Tell : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English)	by Linux fortune

A rose is a rose is a rose. Just ask Jean Marsh, known to millions of PBS viewers in the '70s as Rose, the maid on the LWT export "Upstairs, Downstairs." Though Marsh has since gone on to other projects, ... it's with Rose she's forever identified. So much so that she even likes to joke about having one named after her, a distinction not without its drawbacks. "I was very flattered when I heard about it, but when I looked up the official description, it said, `Jean Marsh: pale peach, not very good in beds; better up against a wall.' I want to tell you that's not true. I'm very good in beds as well."
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction. -- William Faulkner
Ben, why didn't you tell me? -- Luke Skywalker
FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL: #37 Can you name the seven seas? Antartic, Artic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Indian, North Pacific, South Pacific. Can you name the seven dwarfs from Snow White? Doc, Dopey, Sneezy, Happy, Grumpy, Sleepy and Bashful.
I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk. -- Sidney Greenstreet, "The Maltese Falcon"
Leslie West heads for the sticks, to Providence, Rhode Island and tries to hide behind a beard. No good. There are still too many people and too many stares, always taunting, always smirking. He moves to the outskirts of town. He finds a place to live -- huge mansion, dirt cheap, caretaker included. He plugs in his guitar and plays as loud as he wants, day and night, and there's no one to laugh or boo or even look bored. Nobody's cut the grass in months. What's happened to that caretaker? What neighborhood people there are start to talk, and what kids there are start to get curious. A 13 year-old blond with an angelic face misses supper. Before the summer's end, four more teenagers have disappeared. The senior class president, Barnard-bound come autumn, tells Mom she's going out to a movie one night and stays out. The town's up in arms, but just before the police take action, the kids turn up. They've found a purpose. They go home for their stuff and tell the folks not to worry but they'll be going now. They're in a band. -- Ira Kaplan
Please, won't somebody tell me what diddie-wa-diddie means?
There are two jazz musicians who are great buddies. They hang out and play together for years, virtually inseparable. Unfortunately, one of them is struck by a truck and killed. About a week later his friend wakes up in the middle of the night with a start because he can feel a presence in the room. He calls out, "Who's there? Who's there? What's going on?" "It's me -- Bob," replies a faraway voice. Excitedly he sits up in bed. "Bob! Bob! Is that you? Where are you?" "Well," says the voice, "I'm in heaven now." "Heaven! You're in heaven! That's wonderful! What's it like?" "It's great, man. I gotta tell you, I'm jamming up here every day. I'm playing with Bird, and 'Trane, and Count Basie drops in all the time! Man it is smokin'!" "Oh, wow!" says his friend. "That sounds fantastic, tell me more, tell me more!" "Let me put it this way," continues the voice. "There's good news and bad news. The good news is that these guys are in top form. I mean I have never heard them sound better. They are wailing up here." "The bad news is that God has this girlfriend that sings..."
There is much Obi-Wan did not tell you. -- Darth Vader
"What was the worst thing you've ever done?" "I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me... the most dreadful thing." -- Peter Straub, "Ghost Story"
Dogs just don't seem to be able to tell the difference between important people and the rest of us.
I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me that I may sponge away the writing on this stone! -- Charles Dickens
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything. -- Mark Twain
It is often the case that the man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
"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"
Tell the truth or trump--but get the trick. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1, to tell him you have read one of his books; 2, to tell him you have read all of his books; 3, to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart. -- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
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
Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive women. There, that's it: 24 words. But the guy who wrote the book took thousands of words to say it. Or consider "The Brothers Karamazov", by the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's about these two brothers who kill their father. Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It's impossible to tell because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talk as much as the Karamazovs did, I don't see how they found time to become a major world power. I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me." Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words: * "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you. * "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy. -- Dave Barry
What I tell you three times is true. -- Lewis Carroll
When in doubt, tell the truth. -- Mark Twain
A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the program on which he was working. "I will be finished tomorrow," the programmer promptly replied. "I think you are being unrealistic," said the manager. "Truthfully, how long will it take?" The programmer thought for a moment. "I have some features that I wish to add. This will take at least two weeks," he finally said. "Even that is too much to expect," insisted the manager, "I will be satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete." The programmer agreed to this. Several years later, the manager retired. On the way to his retirement lunch, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal. He had been programming all night. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
Anyone who has attended a USENIX conference in a fancy hotel can tell you that a sentence like "You're one of those computer people, aren't you?" is roughly equivalent to "Look, another amazingly mobile form of slime mold!" in the mouth of a hotel cocktail waitress. -- Elizabeth Zwicky
grep me no patterns and I'll tell you no lines.
How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff, Bell Labs
It appears that after his death, Albert Einstein found himself working as the doorkeeper at the Pearly Gates. One slow day, he found that he had time to chat with the new entrants. To the first one he asked, "What's your IQ?" The new arrival replied, "190". They discussed Einstein's theory of relativity for hours. When the second new arrival came, Einstein once again inquired as to the newcomer's IQ. The answer this time came "120". To which Einstein replied, "Tell me, how did the Cubs do this year?" and they proceeded to talk for half an hour or so. To the final arrival, Einstein once again posed the question, "What's your IQ?". Upon receiving the answer "70", Einstein smiled and replied, "Got a minute to tell me about VMS 4.0?"
OS/2 Skyways: The terminal is almost empty, with only a few prospective passengers milling about. The announcer says that their flight has just departed, wishes them a good flight, though there are no planes on the runway. Airline personnel walk around, apologising profusely to customers in hushed voices, pointing from time to time to the sleek, powerful jets outside the terminal on the field. They tell each passenger how good the real flight will be on these new jets and how much safer it will be than Windows Airlines, but that they will have to wait a little longer for the technicians to finish the flight systems. Maybe until mid-1995. Maybe longer.
Still a few bugs in the system... Someday I have to tell you about Uncle Nahum from Maine, who spent years trying to cross a jellyfish with a shad so he could breed boneless shad. His experiment backfired too, and he wound up with bony jellyfish... which was hardly worth the trouble. There's very little call for those up there. -- Allucquere R. "Sandy" Stone
The Gurus of Unix Meeting of Minds (GUMM) takes place Wednesday, April 1, 2076 (check THAT in your perpetual calendar program), 14 feet above the ground directly in front of the Milpitas Gumps. Members will grep each other by the hand (after intro), yacc a lot, smoke filtered chroots in pipes, chown with forks, use the wc (unless uuclean), fseek nice zombie processes, strip, and sleep, but not, we hope, od. Three days will be devoted to discussion of the ramifications of whodo. Two seconds have been allotted for a complete rundown of all the user- friendly features of Unix. Seminars include "Everything You Know is Wrong", led by Tom Kempson, "Batman or Cat:man?" led by Richie Dennis "cc C? Si! Si!" led by Kerwin Bernighan, and "Document Unix, Are You Kidding?" led by Jan Yeats. No Reader Service No. is necessary because all GUGUs (Gurus of Unix Group of Users) already know everything we could tell them. -- "Get GUMMed," Dr. Dobb's Journal, June '84
The programmers of old were mysterious and profound. We cannot fathom their thoughts, so all we do is describe their appearance. Aware, like a fox crossing the water. Alert, like a general on the battlefield. Kind, like a hostess greeting her guests. Simple, like uncarved blocks of wood. Opaque, like black pools in darkened caves. Who can tell the secrets of their hearts and minds? The answer exists only in the Tao. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
The trouble with computers is that they do what you tell them, not what you want. -- D. Cohen
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (10) Sorry, but that's too useful. (9) Dammit, little-endian systems are more consistent! (8) I'm on the committee and I still don't know what the hell #pragma is for. (7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too hard to write. (6) Them bats is smart; they use radar. (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here? (4) How many times do we have to tell you, "No prior art!" (3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this sucker. (2) Thank you for your generous donation, Mr. Wirth. (1) Gee, I wish we hadn't backed down on 'noalias'.
You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers. -- Steven Feiner
You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.
If you would keep a secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.
The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows. - Frank Zappa
Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done. -- James J. Ling
grep me no patterns and I'll tell you no lines.
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. - from John F. Kennedy's address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association September 12, 1960.
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
"Tell the truth and run." -- Yugoslav proverb
"Someone's been mean to you! Tell me who it is, so I can punch him tastefully." -- Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse
"I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk." -- Sidney Greenstreet, _The Maltese Falcon_
God grant me the senility to accept the things I cannot change, The frustration to try to change things I cannot affect, and the wisdom to tell the difference.
The sprung doors parted and I staggered out into the lobby's teak and flicker. Uniformed men stood by impassively like sentries in their trench. I slapped my key on the desk and nodded gravely. I was loaded enough to be unable to tell whether they could tell I was loaded. Would they mind? I was certainly too loaded to care. I moved to the door with boxy, schlep-shouldered strides. -- Martin Amis, _Money_
New York is a jungle, they tell you. You could go further, and say that New York is a jungle. New York is a jungle. Beneath the columns of the old rain forest, made of melting macadam, the mean Limpopo of swamped Ninth Avenue bears an angry argosy of crocs and dragons, tiger fish, noise machines, sweating rainmakers. On the corners stand witchdoctors and headhunters, babbling voodoo-men -- the natives, the jungle-smart natives. And at night, under the equatorial overgrowth and heat-holding cloud cover, you hear the ragged parrot-hoot and monkeysqueak of the sirens, and then fires flower to ward off monsters. Careful: the streets are sprung with pits and nets and traps. Hire a guide. Pack your snakebite gook and your blowdart serum. Take it seriously. You have to get a bit jungle-wise. -- Martin Amis, _Money_
"We never make assertions, Miss Taggart," said Hugh Akston. "That is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell -- we show. We do not claim -- we prove." -- Ayn Rand, _Atlas Shrugged_
"I turn on my television set. I see a young lady who goes under the guise of being a Christian, known all over the nation, dressed in skin-tight leather pants, shaking and wiggling her hips to the beat and rythm of the music as the strobe lights beat their patterns across the stage and the band plays the contemporary rock sound which cannot be differentiated from songs by the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, or anyone else. And you may try to tell me this is of God and that it is leading people to Christ, but I know better. -- Jimmy Swaggart, hypocritical sexual pervert and TV preacher, self-described pornography addict, "Two points of view: 'Christian' rock and roll.", The Evangelist, 17(8): 49-50.
"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
Q: I cant spell worth a dam. I hope your going too tell me what to do? A: Don't worry about how your articles look. Remember it's the message that counts, not the way it's presented. Ignore the fact that sloppy spelling in a purely written forum sends out the same silent messages that soiled clothing would when addressing an audience. -- Brad Templeton, _Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette_
"You must learn to run your kayak by a sort of ju-jitsu. You must learn to tell what the river will do to you, and given those parameters see how you can live with it. You must absorb its force and convert it to your users as best you can. Even with the quickness and agility of a kayak, you are not faster than the river, nor stronger, and you can beat it only by understanding it." -- Strung, Curtis and Perry, _Whitewater_
Everyone who comes in here wants three things: 1. They want it quick. 2. They want it good. 3. They want it cheap. I tell 'em to pick two and call me back. -- sign on the back wall of a small printing company in Delaware
"All the system's paths must be topologically and circularly interrelated for conceptually definitive, locally transformable, polyhedronal understanding to be attained in our spontaneous -- ergo, most economical -- geodesiccally structured thoughts." -- R. Buckminster Fuller [...and a total nonsequitur as far as I can tell. -kl]
"One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions... like a state of sheer terror." -- W. K. Hartmann
A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip. -- Caskie Stinnett, "Out of the Red"
First rule of public speaking. First, tell 'em what you're goin' to tell 'em; then tell 'em; then tell 'em what you've tole 'em.
Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.
How is the world ruled, and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, and they believe what they read. -- Karl Kraus, "Aphorisms and More Aphorisms"
I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth and they never believe me. -- Camillo Di Cavour
Political T.V. commercials prove one thing: some candidates can tell all their good points and qualifications in just 30 seconds.
Consultant, n.: (1) Someone you pay to take the watch off your wrist and tell you what time it is. (2) (For resume use) The working title of anyone who doesn't currently hold a job. Motto: Have Calculator, Will Travel.
Consultant, n.: Someone who'd rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth.
Encyclopedia Salesmen: Invite them all in. Nip out the back door. Phone the police and tell them your house is being burgled. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
HOW YOU CAN TELL THAT IT'S GOING TO BE A ROTTEN DAY: #1040 Your income tax refund cheque bounces.
HOW YOU CAN TELL THAT IT'S GOING TO BE A ROTTEN DAY: #15 Your pet rock snaps at you.
HOW YOU CAN TELL THAT IT'S GOING TO BE A ROTTEN DAY: #32: You call your answering service and they've never heard of you.
Information Center, n.: A room staffed by professional computer people whose job it is to tell you why you cannot have the information you require.
Kramer's Law: You can never tell which way the train went by looking at the tracks.
QOTD: "It's hard to tell whether he has an ace up his sleeve or if the ace is missing from his deck altogether."
QOTD: The only easy way to tell a hamster from a gerbil is that the gerbil has more dark meat.
The rules: (1) Thou shalt not worship other computer systems. (2) Thou shalt not impersonate Liberace or eat watermelon while sitting at the console keyboard. (3) Thou shalt not slap users on the face, nor staple their silly little card decks together. (4) Thou shalt not get physically involved with the computer system, especially if you're already married. (5) Thou shalt not use magnetic tapes as frisbees, nor use a disk pack as a stool to reach another disk pack. (6) Thou shalt not stare at the blinking lights for more than one eight hour shift. (7) Thou shalt not tell users that you accidentally destroyed their files/backup just to see the look on their little faces. (8) Thou shalt not enjoy cancelling a job. (9) Thou shalt not display firearms in the computer room. (10) Thou shalt not push buttons "just to see what happens".
University, n.: Like a software house, except the software's free, and it's usable, and it works, and if it breaks they'll quickly tell you how to fix it, and ... [Okay, okay, I'll leave it in, but I think you're destroying the credibility of the entire fortune program. Ed.]
User n.: A programmer who will believe anything you tell him.
Now Denial: To tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the only time that may ever be interesting again is the future. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"
"But Huey, you PROMISED!" "Tell 'em I lied."
It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed. -- Kim Hubbard
Never be afraid to tell the world who you are. -- Anonymous
Operator, please trace this call and tell me where I am.
Cerebus: I'd love to lick apricot brandy out of your navel. Jaka: Look, Cerebus-- Jaka has to tell you ... something Cerebus: If Cerebus had a navel, would you lick apricot brandy out of it? Jaka: Ugh! Cerebus: You don't like apricot brandy? -- Cerebus #6, "The Secret"
Q: How can you tell when a Burroughs salesman is lying? A: When his lips move.
Q: How many elephants can you fit in a VW Bug? A: Four. Two in the front, two in the back. Q: How can you tell if an elephant is in your refrigerator? A: There's a footprint in the mayo. Q: How can you tell if two elephants are in your refrigerator? A: There's two footprints in the mayo. Q: How can you tell if three elephants are in your refrigerator? A: The door won't shut. Q: How can you tell if four elephants are in your refrigerator? A: There's a VW Bug in your driveway.
Q: How many gradual (sorry, that's supposed to be "graduate") students does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: "I'm afraid we don't know, but make my stipend tax-free, give my advisor a $30,000 grant of the taxpayer's money, and I'm sure he can tell me how to do the shit work for him so he can take the credit for answering this incredibly vital question."
Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... 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"
I heard a definition of an intellectual, that I thought was very interesting: a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this had been an actual emergency, do you really think we'd stick around to tell you?
I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering. -- Pooh-Bah, "The Mikado"
To a New Yorker, all Californians are blond, even the blacks. There are, in fact, whole neighborhoods that are zoned only for blond people. The only way to tell the difference between California and Sweden is that the Swedes speak better English." -- From "East vs. West: The War Between the Coasts
A gangster assembled an engineer, a chemist, and a physicist. He explained that he was entering a horse in a race the following week and the three assembled guys had the job of assuring that the gangster's horse would win. They were to reconvene the day before the race to tell the gangster how they each propose to ensure a win. When they reconvened the gangster started with the engineer: Gangster: OK, Mr. engineer, what have you got? Engineer: Well, I've invented a way to weave metallic threads into the saddle blanket so that they will act as the plates of a battery and provide electrical shock to the horse. G: That's very good! But let's hear from the chemist. Chemist: I've synthesized a powerful stimulant that disolves into simple blood sugars after ten minutes and therefore cannot be detected in post-race tests. G: Excellent, excellent! But I want to hear from the physicist before I decide what to do. Physicist? Physicist: Well, first consider a spherical horse in simple harmonic motion...
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.
FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL: #1 A guinea pig is not from Guinea but a rodent from South America. A firefly is not a fly, but a beetle. A giant panda bear is really a member of the racoon family. A black panther is really a leopard that has a solid black coat rather then a spotted one. Peanuts are not really nuts. The majority of nuts grow on trees while peauts grow underground. They are classified as a legume -- part of the pea family. A cucumber is not a vegetable but a fruit.
FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL: #44 Zebras are colored with dark stripes on a light background.
Gosh that takes me back... or is it forward? That's the trouble with time travel, you never can tell." -- Doctor Who, "Androids of Tara"
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
"In this replacement Earth we're building they've given me Africa to do and of course I'm doing it with all fjords again because I happen to like them, and I'm old-fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it's not equatorial enough. Equatorial!" He gave a hollow laugh. "What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day." "And are you?" "No. That's where it all falls down, of course." "Pity," said Arthur with sympathy. "It sounded like quite a good life-style otherwise." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
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.
One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that sometimes you must work under adverse conditions... like a state of sheer terror. -- W.K. Hartmann
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.
How many hors d'oeuvres you are allowed to take off a tray being carried by a waiter at a nice party? Two, but there are ways around it, depending on the style of the hors d'oeuvre. If they're those little pastry things where you can't tell what's inside, you take one, bite off about two-thirds of it, then say: "This is cheese! I hate cheese!" Then you put the rest of it back on the tray and bite another one and go, "Darn it! Another cheese!" and so on. -- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette"
You can always tell the Christmas season is here when you start getting incredibly dense, tinfoil-and-ribbon- wrapped lumps in the mail. Fruitcakes make ideal gifts because the Postal Service has been unable to find a way to damage them. They last forever, largely because nobody ever eats them. In fact, many smart people save the fruitcakes they receive and send them back to the original givers the next year; some fruitcakes have been passed back and forth for hundreds of years. The easiest way to make a fruitcake is to buy a darkish cake, then pound some old, hard fruit into it with a mallet. Be sure to wear safety glasses. -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"
And if sometime, somewhere, someone asketh thee, "Who kilt thee?", tell them it 'twas the Doones of Bagworthy!
Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy. -- Tom Lehrer
Are there those in the land of the brave Who can tell me how I should behave When I am disgraced Because I erased A file I intended to save?
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
Don't let nobody tell you what you cannot do; don't let nobody tell you what's impossible for you; don't let nobody tell you what you got to do, or you'll never know ... what's on the other side of the rainbow... remember, if you don't follow your dreams, you'll never know what's on the other side of the rainbow... -- melba moore, "the other side of the rainbow"
Even in the moment of our earliest kiss, When sighed the straitened bud into the flower, Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this; And that I knew, though not the day and hour. Too season-wise am I, being country-bred, To tilt at autumn or defy the frost: Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did, I say with them, "What's out tonight is lost." I only hoped, with the mild hope of all Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree, A fairer summer and a later fall Than in these parts a man is apt to see, And sunny clusters ripened for the wine: I tell you this across the blackened vine. -- Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Even in the Moment of Our Earliest Kiss", 1931
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
God rest ye CS students now, The bearings on the drum are gone, Let nothing you dismay. The disk is wobbling, too. The VAX is down and won't be up, We've found a bug in Lisp, and Algol Until the first of May. Can't tell false from true. The program that was due this morn, And now we find that we can't get Won't be postponed, they say. At Berkeley's 4.2. (chorus) (chorus) We've just received a call from DEC, And now some cheery news for you, They'll send without delay The network's also dead, A monitor called RSuX We'll have to print your files on It takes nine hundred K. The line printer instead. The staff committed suicide, The turnaround time's nineteen weeks. We'll bury them today. And only cards are read. (chorus) (chorus) And now we'd like to say to you CHORUS: Oh, tidings of comfort and joy, Before we go away, Comfort and joy, We hope the news we've brought to you Oh, tidings of comfort and joy. Won't ruin your whole day. You've got another program due, tomorrow, by the way. (chorus) -- to God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Hark, the Herald Tribune sings, Advertising wondrous things. Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy. -- Tom Lehrer
Have you seen the old man in the closed down market, Kicking up the papers in his worn out shoes? In his eyes you see no pride, hands hang loosely at his side Yesterdays papers, telling yesterdays news. How can you tell me you're lonely, And say for you the sun don't shine? Let me take you by the hand Lead you through the streets of London I'll show you something to make you change your mind... Have you seen the old man outside the sea-man's mission Memories fading like the metal ribbons that he wears. In our winter city the rain cries a little pity For one more forgotten hero and a world that doesn't care...
Hier liegt ein Mann ganz obnegleich; Im Leibe dick, an Suden reich. Wir haben ihn in das Grab gesteckt, Here lies a man with sundry flaws Weil es uns dunkt er sei verreckt. And numerous Sins upon his head; We buried him today because As far as we can tell, he's dead. -- PDQ Bach's epitaph, as requested by his cousin Betty Sue Bach and written by the local doggeral catcher; "The Definitive Biography of PDQ Bach", Peter Schickele
I am changing my name to Chrysler I am going down to Washington, D.C. I will tell some power broker What they did for Iacocca Will be perfectly acceptable to me! I am changing my name to Chrysler, I am heading for that great receiving line. When they hand a million grand out, I'll be standing with my hand out, Yessir, I'll get mine!
I never saw a purple cow I never hope to see one But I can tell you anyhow I'd rather see than be one. -- Gellett Burgess I've never seen a purple cow I never hope to see one But from the milk we're getting now There certainly must be one -- Odgen Nash Ah, yes, I wrote "The Purple Cow" I'm sorry now I wrote it But I can tell you anyhow I'll kill you if you quote it. -- Gellett Burgess, many years later
I really hate this damned machine I wish that they would sell it. It never does quite what I want But only what I tell it.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove And in our bound partition never part. Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die Had he but known such a-squared cos 2(thi)! -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
If Dr. Seuss Were a Technical Writer..... Here's an easy game to play. Here's an easy thing to say: If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report! If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash! You can't say this? What a shame, sir! We'll find you another game, sir. If the label on the cable on the table at your house, Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol, That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse, Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, 'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang! When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk, And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc, Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to ram your rom. Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom! -- DementDJ@ccip.perkin-elmer.com (DementDJ) [rec.humor.funny]
If I could read your mind, love, What a tale your thoughts could tell, Just like a paperback novel, The kind the drugstore sells, When you reach the part where the heartaches come, The hero would be me, Heroes often fail, You won't read that book again, because the ending is just too hard to take. I walk away, like a movie star, Who gets burned in a three way script, Enter number two, A movie queen to play the scene Of bringing all the good things out in me, But for now, love, let's be real I never thought I could act this way, And I've got to say that I just don't get it, I don't know where we went wrong but the feeling is gone And I just can't get it back... -- Gordon Lightfoot, "If You Could Read My Mind"
If I traveled to the end of the rainbow As Dame Fortune did intend, Murphy would be there to tell me The pot's at the other end. -- Bert Whitney
It's so confusing choosing sides in the heat of the moment, just to see if it's real, Oooh, it's so erotic having you tell me how it should feel, But I'm avoiding all the hard cold facts that I got to face, So ask me just one question when this magic night is through, Could it have been just anyone or did it have to be you? -- Billy Joel, "Glass Houses"
John the Baptist after poisoning a thief, Looks up at his hero, the Commander-in-Chief, Saying tell me great leader, but please make it brief Is there a hole for me to get sick in? The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly, Saying death to all those who would whimper and cry. And dropping a barbell he points to the sky, Saying the sun is not yellow, it's chicken. -- Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues"
`Just the place for a Snark!' the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide By a finger entwined in his hair. 'Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.'
`Just the place for a Snark!' the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide By a finger entwined in his hair. `Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.'
Ladies and Gentlemen, Hobos and Tramps, Cross-eyed mosquitos and bowlegged ants, I come before you to stand behind you To tell you of something I know nothing about. Next Thursday (which is good Friday), There will be a convention held in the Women's Club which is strictly for Men. Admission is free, pay at the door, Pull up a chair, and sit on the floor. It was a summer's day in winter, And the snow was raining fast, As a barefoot boy with shoes on, Stood sitting in the grass. Oh, that bright day in the dead of night, Two dead men got up to fight. Three blind men to see fair play, Forty mutes to yell "Hooray"! Back to back, they faced each other, Drew their swords and shot each other. A deaf policeman heard the noise, Came and arrested those two dead boys.
Ladles and Jellyspoons! I come before you to stand behind you, To tell you something I know nothing about. Since next Thursday will be Good Friday, There will be a fathers' meeting, for mothers only. Wear your best clothes, if you don't have any, And please stay at home if you can possibly be there. Admission is free, please pay at the door. Have a seat on me: please sit on the floor. No matter where you manage to sit, The man in the balcony will certainly spit. We thank you for your unkind attention, And would now like to present our next act: "The Four Corners of the Round Table."
Louie Louie, me gotta go Louie Louie, me gotta go Fine little girl she waits for me Me catch the ship for cross the sea Me sail the ship all alone Three nights and days me sail the sea Me never thinks me make it home Me think of girl constantly (chorus) On the ship I dream she there I smell the rose in her hair Me see Jamaica moon above (chorus, guitar solo) It won't be long, me see my love I take her in my arms and then Me tell her I never leave again -- The real words to The Kingsmen's classic "Louie Louie"
"My name is Sue! How do you do?! Now you gonna die!" Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes, And he went down, but to my surprise, Come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear. So I busted a chair right across his teeth, And we crashed through the walls and into the streets, Kickin' and a-gougin' in the mud and the blood and beer. Now I tell you, I've fought tougher men, But I really can't remember when: He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile. But I heard him laugh and then I heard him cuss, And he went for his gun, but I pulled mine first, And he sat there lookin' at me, and I saw him smile. He said: "Son, this world is rough, And if a man's gonna make it he's gotta be tough, And I knew I wouldn't be there to help you along. So I give you that name and I said goodbye, And I knew you'd have to get tough or die, And it's that name that's helped to make you strong! -- Johnny Cash, "A Boy Named Sue"
Now I lay me down to study, I pray the Lord I won't go nutty. And if I fail to learn this junk, I pray the Lord that I won't flunk. But if I do, don't pity me at all, Just lay my bones in the study hall. Tell my teacher I've done my best, Then pile my books upon my chest.
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus Where the three-body problem is solved, Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K, And the cold virus never evolved. (chorus) We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high, Our ball bearings are perfectly round. Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed, And a kilogram weighs half a pound. (chorus) If we run out of space for our burgeoning race No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart, If we just find a big enough wrench. (chorus) I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space, And living up here is a bore. Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye 'Cause I'm moving next week to L4! (chorus) CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange, Where the space debris always collects, We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams: Solar power and zero-gee sex. -- to Home on the Range
On a morning from a Bogart movie, in a country where they turned back time, You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime. She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain. Don't bother asking for explanations, she'll just tell you that she came In the Year of the Cat. She doesn't give you time for questions, as she locks up your arm in hers, And you follow 'till your sense of which direction completely disappears. By the blue-tiled walls near the market stall there's a hidden door she leads you to. These days, she say, I feel my life just like a river running through The Year of the Cat. Well, she looks at you so coolly, And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea. She comes in incense and patchouli, So you take her to find what's waiting inside The Year of the Cat. Well, morning comes and you're still with her, but the bus and the tourists are gone, And you've thrown away your choice and lost your ticket, so you have to stay on. But the drum-beat strains of the night remain in the rhythm of the new-born day. You know some time you're bound to leave her, but for now you're going to stay In the Year of the Cat. -- Al Stewart, "Year of the Cat"
One pill makes you larger, And if you go chasing rabbits And one pill makes you small. And you know you're going to fall. And the ones that mother gives you, Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar Don't do anything at all. Has given you the call. Go ask Alice Call Alice When she's ten feet tall. When she was just small. When men on the chessboard When logic and proportion Get up and tell you where to go. Have fallen sloppy dead, And you've just had some kind of And the White Knight is talking mushroom backwards And your mind is moving low. And the Red Queen's lost her head Go ask Alice Remember what the dormouse said: I think she'll know. Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head. -- Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"
So... so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell? Blue skies from pain? Did they get you to trade Can you tell a green field Your heroes for ghosts? From a cold steel rail? Hot ashes for trees? A smile from a veil? Hot air for a cool breeze? Do you think you can tell? Cold comfort for change? Did you exchange A walk on part in a war For the lead role in a cage? -- Pink Floyd, "Wish You Were Here"
Take a look around you, tell me what you see, A girl who thinks she's ordinary lookin' she has got the key. If you can get close enough to look into her eyes There's something special right behind the bitterness she hides. And you're fair game, You never know what she'll decide, you're fair game, Just relax, enjoy the ride. Find a way to reach her, make yourself a fool, But do it with a little class, disregard the rules. 'Cause this one knows the bottom line, couldn't get a date. The ugly duckling striking back, and she'll decide her fate. (chorus) The ones you never notice are the ones you have to watch. She's pleasant and she's friendly while she's looking at your crotch. Try your hand at conversation, gossip is a lie, And sure enough she'll take you home and make you wanna die. (chorus) -- Crosby, Stills, Nash, "Fair Game"
Tell me why the stars do shine, Tell me why the ivy twines, Tell me why the sky's so blue, And I will tell you just why I love you. Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine, Phototropism makes ivy twine, Rayleigh scattering makes sky so blue, Sexual hormones are why I love you.
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 bank called to tell me that I'm overdrawn, Some freaks are burning crosses out on my front lawn, And I can'tbelieve* it, all the Cheetos are gone, It's just ONE OF THOSE DAYS! -- Weird Al Yankovic, "One of Those Days"
The smiling Spring comes in rejoicing, And surly Winter grimly flies. Now crystal clear are the falling waters, And bonnie blue are the sunny skies. Fresh o'er the mountains breaks forth the morning, The ev'ning gilds the oceans's swell: All creatures joy in the sun's returning, And I rejoice in my bonnie Bell. The flowery Spring leads sunny Summer, The yellow Autumn presses near; Then in his turn come gloomy Winter, Till smiling Spring again appear. Thus seasons dancing, life advancing, Old Time and Nature their changes tell; But never ranging, still unchanging, I adore my bonnie Bell. -- Robert Burns, "My Bonnie Bell"
The soldier came knocking upon the queen's door. He said, "I am not fighting for you any more." The queen knew she had seen his face someplace before, And slowly she let him inside. He said, "I see you now, and you're so very young, But I've seen more battles lost than I have battles won, And I have this intuition that it's all for your fun. And now will you tell me why?" -- Suzanne Vega, "The Queen and The Soldier"
The Thought Police are here. They've come To put you under cardiac arrest. And as they drag you through the door They tell you that you've failed the test. -- Buggles, "Living in the Plastic Age"
They told me you had proven it When they discovered our results About a month before. Their hair began to curl The proof was valid, more or less Instead of understanding it But rather less than more. We'd run the thing through PRL. He sent them word that we would try Don't tell a soul about all this To pass where they had failed For it must ever be And after we were done, to them A secret, kept from all the rest The new proof would be mailed. Between yourself and me. My notion was to start again Ignoring all they'd done We quickly turned it into code To see if it would run.
This is the story of the bee Whose sex is very hard to see You cannot tell the he from the she But she can tell, and so can he The little bee is never still She has no time to take the pill And that is why, in times like these There are so many sons of bees.
Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?" Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand. -- The Books of Bokonon
Under the wide and heavy VAX Dig my grave and let me relax Long have I lived, and many my hacks And I lay me down with a will. These be the words that tell the way: "Here he lies who piped 64K, Brought down the machine for nearly a day, And Rogue playing to an awful standstill."
Wanna tell you all a story 'bout a man named Jed, A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed. But then one day he was shootin' at some food, When up through the ground come a bubblin' crude -- oil, that is; black gold; 'Texas tea' ... Well the next thing ya know, old Jed's a millionaire. The kinfolk said, 'Jed, move away from there!' They said, 'Californy is the place ya oughta be', So they loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly -- Hills, that is; swimmin' pools; movie stars.
Watching girls go passing by It ain't the latest thing I'm just standing in a doorway I'm just trying to make some sense Out of these girls passing by A smile relieves the heart that grieves The tales they tell of men Remember what I said I'm not waiting on a lady I'm not waiting on a lady I'm just waiting on a friend I'm just waiting on a friend ... Don't need a whore Don't need no booze Don't need a virgin priest Ooh, making love and breaking hearts But I need someone I can cry to It is a game for youth I need someone to protect But I'm not waiting on a lady I'm just waiting on a friend I'm just waiting on a friend -- Rolling Stones, "Waiting on a Friend"
When I think about myself, I almost laugh myself to death, My life has been one great big joke, Sixty years in these folks' world A dance that's walked The child I works for calls me girl A song that's spoke, I say "Yes ma'am" for working's sake. I laugh so hard I almost choke Too proud to bend When I think about myself. Too poor to break, I laugh until my stomach ache, When I think about myself. My folks can make me split my side, I laughed so hard I nearly died, The tales they tell, sound just like lying, They grow the fruit, But eat the rind, I laugh until I start to crying, When I think about my folks. -- Maya Angelou
When my fist clenches crack it open, Before I use it and lose my cool. When I smile tell me some bad news, Before I laugh and act like a fool. And if I swallow anything evil, Put you finger down my throat. And if I shiver please give me a blanket, Keep me warm let me wear your coat No one knows what it's like to be the bad man, to be the sad man. Behind blue eyes. No one knows what its like to be hated, to be fated, To telling only lies. -- The Who
While walking down a crowded City street the other day, I heard a little urchin To a comrade turn and say, "Say, Chimmey, lemme tell youse, I'd be happy as a clam If only I was de feller dat Me mudder t'inks I am. "She t'inks I am a wonder, My friends, be yours a life of toil An' she knows her little lad Or undiluted joy, Could never mix wit' nuttin' You can learn a wholesome lesson Dat was ugly, mean or bad. From that small, untutored boy. Oh, lot o' times I sit and t'ink Don't aim to be an earthly saint How nice, 'twould be, gee whiz! With eyes fixed on a star: If a feller was de feller Just try to be the fellow that Dat his mudder t'inks he is." Your mother thinks you are. -- Will S. Adkin, "If I Only Was the Fellow"
Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed. -- A.E. Housman
Don't tell any big lies today. Small ones can be just as effective.
FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL: #14 The Baby Ruth candy bar was not named after George Herman "The Babe" Ruth, but after the oldest daughter of President Grover Cleveland.
My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world. -- Muhammad Ali
Our [softball] team usually puts the other woman at second base, where the maximum possible number of males can get there on short notice to help out in case of emergency. As far as I can tell, our second basewoman is a pretty good baseball player, better than I am, anyway, but there's no way to know for sure because if the ball gets anywhere near her, a male comes barging over from, say, right field, to deal with it. She's been on the team for three seasons now, but the males still don't trust her. They know, deep in their souls, that if she had to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she probably would elect to save the infant's life, without ever considering whether there were men on base. -- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag"
Hi there! This is just a note from me, to you, to tell you, the person reading this note, that I can't think up any more famous quotes, jokes, nor bizarre stories, so you may as well go home.
I'm a soldier, not a diplomat. I can only tell the truth. -- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy", stardate 3198.9
Sometimes a man will tell his bartender things he'll never tell his doctor. -- Dr. Phillip Boyce, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown.
You say you are lying. But if everything you say is a lie, then you are telling the truth. You cannot tell the truth because everything you say is a lie. You lie, you tell the truth ... but you cannot, for you lie. -- Norman the android, "I, Mudd", stardate 4513.3
"`You know,' said Arthur, `it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die from asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.' `Why, what did she tell you?' `I don't know, I didn't listen.'" - Arthur coping with certain death as best as he could.
FORD Tell me Arthur... ARTHUR Yes? FORD This boulder we're stuck under, how big would you say it was? Roughly? ARTHUR Oh, about the size of Coventry Cathedral. FORD Do you think we could move it? (Arthur doesn't reply) Just asking. - Ford and Arthur in a tricky situation, Fit the Eighth.
"Arthur yawed wildly as his skin tried to jump one way and his skeleton the other, whilst his brain tried to work out which of his ears it most wanted to crawl out of. `Bet you weren't expecting to see me again,' said the monster, which Arthur couldn't help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing as he had never met the creature before. He could tell that he hadn't met the creature before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights." - Arthur discovering who had diverted him from going to a party.
I tell ya, gambling never agreed with me. Last week I went to the track and they shot my horse with the opening gun. Well, just last week I was at a Chinese restaurant and when I opened my fortune cookie I found the guy's check sitting at the next table. I said, "Hey, buddy, I got your check", he said, "Thanks." -- Rodney Dangerfield
If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans. -- Woody Allen
My friends, I am here to tell you of the wonderous continent known as Africa. Well we left New York drunk and early on the morning of February 31. We were 15 days on the water, and 3 on the boat when we finally arrived in Africa. Upon our arrival we immediately set up a rigorous schedule: Up at 6:00, breakfast, and back in bed by 7:00. Pretty soon we were back in bed by 6:30. Now Africa is full of big game. The first day I shot two bucks. That was the biggest game we had. Africa is primerally inhabited by Elks, Moose and Knights of Pithiests. The elks live up in the mountains and come down once a year for their annual conventions. And you should see them gathered around the water hole, which they leave immediately when they discover it's full of water. They weren't looking for a water hole. They were looking for an alck hole. One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my pajamas, I don't know. Then we tried to remove the tusks. That's a tough word to say, tusks. As I said we tried to remove the tusks, but they were imbedded so firmly we couldn't get them out. But in Alabama the Tuscaloosa, but that is totally irrelephant to what I was saying. We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed. So we're going back in a few years... -- Julius H. Marx [Groucho]
"You know, it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young!" "Why, what did she tell you?" "I don't know, I didn't listen." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
FORTUNE'S RANDOM QUOTES FROM MATCH GAME 75, NO. 1: Gene Rayburn: We'd like to close with a thought for the day, friends --- something ... Someone: (interrupting) Uh-oh Gene Rayburn: ...pithy, full of wisdom --- and we call on the Poet Laureate, Lipsy Russell Lipsy Russell: The young people are very different today, and there is one sure way to know: Kids to use to ask where they came from, now they'll tell you where you can go. All: (laughter)
The scene is dull. Tell him to put more life into his dying. -Samuel Goldwyn
Of course I can keep secrets. It's the people I tell them to that can't keep them. -Anthony Haden-Guest
What If Bill Gates Was a Stand-Up Comedian? 1. None of his jokes would be funny. 2. Subliminal message hyping Microsoft and Windows 98 would be inserted throughout his performance. 3. The audio system (running Windows NT) would always crash right before Bill got to a punch line. At that time one of the managers would announce, "Please hold tight while we diagnose this intermittent issue." 4. Tickets for Bill's show would be handed out for free in an attempt to attract customers away from Netscape's shows. 5. Industry pundits would call Bill's show "innovative" and would ask "Why doesn't IBM have a stand-up routine? This is exactly why OS/2 is failing in the market." 6. Bill's show would be called "ActiveHumor 98" 7. In a perfect imitation of his Windows 95 OS, Bill wouldn't be able to tell a joke and walk around at the same time. 8. Audience members would have to sign a License Agreement in which one of the terms is "I agree never to watch Linus Torvalds' show, 'GNU/Humorux'". 9. All audience members would receive a free CD of Internet Explorer 4.0, with FakeJava(R) and ActiveHex(tm) technology. 10. Bill Gates would appear on Saturday Night Live, causing ratings to drop even further.
Statements recently seen on Slashdot: "The Internet interprets advertising as damage and routes around it." "Accept risk. Accept responsibility. Put a lawyer out of business." "A beowulf cluster of Cisco routers? Isn't that the Internet?" "Geeks aren't interested in politics because government doesn't double its efficiency and speed once every 18 months." "Windows 98 hasn't crashed for me once in over a year, either. Oh, wait, I haven't booted it in over a year." "For more than 4 generations the IT Professionals were the guardians of quality and stability in software. Before the dark times. Before Microsoft..." "You can tell how desperate they are by counting the number of times they say 'innovate' in their press releases."
Mad Programmer Commits Suicide KENNETT, MO -- For two years Doug Carter toiled away in his basement computer lab working on his own 'Dougnix' operating system. Apparently he was sick of Windows 95 so he decided to create his own OS, based loosely on Unix. He had developed his own 'DougUI' window manager, Doug++ compiler, DougFS filesystem, and other integrated tools. All was going well until last week when he hooked his computer up to the Internet for the first time. It was then that he stumbled on to www.linux.org. Reports are sketchy about what happened next. We do know he committed suicide days after, leaving behind a rambling suicide note. Part of the note says: "I've wasted the past two years of my life... Wasted... Gone... Forever... Never return to. [illegible] Why did I bother creating my own OS... when Linux is exactly what I needed!?!?!?! If I had only known about Linux! Why someone didn't tell me? [illegible] Wasted! Aggghhh!" [The rest of the note is filled with incomprehensible assembly language ramblings.]
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.
BSOD Simulator Users of Red Hat 6.0 are discovering a new feature that hasn't been widely advertised: a Blue Screen of Death simulator. By default, the bsodsim program activates when the user hits the virtually unused SysRq key (this is customizable) causing the system to switch to a character cell console to display a ficticious Blue Screen. Red Hat hails the bsodsim program as the "boss key" for the Linux world. One RH engineer said, "Workers are smuggling Linux boxes into companies that exclusively use Windows. This is all good and well until the PHB walks by and comments, 'That doesn't look like Windows...' With bsodsim, that problem is solved. The worker can hit the emergency SysRq key, and the system will behave just like Windows..." The bsodsim program doesn't stop at just showing a simulated error message. If the boss doesn't walk away, the worker can continue the illusion by hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL, which causes a simulated reboot. After showing the usual boot messages, bsodsim will run a simulated SCANDISK program indefinitely. The boss won't be able to tell the difference. If the boss continues to hang around, the worker can say, "SCANDISK is really taking a long time... maybe we should upgrade our computers. And don't you have something better to do than watch this computer reboot for the tenth time today?"
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(); }
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
The Next Big Thing: "Clairvoyant Consultants" Nobody likes to deal with tech support or customer service reps. A growing number of people are getting sick of being put on hold for three hours and then paying ridiculous "per incident" fees so some Microserf can tell them to "reinstall the operating system!" Desperate users are turning to an unlikely source to diagnose and fix software problems: psychics. Palm[Pilot] readers, 1-900 number operators, and clairvoyant consultants are quickly becoming the hottest careers in the tech sector. Explained Madam Cosmos, owner of the Main Street Mysticism Temple in Keokuk, Iowa, "With my special powers, I can track down the source of any problem. Got a rogue Registry entry that's causing Bluescreens? I'll find it. Missing a curly bracket in your Perl program but can't locate it because the error messages are so unhelpful? I'll know where it is even before you walk in my door."
Official National Anthem Of The Geek Paradise Of Humorixia (second verse, abridged) Patents, copyrights, and trademarks, Those evil lawyers are worse than sharks. We can't escape their vice-like grip, We're slaves to their class-action whip, We all must fight this evil abomination, Join together and strive for world domination! Tell those bloodsucking ticks, "See ya!" And move on over to Humor-ix-ia! Kill all the lawyers! Oh, kill all the lawyers! Let's "kill -9 lawyers" now! Let's "kill -9 lawyers" now! ...Humorixia! There is no conspiracy!
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of sense to know how to lie well. -- Samuel Butler
As many of you know, I am taking a class here at UNC on Personality. One of the tests to determine personality in our book was so incredibly useful and interesting, I just had to share it. Answer each of the following items "true" or "false" 1. I think beavers work too hard. 2. I use shoe polish to excess. 3. God is love. 4. I like mannish children. 5. I have always been diturbed by the sight of Lincoln's ears. 6. I always let people get ahead of me at swimming pools. 7. Most of the time I go to sleep without saying goodbye. 8. I am not afraid of picking up door knobs. 9. I believe I smell as good as most people. 10. Frantic screams make me nervous. 11. It's hard for me to say the right thing when I find myself in a room full of mice. 12. I would never tell my nickname in a crisis. 13. A wide necktie is a sign of disease. 14. As a child I was deprived of licorice. 15. I would never shake hands with a gardener. 16. My eyes are always cold. 17. Cousins are not to be trusted. 18. When I look down from a high spot, I want to spit. 19. I am never startled by a fish. 20. I have never gone to pieces over the weekend.
But I find the old notions somehow appealing. Not that I want to go back to them -- it is outrageous to have some outer authority tell you what is proper use and abuse of your own faculties, and it is ludicrous to hold reason higher than body or feeling. Still there is something true and profoundly sane about the belief that acts like murder or theft or assault violate the doer as well as the done to. We might even, if we thought this way, have less crime. The popular view of crime, as far as I can deduce it from the movies and television, is that it is a breaking of a rule by someone who thinks they can get away with that; implicitly, everyone would like to break the rule, but not everyone is arrogant enough to imagine they can get away with it. It therefore becomes very important for the rule upholders to bring such arrogance down. -- Marilyn French, "The Woman's Room"
Don't tell me that worry doesn't do any good. I know better. The things I worry about don't happen. -- Watchman Examiner
Don't tell me what you dreamed last night for I've been reading Freud.
Give me a sleeping pill and tell me your troubles.
Go out and tell a lie that will make the whole family proud of you. -- Cadmus, to Pentheus, in "The Bacchae" by Euripides
I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to tell such LIES!
"I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But glory doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all." -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass"
If some people didn't tell you, you'd never know they'd been away on vacation.
If you cannot in the long run tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing was worthless. -- Edwim Schrodinger
It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar. -- Jerome K. Jerome
It takes two to tell the truth: one to speak and one to hear.
Never argue with a fool -- people might not be able to tell the difference.
Never tell a lie unless it is absolutely convenient.
People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first.
"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 unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth. -- Benjamin Disraeli
Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head.
Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
Tell me what to think!!!
The Least Successful Defrosting Device The all-time record here is held by Mr. Peter Rowlands of Lancaster whose lips became frozen to his lock in 1979 while blowing warm air on it. "I got down on my knees to breathe into the lock. Somehow my lips got stuck fast." While he was in the posture, an old lady passed an inquired if he was all right. "Alra? Igmmlptk", he replied at which point she ran away. "I tried to tell her what had happened, but it came out sort of... muffled," explained Mr. Rowlands, a pottery designer. He was trapped for twenty minutes ("I felt a bit foolish") until constant hot breathing brought freedom. He was subsequently nicknamed "Hot Lips". -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
There are people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying. -- Josh Billings
You can always tell luck from ability by its duration.
You can always tell the people that are forging the new frontier. They're the ones with arrows sticking out of their backs.
Your Co-worker Could Be a Space Alien, Say Experts ...Here's How You Can Tell Many Americans work side by side with space aliens who look human -- but you can spot these visitors by looking for certain tip-offs, say experts. They listed 10 signs to watch for: (3) Bizarre sense of humor. Space aliens who don't understand earthly humor may laugh during a company training film or tell jokes that no one understands, said Steiger. (6) Misuses everyday items. "A space alien may use correction fluid to paint its nails," said Steiger. (8) Secretive about personal life-style and home. "An alien won't discuss details or talk about what it does at night or on weekends." (10) Displays a change of mood or physical reaction when near certain high-tech hardware. "An alien may experience a mood change when a microwave oven is turned on," said Steiger. The experts pointed out that a co-worker would have to display most if not all of these traits before you can positively identify him as a space alien. -- National Enquirer, Michael Cassels, August, 1984. [I thought everybody laughed at company training films. Ed.]
This is probably the first and last time I will openly agree for someone to tell me were to go, and do it ;-). - Andre Hedrick on linux-kernel
<phillips> as a perl god, just tell me how to find any string with kernel-doc on it <phillips> I'll trade for some heavyduty vfs consulting one day ;-) - Daniel Phillips on #kernelnewbies
Drivers are a more complex issue. I'm not opposed to binary only drivers, providing its easy to tell they are there and dump all bug reports about them. Freedom generally includes the right to give up freedom. I'll tell people its a bad idea but once they get caught, well it was their right to do so... - Alan Cox on linux-kernel
Are you a parent? Do you sometimes find yourself unsure as to what to say in those awkward situations? Worry no more... Do as I say, not as I do. Do me a favour and don't tell me about it. I don't want to know. What did you do this time? If it didn't taste bad, it wouldn't be good for you. When I was your age... I won't love you if you keep doing that. Think of all the starving children in India. If there's one thing I hate, it's a liar. I'm going to kill you. Way to go, clumsy. If you don't like it, you can lump it.
Children are like cats, they can tell when you don't like them. That's when they come over and violate your body space.
-- Gifts for Children -- This is easy. You never have to figure out what to get for children, because they will tell you exactly what they want. They spend months and months researching these kinds of things by watching Saturday- morning cartoon-show advertisements. Make sure you get your children exactly what they ask for, even if you disapprove of their choices. If your child thinks he wants Murderous Bob, the Doll with the Face You Can Rip Right Off, you'd better get it. You may be worried that it might help to encourage your child's antisocial tendencies, but believe me, you have not seen antisocial tendencies until you've seen a child who is convinced that he or she did not get the right gift. -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
I tell ya, I was an ugly kid. I was so ugly that my dad kept the kid's picture that came with the wallet he bought. -- Rodney Dangerfield
<Flav> Win 98 Psychic edition: We'll tell you where you're going tomorrow
<MrCurious> by the power of greyskull <MrCurious> someone tell me the ban to place <Sopwith> mrcurious: .debian.org, .novare.net <philX> *.debian.org. that's awesome. -- Seen on LinuxNet #linux
"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
* aj thinks Kb^Zzz ought to pick different things to dream about than general resolutions and policy changes. <Kb^Zzz> aj - tell me about it, this is a Bad Sign
<BenC> -include ../../debian/el33t.h <BenC> sendmail build...strange header name :) <isildur> hahaha * netgod laffs <netgod> BenC: can u tell i used to maintain sendmail? :P <BenC> heh :)
<netgod> my client has been owned severely <netgod> this guy got root, ran packet sniffers, installed .rhosts and backdoors, put a whole new dir in called /lib/" ", which has a full suite of smurfing and killing tools <netgod> the only mistake was not deleting the logfiles <netgod> question is how was root hacked, and that i couldnt tell u <netgod> it is, of course, not a debian box * netgod notes the debian box is the only one left untouched by the hacker -- wonder why
<Sanaya> you guys are all sick! sick sick sick I tell ya ;)
A blind rabbit was hopping through the woods, tripping over logs and crashing into trees. At the same time, a blind snake was slithering through the same forest, with identical results. They chanced to collide head-on in a clearing. "Please excuse me, sir, I'm blind and I bumped into you accidentally," apologized the rabbit. "That's quite all right," replied the snake, "I have the same problem!" "All my life I've been wondering what I am," said the rabbit, "Do you think you could help me find out?" "I'll try," said the snake. He gently coiled himself around the rabbit. "Well, you're covered with soft fur, you have a little fluffy tail and long ears. You're... hmmm... you're probably a bunny rabbit!" "Great!" said the rabbit. "Thanks, I really owe you one!" "Well," replied the snake, "I don't know what I am, either. Do you suppose you could try and tell me?" The rabbit ran his paws all over the snake. "Well, you're low, cold and slimey..." And, as he ran one paw underneath the snake, "and you have no balls. You must be an attorney!"
[District Attorneys] learn in District Attorney School that there are two sure-fire ways to get a lot of favorable publicity: (1) Go down and raid all the lockers in the local high school and confiscate 53 marijuana cigarettes and put them in a pile and hold a press conference where you announce that they have a street value of $850 million. These raids never fail, because ALL high schools, including brand-new, never-used ones, have at least 53 marijuana cigarettes in the lockers. As far as anyone can tell, the locker factory puts them there. (2) Raid an "adult book store" and hold a press conference where you announce you are charging the owner with 850 counts of being a piece of human sleaze. This also never fails, because you always get a conviction. A juror at a pornography trial is not about to state for the record that he finds nothing obscene about a movie where actors engage in sexual activities with live snakes and a fire extinguisher. He is going to convict the bookstore owner, and vote for the death penalty just to make sure nobody gets the wrong impression. -- Dave Barry, "Pornography"
Humor in the Court: Q. What is your brother-in-law's name? A. Borofkin. Q. What's his first name? A. I can't remember. Q. He's been your brother-in-law for years, and you can't remember his first name? A. No. I tell you I'm too excited. (Rising from the witness chair and pointing to Mr. Borofkin.) Nathan, for God's sake, tell them your first name!
Humor in the Court: Q: Did you tell your lawyer that your husband had offered you indignities? A: He didn't offer me nothing; he just said I could have the furniture.
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".
All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies. -- The Book of Bokonon / Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Before he became a hermit, Zarathud was a young Priest, and took great delight in making fools of his opponents in front of his followers. One day Zarathud took his students to a pleasant pasture and there he confronted The Sacred Chao while She was contentedly grazing. "Tell me, you dumb beast," demanded the Priest in his commanding voice, "why don't you do something worthwhile? What is your Purpose in Life, anyway?" Munching the tasty grass, The Sacred Chao replied "MU". (The Chinese ideogram for NO-THING.) Upon hearing this, absolutely nobody was enlightened. Primarily because nobody understood Chinese. -- Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters"
"Cheshire-Puss," she began, "would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "I don't care much where--" said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
Nasrudin called at a large house to collect for charity. The servant said "My master is out." Nasrudin replied, "Tell your master that next time he goes out, he should not leave his face at the window. Someone might steal it."
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.
One day the King decided that he would force all his subjects to tell the truth. A gallows was erected in front of the city gates. A herald announced, "Whoever would enter the city must first answer the truth to a question which will be put to him." Nasrudin was first in line. The captain of the guard asked him, "Where are you going? Tell the truth -- the alternative is death by hanging." "I am going," said Nasrudin, "to be hanged on that gallows." "I don't believe you." "Very well, if I have told a lie, then hang me!" "But that would make it the truth!" "Exactly," said Nasrudin, "your truth."
One monk said to the other, "The fish has flopped out of the net! How will it live?" The other said, "When you have gotten out of the net, I'll tell you."
Reality is bad enough, why should I tell the truth? -- Patrick Sky
Two men were sitting over coffee, contemplating the nature of things, with all due respect for their breakfast. "I wonder why it is that toast always falls on the buttered side," said one. "Tell me," replied his friend, "why you say such a thing. Look at this." And he dropped his toast on the floor, where it landed on the dry side. "So, what have you to say for your theory now?" "What am I to say? You obviously buttered the wrong side."
You can never tell which way the train went by looking at the tracks.
(I tried to get some documentation out of Digital on this, but as far as I can tell even _they_ don't have it ;-) -- Linus Torvalds, in an article on a dnserver
> I get the following error messages at bootup, could anyone tell me > what they mean? > fcntl_setlk() called by process 51 (lpd) with broken flock() emulation They mean that you have not read the documentation when upgrading the kernel. -- seen on c.o.l.misc
A traveling salesman was driving past a farm when he saw a pig with three wooden legs executing a magnificent series of backflips and cartwheels. Intrigued, he drove up to the farmhouse, where he found an old farmer sitting in the yard watching the pig. "That's quite a pig you have there, sir" said the salesman. "Sure is, son," the farmer replied. "Why, two years ago, my daughter was swimming in the lake and bumped her head and damned near drowned, but that pig swam out and dragged her back to shore." "Amazing!" the salesman exlaimed. "And that's not the only thing. Last fall I was cuttin' wood up on the north forty when a tree fell on me. Pinned me to the ground, it did. That pig run up and wiggled underneath that tree and lifted it off of me. Saved my life." "Fantastic! the salesman said. But tell me, how come the pig has three wooden legs?" The farmer stared at the newcomer in amazement. "Mister, when you got an amazin' pig like that, you don't eat him all at once."
American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective employees be honest and hardworking. It has even stopped hoping for employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference between the men's room and the women's room without having little pictures on the doors. -- Dave Barry, "Urine Trouble, Mister"
Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done. -- James J. Ling
"Don't tell me I'm burning the candle at both ends -- tell me where to get more wax!!"
Ever notice that even the busiest people are never too busy to tell you just how busy they are?
Everyone who comes in here wants three things: (1) They want it quick. (2) They want it good. (3) They want it cheap. I tell 'em to pick two and call me back. -- sign on the back wall of a small printing company
Have you ever noticed that the people who are always trying to tell you `there's a time for work and a time for play' never find the time for play?
If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else. -- Gerald Weinberg, "The Secrets of Consulting"
Many people write memos to tell you they have nothing to say.
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them WHAT to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. -- Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
NEW YORK-- Kraft Foods, Inc. announced today that its board of directors unanimously rejected the $11 billion takeover bid by Philip Morris and Co. A Kraft spokesman stated in a press conference that the offer was rejected because the $90-per-share bid did not reflect the true value of the company. Wall Street insiders, however, tell quite a different story. Apparently, the Kraft board of directors had all but signed the takeover agreement when they learned of Philip Morris' marketing plans for one of their major Middle East subsidiaries. To a person, the board voted to reject the bid when they discovered that the tobacco giant intended to reorganize Israeli Cheddar, Ltd., and name the new company Cheeses of Nazareth.
Some people only open up to tell you that they're closed.
The Worst Car Hire Service When David Schwartz left university in 1972, he set up Rent-a-wreck as a joke. Being a natural prankster, he acquired a fleet of beat-up shabby, wreckages waiting for the scrap heap in California. He put on a cap and looked forward to watching people's faces as he conducted them round the choice of bumperless, dented junkmobiles. To his lasting surprise there was an insatiable demand for them and he now has 26 thriving branches all over America. "People like driving round in the worst cars available," he said. Of course they do. "If a driver damages the side of a car and is honest enough to admit it, I tell him, `Forget it'. If they bring a car back late we overlook it. If they've had a crash and it doesn't involve another vehicle we might overlook that too." "Where's the ashtray?" asked on Los Angeles wife, as she settled into the ripped interior. "Honey," said her husband, "the whole car's the ash tray." -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
To understand this important story, you have to understand how the telephone company works. Your telephone is connected to a local computer, which is in turn connected to a regional computer, which is in turn connected to a loudspeaker the size of a garbage truck on the lawn of Edna A. Bargewater of Lawrence, Kan. Whenever you talk on the phone, your local computer listens in. If it suspects you're going to discuss an intimate topic, it notifies the computer above it, which listens in and decides whether to alert the one above it, until finally, if you really humiliate yourself, maybe break down in tears and tell your closest friend about a sordid incident from your past involving a seedy motel, a neighbor's spouse, an entire religious order, a garden hose and six quarts of tapioca pudding, the top computer feeds your conversation into Edna's loudspeaker, and she and her friends come out on the porch to listen and drink gin and laugh themselves silly. -- Dave Barry, "Won't It Be Just Great Owning Our Own Phones?"
What they said: What they meant: "I recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever." (Yes, that about sums it up.) "The amount of mathematics she knows will surprise you." (And I recommend not giving that school a dime...) "I simply can't say enough good things about him." (What a screw-up.) "I am pleased to say that this candidate is a former colleague of mine." (I can't tell you how happy I am that she left our firm.) "When this person left our employ, we were quite hopeful he would go a long way with his skills." (We hoped he'd go as far as possible.) "You won't find many people like her." (In fact, most people can't stand being around her.) "I cannot reccommend him too highly." (However, to the best of my knowledge, he has never committed a felony in my presence.)
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. -- Norman Douglas
And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is. :-) -- Larry Wall in <10209@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident. :-) -- Larry Wall on s/foo/bar/eieio in <10911@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Your csh still thinks true is false. Write to your vendor today and tell them that next year Configure ought to "rm /bin/csh" unless they fix their blasted shell. :-) -- Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution
You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all. :-) -- Larry Wall in <199709081801.LAA20629@wall.org>
Falling in Love When two people have been on enough dates, they generally fall in love. You can tell you're in love by the way you feel: your head becomes light, your heart leaps within you, you feel like you're walking on air, and the whole world seems like a wonderful and happy place. Unfortunately, these are also the four warning signs of colon disease, so it's always a good idea to check with your doctor. -- Dave Barry
HEY KIDS! ANN LANDERS SAYS: Be sure it's true, when you say "I love you". It's a sin to tell a lie. Millions of hearts have been broken, just because these words were spoken.
"I'll tell you what I know, then," he decided. "The pin I'm wearing means I'm a member of the IA. That's Inamorati Anonymous. An inamorato is somebody in love. That's the worst addiction of all." "Somebody is about to fall in love," Oedipa said, "you go sit with them, or something?" "Right. The whole idea is to get where you don't need it. I was lucky. I kicked it young. But there are sixty-year-old men, believe it or not, and women even older, who might wake up in the night screaming." "You hold meetings, then, like the AA?" "No, of course not. You get a phone number, an answering service you can call. Nobody knows anybody else's name; just the number in case it gets so bad you can't handle it alone. We're isolates, Arnold. Meetings would destroy the whole point of it." -- Thomas Pynchon, "The Crying of Lot 49"
The birds are singing, the flowers are budding, and it is time for Miss Manners to tell young lovers to stop necking in public. It's not that Miss Manners is immune to romance. Miss Manners has been known to squeeze a gentleman's arm while being helped over a curb, and, in her wild youth, even to press a dainty slipper against a foot or two under the dinner table. Miss Manners also believes that the sight of people strolling hand in hand or arm in arm or arm in hand dresses up a city considerably more than the more familiar sight of people shaking umbrellas at one another. What Miss Manners objects to is the kind of activity that frightens the horses on the street...
"Why must you tell me all your secrets when it's hard enough to love you knowing nothing?" -- Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
Excuse me, but didn't I tell you there's NO HOPE for the survival of OFFSET PRINTING?
I wonder if I ought to tell them about my PREVIOUS LIFE as a COMPLETE STRANGER?
LBJ, LBJ, how many JOKES did you tell today??!
Where's the Coke machine? Tell me a joke!!
At the hospital, a doctor is training an intern on how to announce bad news to the patients. The doctor tells the intern "This man in 305 is going to die in six months. Go in and tell him." The intern boldly walks into the room, over to the man's bedisde and tells him "Seems like you're gonna die!" The man has a heart attack and is rushed into surgery on the spot. The doctor grabs the intern and screams at him, "What!?!? are you some kind of moron? You've got to take it easy, work your way up to the subject. Now this man in 213 has about a week to live. Go in and tell him, but, gently, you hear me, gently!" The intern goes softly into the room, humming to himself, cheerily opens the drapes to let the sun in, walks over to the man's bedside, fluffs his pillow and wishes him a "Good morning!" "Wonderful day, no? Say... guess who's going to die soon!"
If I kiss you, that is an psychological interaction. On the other hand, if I hit you over the head with a brick, that is also a psychological interaction. The difference is that one is friendly and the other is not so friendly. The crucial point is if you can tell which is which. -- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"
The 80's -- when you can't tell hairstyles from chemotherapy.