
"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

"Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit like as on any la-dy!"
"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

"You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!"
"True.  One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

"I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!"
"My dear--a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that.  You ain't ruined," said she.
                --Thomas Hardy
Please stand for the National Anthem:

        Australians all, let us rejoice,
        For we are young and free.
        We've golden soil and wealth for toil
        Our home is girt by sea.
        Our land abounds in nature's gifts
        Of beauty rich and rare.
        In history's page, let every stage
        Advance Australia Fair.
        In joyful strains then let us sing,
        Advance Australia Fair.

Thank you.  You may resume your seat.
Please stand for the National Anthem:

        God save our Gracious Queen!
        Long live our Noble Queen!
        God save the Queen!
        Send her victorious,
        Happy and glorious,
        Long to reign o'er us!
        God save the Queen!

Thank you.  You may resume your seat.
Say many of cameras focused t'us,
Our middle-aged shots do us justice.
No justice, please, curse ye!
We really want mercy:
You see, 'tis the justice, disgusts us.
                -- Thomas H. Hildebrandt
Snow-white!  Snow-white!  O Lady clear!
O Queen beyond the Western Sea!
O Light to us that wander here
Amid the world of woven trees!

        Gilthoniel!  O Elbereth!
        Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath!
        Snow-white!  Snow-white!  We sing to thee
        In a far land beyond the Sea.

O stars that in the Sunless Year
With shining hand by her were sown,
In windy fields now bright and clear
We see you silver blossom blown!

        O Elbereth!  Gilthoniel!
        We still remember, we who dwell
        In this far land beneath the trees,
        Thy starlight on the Western Seas.
                -- J. R. R. Tolkien
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"
Tell me, O Octopus, I begs,
Is those things arms, or is they legs?
I marvel at thee, Octopus;
If I were thou, I'd call me us.
                -- Ogden Nash
The difference between us is not very far,
cruising for burgers in daddy's new car.
The Pig, if I am not mistaken,
Gives us ham and pork and Bacon.
Let others think his heart is big,
I think it stupid of the Pig.
                -- Ogden Nash
                The Worst Lines of Verse
For a start, we can rule out James Grainger's promising line:
        "Come, muse, let us sing of rats."
Grainger (1721-67) did not have the courage of his convictions and deleted
these words on discovering that his listeners dissolved into spontaneous
laughter the instant they were read out.
        No such reluctance afflicted Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-70) who was
inspired by the subject of war.
        "Flash! flash! bang! bang! and we blazed away,
        And the grey roof reddened and rang;
        Flash! flash! and I felt his bullet flay
        The tip of my ear.  Flash! bang!"
By contrast, Cheshire cheese provoked John Armstrong (1709-79):
        "... that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste of solid milk..."
While John Bidlake was guided by a compassion for vegetables:
        "The sluggard carrot sleeps his day in bed,
        The crippled pea alone that cannot stand."
George Crabbe (1754-1832) wrote:
        "And I was ask'd and authorized to go
        To seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co."
William Balmford explored the possibilities of religious verse:
        "So 'tis with Christians, Nature being weak
        While in this world, are liable to leak."
And William Wordsworth showed that he could do it if he really tried when
describing a pond:
        "I've measured it from side to side;
        Tis three feet long and two feet wide."
                -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
Wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us.
                -- R. Burns
we will invent new lullabies, new songs, new acts of love,
we will cry over things we used to laugh &
our new wisdom will bring tears to eyes of gentle
creatures from other planets who were afraid of us till then &
in the end a summer with wild winds &
new friends will be.
We've tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.

The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
All hands!  Standby!  Free falling!
And the lights below us fade.
Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps the race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet--

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
                -- Robert A. Heinlein, 1941
Well, we're big rock singers, we've got golden fingers,
And we're loved everywhere we go.
We sing about beauty, and we sing about truth,
At ten thousand dollars a show.
We take all kind of pills to give us all kind of thrills,
But the thrill we've never known,
Is the thrill that'll get'cha, when you get your picture,
On the cover of the Rolling Stone.

I got a freaky old lady, name of Cole King Katie,
Who embroiders on my jeans.
I got my poor old gray-haired daddy,
Drivin' my limousine.
Now it's all designed, to blow our minds,
But our minds won't be really be blown;
Like the blow that'll get'cha, when you get your picture,
On the cover of the Rolling Stone.

We got a lot of little, teen-aged, blue-eyed groupies,
Who'll do anything we say.
We got a genuine Indian guru, that's teachin' us a better way.
We got all the friends that money can buy,
So we never have to be alone.
And we keep gettin' richer, but we can't get our picture,
On the cover of the Rolling Stone.
                -- Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show
                [As a note, they eventually DID make the cover of RS. Ed.]
What we Are is God's gift to us.
What we Become is our gift to God.
When someone makes a move                We'll send them all we've got,
Of which we don't approve,                John Wayne and Randolph Scott,
Who is it that always intervenes?        Remember those exciting fighting scenes?
U.N. and O.A.S.,                        To the shores of Tripoli,
They have their place, I guess,                But not to Mississippoli,
But first, send the Marines!                What do we do?  We send the Marines!

For might makes right,                        Members of the corps
And till they've seen the light,        All hate the thought of war:
They've got to be protected,                They'd rather kill them off by
                                                peaceful means.
All their rights respected,                Stop calling it aggression--
Till somebody we like can be elected.        We hate that expression!
                                        We only want the world to know
                                        That we support the status quo;
                                        They love us everywhere we go,
                                        So when in doubt, send the Marines!
                -- Tom Lehrer, "Send The Marines"
Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
        We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
        Clean-favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
        And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
        "Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich -- yes, richer than a king --
        And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
        To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
        And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
        Went home and put a bullet through his head.
                -- E.A. Robinson, "Richard Cory"
"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.
Brandy Davis, an outfielder and teammate of mine with the Pittsburgh Pirates,
is my choice for team captain.  Cincinnatti was beating us 3-1, and I led
off the bottom of the eighth with a walk.  The next hitter banged a hard
single to right field.  Feeling the wind at my back, I rounded second and
kept going, sliding safely into third base.
        With runners at first and third, and home-run hitter Ralph Kiner at
bat, our manager put in the fast Brandy Davis to run for the player at first.
Even with Kiner hitting and a change to win the game with a home run, Brandy
took off for second and made it.  Now we had runners at second and third.
        I'm standing at third, knowing I'm not going anywhere, and see Brandy
start to take a lead.  All of a sudden, here he comes.  He makes a great slide
into third, and I scream, "Brandy, where are you going?"  He looks up, and
shouts, "Back to second if I can make it."
                -- Joe Garagiola, "It's Anybody's Ball Game"
Harry is heavily into camping, and every year in the late fall, he makes us
all go to Assateague, which is an island on the Atlantic Ocean famous for
its wild horses.  I realize that the concept of wild horses probably stirs
romantic notions in many of you, but this is because you have never met any
wild horses in person.  In person, they are like enormous hooved rats.  They
amble up to your camp site, and their attitude is: "We're wild horses.
We're going to eat your food, knock down your tent and poop on your shoes.
We're protected by federal law, just like Richard Nixon."
                -- Dave Barry, "Tenting Grandpa Bob"
Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game.  You want us
to pay income taxes, too?
                -- Bill Veeck, Chicago White Sox
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"
The Fastest Defeat In Chess
        The big name for us in the world of chess is Gibaud, a French chess
master.  
        In Paris during 1924 he was beaten after only four moves by a
Monsieur Lazard.  Happily for posterity, the moves are recorded and so
chess enthusiasts may reconstruct this magnificent collapse in the comfort
of their own homes.
        Lazard was black and Gibaud white:
        1: P-Q4, Kt-KB3
        2: Kt-Q2, P-K4
        3: PxP, Kt-Kt5
        4: P-K6, Kt-K6
        White then resigns on realizing that a fifth move would involve
either a Q-KR5 check or the loss of his queen.
                -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
We was playin' the Homestead Grays in the city of Pitchburgh.  Josh [Gibson]
comes up in the last of the ninth with a man on and us a run behind.  Well,
he hit one.  The Grays waited around and waited around, but finally the
empire rules it ain't comin' down.  So we win.  The next day, we was disputin'
the Grays in Philadelphia when here come a ball outta the sky right in the
glove of the Grays' center fielder.  The empire made the only possible call.
"You're out, boy!" he says to Josh.  "Yesterday, in Pitchburgh."
                -- Satchel Paige
Either one of us, by himself, is expendable.  Both of us are not.
                -- Kirk, "The Devil in the Dark", stardate 3196.1
I am pleased to see that we have differences.  May we together become
greater than the sum of both of us.
                -- Surak of Vulcan, "The Savage Curtain", stardate 5906.4
Landru! Guide us!
                -- A Beta 3-oid, "The Return of the Archons", stardate 3157.4
The games have always strengthened us.  Death becomes a familiar
pattern.  We don't fear it as you do.
                -- Proconsul Marcus Claudius, "Bread and Circuses",
                   stardate 4041.2
        "The release of emotion is what keeps us health.  Emotionally healthy."
        "That may be, Doctor.  However, I have noted that the healthy release
of emotion is frequently unhealthy for those closest to you."
                -- McCoy and Spock, "Plato's Stepchildren", stardate 5784.3
We do not colonize.  We conquer.  We rule.  There is no other way for us.
                -- Rojan, "By Any Other Name", stardate 4657.5
"`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.
"And finally, " said Max, quieting the audience down and
putting on his solemn face, "finally I believe we have with
us here tonight, a party of believers, very devout
believers, from the Church of the Second Coming of the
Great Prophet Zarquon. " ... "There they are, " said Max,
"sitting there, patiently. He said he'd come again, and
he's kept you waiting a long time, so let's hope he's
hurrying fellas, because he's only got eight minutes left! "
High Priest:        Armaments Chapter One, verses nine through twenty-seven:
Bro. Maynard:        And Saint Attila raised the Holy Hand Grenade up on high
        saying, "Oh Lord, Bless us this Holy Hand Grenade, and with it
        smash our enemies to tiny bits."  And the Lord did grin, and the
        people did feast upon the lambs, and stoats, and orangutans, and
        breakfast cereals, and lima bean-
High Priest:        Skip a bit, brother.
Bro. Maynard:        And then the Lord spake, saying: "First, shalt thou take
        out the holy pin.  Then shalt thou count to three.  No more, no less.
        *Three* shall be the number of the counting, and the number of the
        counting shall be three.  *Four* shalt thou not count, and neither
        count thou two, excepting that thou then goest on to three.  Five is
        RIGHT OUT.  Once the number three, being the third number be reached,
        then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade towards thy foe, who, being
        naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.  Amen.
All:        Amen.
                -- Monty Python, "The Holy Hand Grenade"
If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would
have made them cute and furry.
                -- Dave Barry
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
                -- Walt Kelly
"But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now."

  -- Bruce Perens, on the future of Open Source software. (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)
The Microsoft Motto: "We're the leaders, wait for us!"
All of you people should be ashamed of yourselves! MicroSoft is the reason
there are so many people in my IS department, and the reason half of us have
jobs. If Sun had won, we could probably get by with two people sleeping like
the Maytag man. But because of MS, there are eight people gainfully employed as
highly paid contracters, looking busy, feeding their kids. And the way it
looks, I stand to be employed and wealthy for a long, long time.

   -- From Slashdot.org
US Navy uses NT. Saddam, Gadafi, it's party time!

   -- Havlik Denis
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
Increased Electricity Consumption Blamed on Linux

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The US Department of Energy claims Linux is partially
responsible for the increased demand for electricity during the past year.
Electricity use was up 2.5% from January to September of 1998 compared with
the same period in 1997.  "While some of the increase can be attributed to
higher temperatures over the summer," one Department bureaucrat explained,
"Linux is certainly a contributor to the increased demand for power."  

When asked for clarification, the bureaucrat responded, "In the past, most
PCs have been turned off when not in use.  Linux users, on the other hand,
usually don't turn off their computers.  They leave them on, hoping to
increase their uptime to impress their friends.  And since Linux rarely
crashes the entire system, those computers stay on for weeks, months, even
years at a time.  With Linux use continuing to grow, we expect demand for
electricity to increase steadily over the next several years."

In response to the news, several utility companies have announced plans to
give away free Linux CDs to paying customers who request them.  One anonymous
executive said, "The more people who use Linux, the more power they consume.
The more electricity they use, the more money we make. It's a win-win
combination."  Yesterday Linus Torvalds was nominated as a candidate for the
Assocation of American Utility Companies Person of the Year.
Operation Desert Slash

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- High officials in the US military are planning on putting
the  'Slashdot Effect' to use against Iraq. Pentagon computer experts think
that the Slashdot Effect could topple key Net-connected Iraqi computer
systems.  Such a Denial of Service attack could prove instrumental when the
US invades.

One Pentagon official said, "If I had a million dollars for every server that
crashed as a result of being linked on Slashdot, I'd be richer than Bill
Gates.  The Slashdot Effect is a very powerful weapon that the US military
wants to tap into."

Rob Malda has been contacted by top military brass.  According to anonymous
sources, Malda will play a key part in the so-called "Operation Desert
Slash".  Supposedly Malda will post several Slashdot articles with links to
critical Iraqi websites right when the US invasion is set to begin.
Meanwhile, Pentagon operatives will begin a series of Denial of Service
attacks on other key Iraqi computer systems. One source notes, "Since many
Iraqi systems rely on Microsoft software, this task should be relatively
simple."
Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #1

Linux-of-the-Month Club
Price: US$60 for a one year membership
Producer: CheapNybbles; 1-800-LINUX-CD

It's the gift that keeps on giving.  Every month a CD-ROM with a different
Linux distribution or BSD Unix flavor will be sent in the mail.  This is the
perfect gift for those that have been using Slackware since day one and
haven't gotten around to trying another distribution.  Or, for those friends
or relatives that still cling to Windows, a Linux-of-the-Month club
membership is the perfect way to say, "Your OS sucks".
Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #3

iTux Penguin Computer
Price: $999.95 for base model
Producer: Orange Computer, Co.; 1-800-GET-ITUX

Based on the Slashdot comments, response to the Apple iMac from the Linux
community was lukewarm at best.  Orange Computer, Co., has picked up where
Apple left behind and produced the iTux computer specifically for Linux users
who want to "Think a lot different".

The self-contained iTux computer system is built in the shape of Tux the
Penguin.  Its 15 inch monitor (17 inch available next year) is located at
Tux's large belly.  The penguin's two feet make up the split ergonomic
keyboard (without those annoying Windows keys, of course).  A 36X CD-ROM
drive fits into Tux's mouth.  Tux's left eye is actually the reboot button
(can be reconfigured for other purposes since it is rarely used) and his
right eye is the power button.  The iTux case opens up from the back,
allowing easy access for screwdriver-wielding nerds into Tux's guts.

The US$995.95 model contains an Alpha CPU and all the usual stuff found in a
Linux-class machine.  More expensive models, to be debuted next year, will
feature dual or quad Alpha CPUs and a larger size.
Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #4

Microsoft Destruction Kit
Price: US$29.95 (more with optional digital camera or shotgun)
Producer: The Fuzzier Image; 1-800-BILL-SUX

Mix an Internet Explorer CD-ROM, a rocket launcher, and a flamethrower. What
do you have?  A whole lot of fun!  The Microsoft Destruction Kit is the best
way to destroy those Microsoft CD-ROMs you no longer need now that you've
discovered Linux.  You can launch the CD (and registration forms, manuals,
retail boxes, license agreements, etc.) and pepper it with bullets, all while
capturing the event with a digital camera. Or, you can use the included
miniature flamethrower to burn the evil CD to a crisp.  The kit comes with a
set of IE 4.0 CDs to get you started.  Tell Microsoft "where *you* want
it to go today" in style with the Microsoft Destruction Kit.
Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #6

Hearing Un-aid
US$129.95 at The Fuzzier Projection Co.

It's a scene we can all identify with: you're at a boring company meeting,
trying to read the latest Slashdot headlines on your PalmPilot, but you can't
concentrate because the PHB is rambling in a loud, booming voice about
e-infomediary-substrategic-paradigms and
meta-content-aggregation-relationship-corridors.

With the Hearing Un-aid(tm), you can put a stop to incessant buzzword-speak by
your boss. Unlike a hearing aid, which amplifies sound, the Hearing Un-aid
dampens noise, so you can easily tune out the board meeting and instead focus
on something far more important, such as downloading Humorix stories.

If you happen to miss something important (yeah, right) and your boss accuses
you of not paying attention, you can simply point to your hearing "aid" and
respond, "What was that? I couldn't hear you because of my temporary hearing
loss."
Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #7

Bluescreen Computer Case
US$27.97 at Bud's Beige Box Bazaar

Real Geeks may not admit to using Windows, but there's still countless geeks
out there who must suffer through the humiliation of using Windows while at
work. The patent-not-pending Bluescreen Case, though, will ease the stress of
working with Microsoft "solutions".

This computer case is very similar to other beige boxes, but with one
important difference: the reboot button is covered with a picture of Bill
Gates. When the machine bluescreens for the millionth time, all you have to do
is punch Bill Gates in the face as hard as you can, and the computer will
restart. This provides invaluable therapeutic stress relief.
Humorix Holiday Gift Idea #8

Bob's Map to the Homes of the Rich & Geeky
US$29.95 at BobsEcommerceSite.com

Hollywood is full of shady street-side vendors selling "maps to the homes of
the rich and famous" that are actually photocopies of photocopies of
photocopies of an old 1984 Rand McNally map.

But what about the Bay Area? Wouldn't you like to visit the homes and
driveways of the rich and geeky in Silicon Valley? Wouldn't you like to see
Linus Torvalds' residence? Wouldn't you like to drive by the home of
permanent-interim-CEO Steve Jobs? Wouldn't you like to spit on the driveway of
Bill Gates?

Well, now you can. Bob's Map to the Homes of the Rich & Geeky is a full-color
128 page atlas filled with detailed instructions for finding the homes of
1,024 of the world's most famous geeks. From San Jose, to Seattle, to Austin,
to Boston, Bob's Map is your passport to gawk at the homes of the rich and
geeky.
Microsoft ActivePromo Campaign: "State Innovation Day"

Microsoft has successfully lobbied for the State of Washington to declare
August 24th as State Innovation Day.  Efforts are underway to lobby the US
Congress to decree a similar designation nationally.  Several events are
scheduled on August 24, 1999 to showcase "innovation" in the computer
industry (in other words, Microsoft), including:

* An "Innovation Day Parade" held in downtown Seattle, featuring
floats and helium-filled balloons representing various Microsoft products
(Dancing Paper Clip, Microsoft Bob, Flying Windows Logo, etc.)

* An "Innovation is Cool" essay contest for high school and
college students.  Possible topics include "Why IE Should Be Integrated in
Windows", "Why Bill Gates Is My Hero", "Government Intervention is Evil",
and "Why Monopolies Improve Product Quality and Lower Prices".

* A 24-hour "Innovation in Education" telethon on NBC to raise money for
school districts nationwide to buy new Wintel computer systems and Internet
access through the Microsoft Network.
Actual Snippet of Windows Source Code!  Honest!

NOTE: The following snippet of the Windows 95 source code was sent to us via
'unofficial' channels.  Don't tell anyone you saw this!  We really don't
feel like being visited by the Microsoft Intellectual Property Police.

void BusyLoop()
/* Do nothing loop to kill CPU cycles; added at the
   request of Intel */
{
DisplayRandomSubliminalMessage();
for( int i = 0; i < BIG_INT; i++ )
  for( int j = 0; j < BIG_INT; j++ )
   for( int k = 0; k < BIG_INT; k++ )
    for( int l = 0; l < BIG_INT; l++ )
     if( STACK_SPACE_PERCENTAGE_FREE > .05 )
     /* There's plenty of stack space left -- let's
        eat up some more CPU cycles, recursively! */
      BusyLoop();
}
Jargon Coiner (#12)

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

* IPO (I've Patented the Obvious): Acquiring patents on trivial things and
  then hitting other companies over the head with them.

  Example: "Amazon just IPO'd one-click spam and is now ready to sue B&N."

* IPO (I'm Pissed Off): Exclamation given by a Linux user who was unable
  to participate in a highly lucrative Linux IPO due to lack of capital or
  E*Trade problems. Also uttered by Linux hackers who did not receive The
  Letter from Red Hat or VA Linux even though their friends did.
  
* YAKBA (Yet Another Killer Backhoe Attack): The acronym that describes
  network outtages caused by a careless backhoe operator.

  Examples: "Don't blame us, our website was offline after we suffered a
  YAKBA". "Don't worry about Y2K, what we need to think about is
  YAKBA-compliance."
ERIC S. RAYMOND: I'd like to introduce Eric Jones, a disadvantaged member
of the geek community who has been forced to live in a homeless shelter.
Eric? Come on out here and tell us about yourself...

JONES: Well, I'm a consultant for a Bay Area corporation. Due to the
housing crisis, I've been forced to sleep in a shelter.

ESR: How much do you make?

JONES: Over $100,000 a year.

ESR: Wow! And you still can't afford housing or rent?  That sounds
terrible... Hopefully with this telethon we'll be able to raise money to
fund new shelters for disadvantaged geeks like Eric here. We also have
plans for a Silicon Valley Terraforming Initiative in which several square
miles of Pacific Ocean will be turned into usuable land for building
housing and apartments for geeks...

   -- Excerpt from the Geek Grok '99 telethon
Don't you see? This whole trial is a conspiracy concocted by Bill Gates.
He knows that he stands to make even more billions if Microsoft is broken
up into Baby Bills... just like Rockefeller did with Standard Oil, and
stockholders did with Ma Bell. Bill Gates actually wants the DOJ to win.
That's why he's been so arrogant in court; he wants Judge Jackson to throw
the book at him! It will be a very lucrative book. The faked Windows
video? His amnesia during the video deposition? It's all a ruse to fool
Microsoft stockholders... and us.    

  -- The ramblings of a resident Slashdot conspiracy nut in response
     to Judge Jackson's harsh Findings Of Fact against Microsoft
Is Linux A Finnish Conspiracy?

WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF CORRUPTION -- According to a report recently
issued by the NSA (No Such Agency), Finland is now considered a national
economic and security risk. "We don't trust the Finns... software written
by these people could potentially contain backdoors that could undermine
domestic security," the report states. In response to the news, US Senator
Fatcatte (R-WA) has proposed a bill, the It's For The Children Act of
2000, that would ban all software written by native-born Finns.

"It's time we take the Finnish threat seriously," Fatcatte said at a press
conference. "Not only is Finn software a threat to domestic tranquility,
but it could radically alter the computer industry, costing us thousands
of jobs... and, more importantly, billions in tax revenue. We must prevent
the Finns from subverting our economy with so-called 'open-source
software'." He then asked, "Is anybody thinking of the children of
programmers who will become unemployed when Finnish software overruns the
country?"
New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#1)

Adopt-A-Beowulf: the latest company to hop the Linux bandwagon
as it tramples down Wall Street.

Every geek dreams of owning their own Beowulf supercomputer. Very few
people (except for dotcom billionnaires) can afford to build one, but the
folks at Adopt-a-Beowulf can provide the next best thing: a virtual
beowulf. For US$49.95, you can "adopt" your own 256-node Beowulf cluster.
You won't own it, or even get to see it in person, but you will receive
photos of the cluster, a monthly newsletter about its operation, and a
limited shell account on it.

The company hopes to branch out into other fields. Some slated products
include Adopt-A-Penguin, Lease-A-Camel (for Perl mongers), and
Adopt-A-Distro (in which your name will be used as the code-name for a
beta release of a major Linux distribution or other Open Source project).
New Linux Companies Hope To Get Rich Quick (#4)

The buzz surrounding Linux and Open Source during 1999 has produced a
large number of billionnaires. However, people who weren't employed by Red
Hat or VA Linux, or who didn't receive The Letter, are still poor. The
visionaries at The IPO Factory want to change all that.

As the name suggests, this company helps other businesses get off the
ground, secure investments from Venture Capitalists, and eventually hold
an IPO that exits the stratosphere. "You can think of us as meta-VCs," the
IPO Factory's founder said. "You provide the idea... and we do the rest.
If your company doesn't hold a successful IPO, you get your money back,
guaranteed!" He added quickly, "Of course, if you do undergo a billion
dollar IPO, we get to keep 25% of your stock."

The company's first customer, LinuxOne, has been a failure. "From now on
we're only going to service clients that actually have a viable product,"
an IPO Factory salesperson admitted. "Oh, and we've learned our lesson:
it's not a good idea to cut-and-paste large sections from Red Hat's S-1
filing."
I Want My Bugs!

An entymologist in Georgia is threatening to sue Microsoft over false
advertising in Windows 2000. "According to Microsoft, Win2K contains
63,000 bugs," he explained. "However, the shrink-wrapped box I purchased
at CompUSSR only had one cockroach along with some worthless papers and a
shiny drink coaster. I got ripped off."

The entymologist hoped that the 63,000 promised bugs would greatly add to
his insect collection. "I had my doubts that Microsoft could deliver
63,000 insects in one small box for only US$299," he said. "However, with
a company as innovative as Microsoft, the sky is the limit. Or at least
that's what I thought." He then asked angrily, "Where do I want to go
today? Back to the store for a refund!"
Affordable Virtual Beowulf Cluster

Every nerd drools over Beowulf clusters, but very few have even seen one,
much less own one. Until now, that is. Eric Gylgen, the open source hacker
famous for EviL (the dancing ASCII paperclip add-on to vi), is working on
a program that will emulate Beowulf clusters on a standard desktop PC.

"Of course," he added candidly, "the performance of my virtual cluster
will be many orders of magnitude less than a real cluster, but that's not
really the point. I just want to be able to brag that I run a 256 node
cluster. Nobody has to know I only spent $500 on the hardware it uses."

Eric has prior experience in this field. Last month he successfully built
a real 32 node Beowulf cluster out of Palm Pilots, old TI-8x graphing
calculators, various digital cameras, and even some TRS-80s.

He demonstrated a pre-alpha version of his VirtualEpicPoem software to us
yesterday. His Athlon machine emulated a 256 node Beowulf cluster in which
each node, running Linux, was emulating its own 16 node cluster in which
each node, running Bochs, was emulating VMWare to emulate Linux running
old Amiga software. The system was extremely slow, but it worked.
Will Silicon Valley Become A Ghost Town?

Back in the 80s, businessmen hoped that computers would usher in a
paperless office. Now in the 00s, businessmen are hoping that paper will
usher in a computerless office. "We've lost more productivity this last
decade to shoddy software," explained Mr. Lou Dight, the author of the
bestselling book, "The Dotless Revolution". "By getting rid of computers
and their infernal crashes, bluescreens, and worst of all, Solitaire, the
US gross domestic product will soar by 20% over the next decade. It's time
to banish Microsoft crapware from our corporate offices."

Lou Dight is the champion of a new trend in corporate America towards the
return of pen-and-paper, solar calculators, old IBM typewriters, and even
slide rules. If "dotcom" was the buzzword of the 90s, "dotless" is the
buzzword of the 21st Century.
Brief History Of Linux (#8)
Let's all holler for Hollerith

In 1890 the US Congress wanted to extend the census to collect exhaustive
demographic information on each citizen that could be resold to marketing
companies to help pay for the newly installed gold-plated toilets on
Capitol Hill. Experts estimated that the 1890 Census wouldn't be completed
until 1900.  It was hoped that an electronic tabulating machine using
punchcards designed by Herman Hollerith would speed up the process.

It didn't quite work out that way. An infestation of termites ate their
way through the wooden base of Hollerith's machines, and then a wave of
insects devoured several stacks of punchcards.  Also, some Hollerith
models had the propensity to crash at the drop of a hat... literally. In
one instance, the operator dropped his hat and when he reached down to
pick it up, he bumped the machine, causing it to flip over and crash.

These flaws meant that the census was delayed for several years. However,
the system was, in the words of one newspaper reporter, "good enough for
government work", a guiding principle that lives on to this very day and
explains the government's insistence on using Windows-based PCs.
Brief History Of Linux (#14)
Military Intelligence: Not an oxymoron in 1969

It was the Department Of Defense that commissioned the ARPANET in 1969, a
rare example of the US military breaking away from its official motto,
"The Leading Edge Of Yesterday's Technology(tm)".

In the years leading up to 1969, packet switching technology had evolved
enough to make the ARPANET possible. Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.
received the ARPA contract in 1968 for packet switching "Interface Message
Processors". US Senator Edward Kennedy, always on the ball, sent a
telegram to BBN praising them for their non-denominational "Interfaith"
Message Processors, an act unsurpassed by elected representatives until Al
Gore invented the Internet years later.

While ARPANET started with only four nodes in 1969, it evolved rapidly.
Email was first used in 1971; by 1975 the first mailing list, MsgGroup,
was created by Steve Walker when he sent a "First post!"  messages to it.
In 1979 all productive use of ARPANET ceased when USENET and the first MUD
were created. In 1983, when the network surpassed 1,000 hosts, a study
showed that 90.4% of all traffic was devoted to email and USENET flame wars.
Brief History Of Linux (#21)
The GNU Project

Meet Richard M. Stallman, an MIT hacker who would found the GNU Project
and create Emacs, the operating-system-disguised-as-a-text-editor. RMS,
the first member of the Three Initials Club (joined by ESR and JWZ),
experienced such frustration with software wrapped in arcane license
agreements that he embarked on the GNU Project to produce free software.

His journey began when he noticed this fine print for a printer driver:

   You do not own this software. You own a license to use one copy of this
   software, a license that we can revoke at any time for any reason
   whatsoever without a refund. You may not copy, distribute, alter,
   disassemble, or hack the software. The source code is locked away in a
   vault in Cleveland. If you say anything negative about this software
   you will be in violation of this license and required to forfeit your
   soul and/or first born child to us.

The harsh wording of the license shocked RMS. The computer industry was in
it's infancy, which could only mean it was going to get much, much worse.
Brief History Of Linux (#22)

RMS had a horrible, terrible dream set in 2020 in which all of society was
held captive by copyright law. In particular, everyone's brain waves were
monitored by the US Dept. of Copyrights. If your thoughts referenced a
copyrighted idea, you had to pay a royalty. To make it worse, a handful of
corporations held fully 99.9% of all intellectual property rights.

Coincidentally, Bill Gates experienced a similar dream that same night. To
him, however, it was not a horrible, terrible nightmare, but a wonderful
utopian vision. The thought of lemmings... er, customers paying a royalty
everytime they hummed a copyrighted song in their head or remembered a
passage in a book was simply too marvelous for the budding monopolist.

RMS, waking up from his nightmare, vowed to fight the oncoming Copyright
Nightmare. The GNU Project was born. His plan called for a kernel,
compiler, editor, and other tools. Unfortunately, RMS became bogged down
with Emacs that the kernel, HURD, was shoved on the back burner. Built
with LISP (Lots of Incomprehensible Statements with Parentheses), Emacs
became bloated in a way no non-Microsoft program ever has. Indeed, for a
short while RMS pretended that Emacs really was the GNU OS kernel.
Brief History Of Linux (#29)

"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is credited by many (especially ESR
himself) as the reason Netscape announced January 22, 1998 the release of
the Mozilla source code. In addition, Rob Malda of Slashdot has also
received praise because he had recently published an editorial ("Give us
the damn source code so we can fix Netscape's problems ourselves!")

Of course, historians now know the true reason behind the landmark
decision: Netscape engineers were scared to death that a large
multi-national corporation would acquire them and crush Mozilla. Which
indeed did happen much later, although everybody thought the conqueror
would be Microsoft, not AOL (America's Online Lusers).

The Netscape announcement prompted a strategy session among Linux bigwigs
on February 3rd. They decided a new term to replace 'free software' was
needed; some rejected suggestions included "Free Source", "Ajar Source",
"World Domination Source", "bong-ware" (Bong's Obviously Not GNU), and
"Nude Source". We can thank Chris Peterson for coining "Open Source",
which became the adopted term and later sparked the ugly "Free Software
vs. Open Source", "Raymond vs. Stallman" flame-a-thons.
This nation is sinking into the quicksand of the Paperwork Age, a
postmodern world in which judges issue meta-injuctions against other
judges who issue injuctions against lawyers who file lawsuits every 3.2
minutes. It's an age where lawyers design ballots forms and then proceed
to argue over how to count them.

The United States has bluescreened. A fatal exception error occured on
Election Night, and now all of our unsaved work has been lost.

  -- Jon Splatz, Humorix's Pundit and Social Commentator, ranting about
     the 2000 US Presidential Election From Hell and the dreaded
     "Lawyerclysm"
Linux Distro To Include Pre-Installed Security Holes

Proactive Synergy Paradigm, the Linux distro targeted at Pointy Haired
Bosses, will now include built-in security flaws to better compete with
Microsoft programs.

"The sheer popularity of Windows, Outlook, and IIS clearly shows that
people demand security holes large enough to drive a truck through," said
Mr. Bert Dill of P.S.P. Inc. "We're going to do our best to offer what the
consumer wants. Just as Microsoft stole ideas from Apple during the
1980's, we're stealing ideas from Microsoft today."

Future releases of Proactive Synergy Linux will feature "LookOut! 1.0", a
mail reader that automatically executes (with root privileges) e-mail
attachments coded in Perl, JavaScript, Python, and Visual Basic.

"Hey, if it works for Microsoft, it can work for us," boasted Mr. Dill.
"Now PHBs won't have to stick with Windows in order to have their
confidential files secretly emailed to their colleagues by a worm. Better
yet, this capability allows viruses to automagically delete unnecessary
files to save disk space without wasting the PHB's valuable time.
Microsoft Employees Go On Strike, Demand Reduced Salaries

REDMOND, WA -- Several hundred programmers walked off their jobs at
Microsoft Headquarters on Friday to protest their shoddy public image. "My
friends all think I'm a servant of Satan because I get my paycheck from
Microsoft," explained Microserf Eric Eshleman. "If I didn't make so much
money, I'd have more of a backbone to shout 'No!' when my supervisor
demands that I include some new virus-delivery feature in Outlook."

The striking programmers demand salary cuts, less benefits, and zero stock
options. Their labor union, the Brotherhood Of Programmers Sick Of Being
Called Evil, hopes to get some face time with Microsoft executives and
touch base on reaching a proactive agreement leveraging the latest
innovatives in PR to produce a synergistic worldwide buzzword-enhanced
advertising campaign that showcases Microsoft associates as enlightened
engineers instead of morally bankrupt bastards bent on world domination.

Earlier today, about 150 strikers formed a picket line near the front
entrance to Bill Gates' mansion. They carried signs saying "Hell no we're
not going to Hell", "I want to be able to sleep at night", "Why does the
public hate us so much?" and "I'm fed up with ethical dilemmas".
All my friends and I are crazy.  That's the only thing that keeps us sane.
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
                -- Sean O'Casey
An elderly couple were flying to their Caribbean hideaway on a chartered plane
when a terrible storm forced them to land on an uninhabited island.  When
several days passed without rescue, the couple and their pilot sank into a
despondent silence. Finally, the woman asked her husband if he had made his
usual pledge to the United Way Campaign.
        "We're running out of food and water and you ask *that*?" her husband
barked.  "If you really need to know, I not only pledged a half million but
I've already paid them half of it."
        "You owe the U.W.C. a *quarter million*?" the woman exclaimed
euphorically.  "Don't worry, Harry, they'll find us!  They'll find us!"
"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"
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
                -- H.L. Mencken, "A Mencken Chrestomathy"
For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble:
and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.
                -- Sir Thomas More
God gives us relatives; thank goodness we can chose our friends.
Higgins:        Doolittle, you're either an honest man or a rogue.
Doolittle:        A little of both, Guv'nor.  Like the rest of us, a
                little of both.
                -- Shaw, "Pygmalion"
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is
to a cockatoo.
                -- George Bernard Shaw
If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.
If God wanted us to be brave, why did he give us legs?
                -- Marvin Kitman
If we were meant to get up early, God would have created us with alarm clocks.
In the misfortune of our friends we find something that is not displeasing
to us.
                -- La Rochefoucauld, "Maxims"
"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
May those that love us love us; and those that don't love us, may
God turn their hearts; and if he doesn't turn their hearts, may
he turn their ankles so we'll know them by their limping.
Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our
pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs
and tears.  ...  It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious,
inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us
sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness
and acts that are contrary to habit...
                -- Hippocrates "The Sacred Disease"
Most people have a furious itch to talk about themselves and are restrained
only by the disinclination of others to listen.  Reserve is an artificial
quality that is developed in most of us as the result of innumerable rebuffs.
                -- W.S. Maugham
No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas.
Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
Conscience makes egotists of us all.
                -- Oscar Wilde
People who think they know everything greatly annoy those of us who do.
        "Richard, in being so fierce toward my vampire, you were doing
what you wanted to do, even though you thought it was going to hurt
somebody else. He even told you he'd be hurt if..."
        "He was going to suck my blood!"
        "Which is what we do to anyone when we tell them we'll be hurt
if they don't live our way."
...
        "The thing that puzzles you," he said, "is an accepted saying that
happens to be impossible.  The phrase is hurt somebody else.  We choose,
ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what.  Us who decides.
Nobody else.  My vampire told you he'd be hurt if you didn't let him?  That's
his decision to be hurt, that's his choice.  What you do about it is your
decision, your choice: give him blood; ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake
through his heart.  If he doesn't want the holly stake, he's free to resist,
in whatever way he wants.  It goes on and on, choices, choices."
        "When you look at it that way..."
        "Listen," he said, "it's important.  We are all.  Free.  To do.
Whatever.  We want.  To do."
                -- Richard Bach, "Illusions"
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"
Stupidity got us into this mess -- why can't it get us out?
The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet,
challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the martial spirit that
keeps the blood at heat.  Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents
itself before us slyly and craftily, glib and insinuating, in the modest garb
of innocence.  To yield to its blandishments is so easy.  The wrong, it seems,
is venial...  Then it is that you will be summoned to show the courage of
adventurous youth.
                -- Benjamin Cardozo
The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.
                -- Irving Howe
The more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.
The world needs more people like us and fewer like them.
Those of you who think you know everything are annoying those of us who do.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
                -- Oscar Wilde
We are stronger than our skin of flesh and metal, for we carry and share a
spectrum of suns and lands that lends us legends as we craft our immortality
and interweave our destinies of water and air, leaving shadows that gather
color of their own, until they outshine the substance that cast them.
We may not return the affection of those who like us, but we always respect
their good judgement.
We really don't have any enemies.  It's just that some of our best
friends are trying to kill us.
What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity.  We are all formed
of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that
is the first law of nature.
                -- Voltaire
What makes us so bitter against people who outwit us is that they think
themselves cleverer than we are.
What's the matter with the world?  Why, there ain't but one thing wrong
with every one of us -- and that's "selfishness."
                -- The Best of Will Rogers
While we are sleeping, two-thirds of the world is plotting to do us in.
                -- Dean Rusk
Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of movement unless it was to
avoid responsibility with?
"I think it's wrong any of us should claim ideas for stuff
that has been done already by other people. It's time to
put away the wheel reinvention kit and LEARN FROM OTHER
SYSTEMS and even from *shudder* books ;)"

        - Rik van Riel
Andries Brouwer wrote:
> Linux is unreliable.
> That is bad.

Since your definition of reliability is a mathematical abstraction requiring
infinite storage why don't you start by inventing infinitely large SDRAM
chips, then get back to us ?

        - Alan Cox
Yes, we're all anti-american terrorists who plan to make the
US economy collapse by inventing lots of new words which will
have to be added to the dictionary, making the US economy
unable to support the ever-growing dictionaries and ensuring  
the Americans will be unable to (learn to) spell, leaving them
dead in the water if there's ever a linguistic war between
them and the UK.

        - Rik van Riel explaining the real reason behind spelling
          mistakes in the linux kernel
<tik-tok> Hi all, I'm having problems with my 2.2.19 kernel build I'm
        trying to create my ramdisk and I get the following error
        message "All your loopback devices are in use!"  can anyone help?
<phillips> All your loopback devices are belong to us!

        - Daniel Phillips on #kernelnewbies
If you _really_ feel this strongly about the bug, you could
either try to increase the number of hours a day for all of
us or you could talk to my boss about hiring me as a consultant
to fix the problem for you on an emergency basis :)

        - Rik van Riel explaining what to do against kernel bugs
Most EULA's are not legal contracts. In civilised countries the right to
disassemble is enshrined in law (ironically it comes in Europe from trying  
to keep car manufacturers from running monopolistic scams not from the
software people doing the same)

In the USA its a lot less clear. You can find laws explicitly claiming both,
and since US law is primarily about who has loads of money, its a bit
irrelevant

        - Alan Cox explaining EULA's on linux-kernel
With the current lunatic US congress proposals on security, crypto and
building big brother into all PC's I'd say allowing non GPL security modules
is positively dangerous to the well being of non US citizens

        - Alan Cox on linux-kernel
Cuba is within small boat distance. I thought it was going to be twenty
years before the direction changed, now Im not so sure

        - Alan Cox on crazy US computer security laws
Aren't we lucky our documentation is so sparse noone can accuse us of being
inconsistent? 8)

        - Rusty Russell on linux-kernel
But I do know, that an Alan at home, co-working with his under-ground
cluster of gnomes, does a hell-of-a-lot more good for free software
than an Alan in a US-prison as yet another victim of "justice".

        - David Weinehall discussing the DMCA/SSSCA on linux-kernel
Chris Rumpf wrote:
> I would like to join this mailing list.

you want all of us to give you a call saying you're welcome ??

        - elko@home.nl on linux-kernel
And there was much suffering among the people, for g++ was a necessity. And
one rose up from the mass and cried, "Lord Root, if thou canst not help us,
then call upon the gods of far gcc@gcc.gnu.org for among them are sages of
wisdom who may be of help!"

        - bug report from Sean Callanan send to the GCC mailing list
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.
                -- Henrik Tikkanen
        On this morning in August when I was 13, my mother sent us out pick
tomatoes.  Back in April I'd have killed for a fresh tomato, but in August
they are no more rare or wonderful than rocks.  So I picked up one and threw
it at a crab apple tree, where it made a good *splat*, and then threw a tomato
at my brother.  He whipped one back at me.  We ducked down by the vines,
heaving tomatoes at each other.  My sister, who was a good person, said,
"You're going to get it."  She bent over and kept on picking.
        What a target!  She was 17, a girl with big hips, and bending over,
she looked like the side of a barn.
        I picked up a tomato so big it sat on the ground.  It looked like it
had sat there a week.  The underside was brown, small white worms lived in it,
and it was very juicy.  I stood up and took aim, and went into the windup,
when my mother at the kitchen window called my name in a sharp voice.  I had
to decide quickly.  I decided.
        A rotten Big Boy hitting the target is a memorable sound, like a fat
man doing a belly-flop.  With a whoop and a yell the tomatoee came after
faster than I knew she could run, and grabbed my shirt and was about to brain
me when Mother called her name in a sharp voice.  And my sister, who was a
good person, obeyed and let go -- and burst into tears.  I guess she knew that
the pleasure of obedience is pretty thin compared with the pleasure of hearing
a rotten tomato hit someone in the rear end.
                -- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days"
We are the people our parents warned us about.
What really shapes and conditions and makes us is somebody only a few of
us ever have the courage to face: and that is the child you once were,
long before formal education ever got its claws into you -- that
impatient, all-demanding child who wants love and power and can't get
enough of either and who goes on raging and weeping in your spirit till
at last your eyes are closed and all the fools say, "Doesn't he look
peaceful?" It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars
and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in
life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp
before they were five years old.
                -- Robertson Davies, "The Rebel Angels"
While the year 2000 (y2k) problem is not an issue for us, all Linux
implementations will impacted by the year 2038 (y2.038k) issue. The
Debian Project is committed to working with the industry on this issue
and we will have our full plans and strategy posted by the first quarter
of 2020.
Most of us feel that marketing types are like a dangerous weapon - keep
'em unloaded and locked up in a cupboard, and only bring them out when
you need them to do a job.
        -- Craig Sanders
"What does this tell me?  That if Microsoft were the last software
company left in the world, 13% of the US population would be scouring
garage sales & Goodwill for old TRS-80s, CPM machines & Apple ]['s before
they would buy Microsoft. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement."
        -- Seen on Slashdot
<Knghtbrd> Feanor - license issues are important.  If we don't watch our
           arses now, someone's gonna come up and bite us later...
<Thoth_> Yeah, well that's why it's numbered 2.3.1... it's for those of us
         who miss NT-like uptimes
<slashdot> my US geograpy is lousy...lol
<knghtbrd> so's mine and I live here
<Crow-> who gives a shit about US law
<jim> anyone living in the US.
Techical solutions are not a matter of voting. Two legislations in the US
states almost decided that the value of Pi be 3.14, exactly. Popular vote
does not make for a correct solution.
        -- Manoj Srivastava
In fact.. based on this model of what the NSA is and isn't... many of the
people reading this are members of the NSA... /. is afterall 'News for
Nerds'.

NSA MONDAY MORNING {at the coffee machine):
NSA AGENT 1: Hey guys, did you check out slashdot over the weekend?
    AGENT 2: No, I was installing Mandrake 6.1 and I coulnd't get the darn
             ppp connection up..
    AGENT 1: Well check it out... they're on to us.
        -- Chris Moyer <cdmoyer@starmail.com>
"Pacific Bell Customer Service, this is [..], how can I provide you with
excellent customer service today?"
"HAHAHAHAHA!!  That's good, I like it.."
"Um, thanks, they make us say that."
        -- knghtbrd and a pacbell rep, name removed to protect her job
<knghtbrd> If charging someone for violation of US crypto laws would get
           you laughed out of court, just "investigate" them on hte charge
           of TREASON!
<knghtbrd> Tea, anyone?
<Espy> I'd rather drown politicians instead of tea :)
<stu> espy: politicians have gills, duh
<Espy> weasels don't have gills
<Knghtbrd> Trust us, we know what we're doing...  We may have no idea HOW
           we're doing it, but we know WHAT we're doing.
<Culus_> We are also hoping to release a version of linux where shell is
         replaced by perl to a large degree.  Adding to that, there are a
         few of us who would like to see a pure perl platform.. PerlOS :)
* Culus_ looks on in horror
<mstone> Culus_: on the up side, you can type damn near anything in at the
         command prompt :)
Fortune Documents the Great Legal Decisions:

We can imagine no reason why, with ordinary care, human toes could not be
left out of chewing tobacco, and if toes are found in chewing tobacco, it
seems to us that someone has been very careless.
                -- 78 So. 365.
Humor in the Court:
Q: What can you tell us about the truthfulness and veracity of this defendant?
A: Oh, she will tell the truth. She said she'd kill that sonofabitch--and
   she did!
        It seems these two guys, George and Harry, set out in a Hot Air
balloon to cross the United States.  After forty hours in the air, George
turned to Harry, and said, "Harry, I think we've drifted off course!  We
need to find out where we are."
        Harry cools the air in the balloon, and they descend to below the
cloud cover.  Slowly drifting over the countryside, George spots a man
standing below them and yells out, "Excuse me!  Can you please tell me
where we are?"
        The man on the ground yells back, "You're in a balloon, approximately
fifty feet in the air!"
        George turns to Harry and says, "Well, that man *must* be a lawyer".
        Replies Harry, "How can you tell?".
        "Because the information he gave us is 100% accurate, and totally
useless!"

That's the end of The Joke, but for you people who are still worried about
George and Harry: they end up in the drink, and make the front page of the
New York Times: "Balloonists Soaked by Lawyer".
Let us remember that ours is a nation of lawyers and order.
We may not like doctors, but at least they doctor.  Bankers are not ever
popular but at least they bank.  Policeman police and undertakers take
under.  But lawyers do not give us law.  We receive not the gladsome light
of jurisprudence, but rather precedents, objections, appeals, stays,
filings and forms, motions and counter-motions, all at $250 an hour.
                -- Nolo News, summer 1989
All of us should treasure his Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a
Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks,
tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks:
"Just lie down on the floor and keep calm."
                -- Robert Wilson, "John Dillinger Died for You"
        Approaching the gates of the monastery, Hakuin found Ken the Zen
preaching to a group of disciples.
        "Words..." Ken orated, "they are but an illusory veil obfuscating
the absolute reality of --"
        "Ken!" Hakuin interrupted. "Your fly is down!"
        Whereupon the Clear Light of Illumination exploded upon Ken, and he
vaporized.
        On the way to town, Hakuin was greeted by an itinerant monk imbued
with the spirit of the morning.
        "Ah," the monk sighed, a beatific smile wrinkling across his cheeks,
"Thou art That..."
        "Ah," Hakuin replied, pointing excitedly, "And Thou art Fat!"
        Whereupon the Clear Light of Illumination exploded upon the monk,
and he vaporized.
        Next, the Governor sought the advice of Hakuin, crying: "As our
enemies bear down upon us, how shall I, with such heartless and callow
soldiers as I am heir to, hope to withstand the impending onslaught?"
        "US?" snapped Hakuin.
        Whereupon the Clear Light of Illumination exploded upon the
Governor, and he vaporized.
        Then, a redneck went up to Hakuin and vaporized the old Master with
his shotgun.  "Ha! Beat ya' to the punchline, ya' scrawny li'l geek!"
Each of us bears his own Hell.
                -- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)
God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to
change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.
****  GROWTH CENTER REPAIR SERVICE

For those who have had too much of Esalen, Topanga, and Kairos. Tired of
being genuine all the time?  Would you like to learn how to be a little
phony again?  Have you disclosed so much that you're beginning to avoid
people? Have you touched so many people that they're all beginning to
feel the same? Like to be a little dependent? Are perfect orgasms
beginning to bore you? Would you like, for once, not to express a
feeling?  Or better yet, not be in touch with it at all?  Come to us.  We
promise to relieve you of the burden of your great potential.
If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
                -- Anatole France
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around us in awareness.
                -- James Thurber
Life is like a 10 speed bicycle.  Most of us have gears we never use.
                -- C. Schultz
        Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great
crystal river.  Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs
and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and
resisting the current what each had learned from birth.  But one creature
said at last, "I trust that the current knows where it is going.  I shall
let go, and let it take me where it will.  Clinging, I shall die of boredom."
        The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool!  Let go, and that current
you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will
die quicker than boredom!"
        But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at
once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.  Yet, in time,
as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the
bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.
        And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See
a miracle!  A creature like ourselves, yet he flies!  See the Messiah, come
to save us all!"  And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more
Messiah than you.  The river delight to lift us free, if only we dare let go.
Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.
        But they cried the more, "Saviour!" all the while clinging to the
rocks, making legends of a Saviour.
                -- Richard Bach
        One day it was announced that the young monk Kyogen had reached
an enlightened state.  Much impressed by this news, several of his peers
went to speak with him.
        "We have heard that you are enlightened.  Is this true?" his fellow
students inquired.
        "It is", Kyogen answered.
        "Tell us", said a friend, "how do you feel?"
        "As miserable as ever", replied the enlightened Kyogen.
What we Are is God's gift to us.
What we Become is our gift to God.
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"
> : Any porters out there should feel happier knowing that DEC is shipping
> : me an AlphaPC that I intend to try getting linux running on: this will
> : definitely help flush out some of the most flagrant unportable stuff.
> : The Alpha is much more different from the i386 than the 68k stuff is, so
> : it's likely to get most of the stuff fixed.
>
> It's posts like this that almost convince us non-believers that there
> really is a god.
        -- Anthony Lovell, to Linus's remarks about porting
/*
* [...] 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]
Microsoft Corp., concerned by the growing popularity of the free 32-bit
operating system for Intel systems, Linux, has employed a number of top
programmers from the underground world of virus development.  Bill Gates stated
yesterday: "World domination, fast -- it's either us or Linus".  Mr. Torvalds
was unavailable for comment ...
        -- Robert Manners, rjm@swift.eng.ox.ac.uk, in comp.os.linux.setup
> I'm an idiot..  At least this [bug] took about 5 minutes to find..
We need to find some new terms to describe the rest of us mere mortals
then.
        -- Craig Schlenter in response to Linus Torvalds's
Convention organizer to Linus Torvalds: "You might like to come with us
to some licensed[1] place, and have some pizza."

Linus: "Oh, I did not know that you needed a license to eat pizza".

[1] Licenced - refers in Australia to a restaurant which has government
licence to sell liquor.
        -- Linus at a talk at the Melbourne University
N: Phil Lewis
E: beans@bucket.ualr.edu
D: Promised to send money if I would put his name in the source tree.
S: PO Box 371
S: North Little Rock, Arkansas 72115
S: US
        -- /usr/src/linux/CREDITS
"Linux was made by foreign terrorists to take money from true US companies
like Microsoft." - Some AOL'er.
"To this end we dedicate ourselves..." -Don
        -- From the sig of "Don", don@cs.byu.edu
>  Where in the US is Linus?

He was in the "Promise Land".
        -- David S. Miller <davem@caip.rutgers.edu>
>       Yeah, Linus is in the US.
>
>       His source trees are in Finland.

        OK, someone give him access -fast- ...... ;-)
        -- babydr@nwrain.net, because of problems with the kernel
NEVER RESPOND TO CRITICAL PRESS.  IT IS A GAME YOU CAN ONLY LOSE, AND IT
MAKES US LOOK BAD.
        -- Bruce Perens
<Myxie> I know. Unless htere is a cookie monster somewhere between us tat muches the amil.
<Myxie> amil/mail
<Myxie> muches/munches tat/that htere/there
<HippieGuy> heheh
<HippieGuy> problems? :)
* Myxie needs an ircii addon that pipes teh command line through ispell :)
        -- Seen on #Debian
A feed salesman is on his way to a farm.  As he's driving along at forty
m.p.h., he looks out his car window and sees a three-legged chicken running
alongside him, keeping pace with his car.  He is amazed that a chicken is
running at forty m.p.h.  So he speeds up to forty-five, fifty, then sixty
m.p.h.  The chicken keeps right up with him the whole way, then suddenly
takes off and disappears into the distance.
        The man pulls into the farmyard and says to the farmer, "You know,
the strangest thing just happened to me; I was driving along at at least
sixty miles an hour and a chicken passed me like I was standing still!"
        "Yeah," the farmer replies, "that chicken was ours.  You see, there's
me, and there's Ma, and there's our son Billy.  Whenever we had chicken for
dinner, we would all want a drumstick, so we'd have to kill two chickens.
So we decided to try and breed a three-legged chicken so each of us could
have a drumstick."
        "How do they taste?" said the farmer.
        "Don't know," replied the farmer.  "We haven't been able to catch
one yet."
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.
Between 1950 and 1952, a bored weatherman, stationed north of Hudson
Bay, left a monument that neither government nor time can eradicate.
Using a bulldozer abandoned by the Air Force, he spent two years and
great effort pushing boulders into a single word.

It can be seen from 10,000 feet, silhouetted against the snow.
Government officials exchanged memos full of circumlocutions (no Latin
equivalent exists) but failed to word an appropriation bill for the
destruction of this cairn, that wouldn't alert the press and embarrass
both Parliament and Party.

It stands today, a monument to human spirit.  If life exists on other
planets, this may be the first message received from us.
                -- The Realist, November, 1964.
If God had not given us sticky tape, it would have been necessary to invent it.
If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we would
all be millionaires.
                -- Abigail Van Buren
Let me assure you that to us here at First National, you're not just a
number.  Youre two numbers, a dash, three more numbers, another dash and
another number.
                -- James Estes
        Then a man said: Speak to us of Expectations.
        He then said: If a man does not see or hear the waters of the
Jordan, then he should not taste the pomegranate or ply his wares in an
open market.
        If a man would not labour in the salt and rock quarries then he
should not accept of the Earth that which he refuses to give of
himself.

        Such a man would expect a pear of a peach tree.
        Such a man would expect a stone to lay an egg.
        Such a man would expect Sears to assemble a lawnmower.
                -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
There are many of us in this old world of ours who hold that things break
about even for all of us.  I have observed, for example, that we all get
about the same amount of ice.  The rich get it in the summer and the poor
get it in the winter.
                -- Bat Masterson
What they say:                        What they mean:

New                                Different colors from previous version.
All New                                Not compatible with previous version.
Exclusive                        Nobody else has documentation.
Unmatched                        Almost as good as the competition.
Design Simplicity                The company wouldn't give us any money.
Fool-proof Operation                All parameters are hard-coded.
Advanced Design                        Nobody really understands it.
Here At Last                        Didn't get it done on time.
Field Tested                        We don't have any simulators.
Years of Development                Finally got one to work.
Unprecedented Performance        Nothing ever ran this slow before.
Revolutionary                        Disk drives go 'round and 'round.
Futuristic                        Only runs on a next generation supercomputer.
No Maintenance                        Impossible to fix.
Performance Proven                Worked through Beta test.
Meets Tough Quality Standards        It compiles without errors.
Satisfaction Guaranteed                We'll send you another pack if it fails.
Stock Item                        We shipped it before and can do it again.
Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature  :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <2609@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov>
"...this does not mean that some of us should not want, in a rather
dispassionate sort of way, to put a bullet through csh's head."
Larry Wall in <1992Aug6.221512.5963@netlabs.com>
I guess what I'm saying is that the croak in question is requiring
agreement (in the linguistic sense) that isn't buying us anything.
             -- Larry Wall in <199709241628.JAA08908@wall.org>
The prayer of serenity applies here.  To both of us.  :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <199710141802.LAA22443@wall.org>
That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . .
Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns...  :-)
             -- Larry Wall in <199710171838.LAA24968@wall.org>
All the passions make us commit faults; love makes us commit the most
ridiculous ones.
                -- La Rochefoucauld
I loved her with a love thirsty and desperate. I felt that we two might commit
some act so atrocious that the world, seeing us, would find it irresistible.
                -- Gene Wolfe, "The Shadow of the Torturer"
Let us live!!!
Let us love!!!
Let us share the deepest secrets of our souls!!!

You first.
Love conquers all things; let us too surrender to love.
                -- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)
Love tells us many things that are not so.
                -- Krainian Proverb
That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love,
that no one could have loved so before us, and that no one will love
in the same way as us.
                -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents'
shortcomings.
                -- Laurence J. Peter, "Peter's Principles"
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2023
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