(1) Alexander the Great was a great general. (2) Great generals are forewarned. (3) Forewarned is forearmed. (4) Four is an even number. (5) Four is certainly an odd number of arms for a man to have. (6) The only number that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, Alexander the Great had an infinite number of arms. %% Uses For A Dead Microprocessor (1) Scarecrow for centipedes (2) Dead cat brush (3) Hair barrettes (4) Cleats (5) Self-piercing earrings (6) Fungus trellis (7) False eyelashes (8) Prosthetic dog claws (9) Window garden harrow (pulled behind Tonka tractors) (10) Killer velcro (11) Currency %% 186,282 miles per second: It isn't just a good idea, it's the law! %% A billion here, a couple of billion there -- first thing you know it adds up to be real money. -- Everett McKinley Dirksen %% A budget is just a method of worrying before you spend money, as well as afterward. %% A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other. %% A celebrity is a person who is well known for his well-knownness. %% A city is a large community where people are lonesome together -- Herbert Prochnow %% A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. -- Mark Twain %% A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking. %% A diplomat is a man who can convince his wife she'd look stout in a fur coat. %% A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip. %% A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his morning meal. "I would like to give you this personality test", said the outsider, "because I want you to be happy." Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the toaster -- "I wish the toaster to be happy too". %% A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, "The medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam's rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat." The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that, the Garden and the world were created. So God must have been an architect." The computer scientist, who had listened to all of this said, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?" %% A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of. -- Ogden Nash %% A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser. Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network with the mouse, and asked "what do you see?" Very earnestly, the Undergraduate replied "I see a cursor." The Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the back of the keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head with a thick Interlisp Manual. The Undergraduate was then Enlightened. %% A long-forgotten loved one will appear soon. Buy the negatives at any price. %% A man goes to a tailor to try on a new custom-made suit. The first thing he notices is that the arms are too long. "No problem," says the tailor. "Just bend them at the elbow and hold them out in front of you. See, now it's fine." "But the collar is up around my ears!" "It's nothing. Just hunch your back up a little ... no, a little more ... that's it." "But I'm stepping on my cuffs!" the man cries in desperation. "Nu, bend you knees a little to take up the slack. There you go. Look in the mirror -- the suit fits perfectly." So, twisted like a pretzel, the man lurches out onto the street. Reba and Florence see him go by. "Oh, look," says Reba, "that poor man!" "Yes," says Florence, "but what a beautiful suit." -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems. %% A musician of more ambition than talent composed an elegy at the death of composer Edward MacDowell. She played the elegy for the pianist Josef Hoffman, then asked his opinion. "Well, it's quite nice," he replied, but don't you think it would be better if ..." "If what?" asked the composer. "If ... if you had died and MacDowell had written the elegy?" %% A new koan: If you have some ice cream, I will give it to you. If you have no ice cream, I will take it away from you. It is an ice cream koan. %% A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. %% A priest asked: What is Fate, Master? And he answered: It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence. It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs. It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness. And that is Fate? said the priest. Fate ... I thought you said Freight, responded the Master. That's all right, said the priest. I wanted to know what Freight was too. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" %% A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep. %% A psychiatrist is a person who will give you expensive answers that your wife will give you for free. %% A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen objects, such as the faces of loved ones, causes eye strain in computer scientists. Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added concentration needed to "make sense" of such unnatural three dimensional objects ... %% A Severe Strain on the Credulity As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. -- New York Times Editorial, 1920 %% A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity. -- Mark Twain %% A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows. -- O'Henry %% A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by blowing first. %% A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn. %% A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. -- John Ciardi %% A UNIX saleslady, Lenore, Enjoys work, but she likes the beach more. She found a good way To combine work and play: She sells C shells by the seashore. %% A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous. %% "A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire %% A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. %% A.A.A.A.A.: An organization for drunks who drive %% Accident, n.: A condition in which presence of mind is good, but absence of body is better. %% Accidents cause History. If Sigismund Unbuckle had taken a walk in 1426 and met Wat Tyler, the Peasant's Revolt would never have happened and the motor car would not have been invented until 2026, which would have meant that all the oil could have been used for lamps, thus saving the electric light bulb and the whale, and nobody would have caught Moby Dick or Billy Budd. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Acid -- better living through chemistry. %% Acid absorbs 47 times it's weight in excess Reality. %% "Acting is an art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing." %% Actor: "I'm a smash hit. Why, yesterday during the last act, I had everyone glued in their seats!" Oliver Herford: "Wonderful! Wonderful! Clever of you to think of it!" %% Actor: So what do you do for a living? Doris: I work for a company that makes deceptively shallow serving dishes for Chinese restaurants. -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers" %% After [Benjamin] Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted many important electrical experiments. For example, in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current developed and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was no longer attached to the frog, which was dead anyway. Galvani's discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact that it sinks like a stone. %% After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations. -- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare %% After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi. -- P. J. O'Rourke %% Afternoon, n.: That part of the day we spend worrying about how we wasted the morning. %% Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." %% Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall, Aleph-null bottles of beer, You take one down, and pass it around, Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall. %% All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors. %% All science is either physics or stamp collecting. -- E. Rutherford %% All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too, provided you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: "Where else are you going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains?" %% Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lighting storm and received a serious electrical shock. This proved that lighting was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as "A penny saved is a penny earned." Eventually he had to be given a job running the post office. %% Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn't expect to be paid back. %% AMAZING BUT TRUE ... If all the salmon caught in Canada in one year were laid end to end across the Sahara Desert, the smell would be absolutely awful. %% AMAZING BUT TRUE ... There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it would completely cover the Sahara Desert. %% America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization. -- John O'Hara %% America was discovered by Amerigo Vespucci and was named after him, until people got tired of living in a place called "Vespuccia" and changed its name to "America". -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% An excellence-oriented '80s male does not wear a regular watch. He wears a Rolex watch, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is advertised only in excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and Rich Protestant Golfer Magazine. The advertisements are written in incomplete sentences, which is how advertising copywriters denote excellence: "The Rolex Hyperion. An elegant new standard in quality excellence and discriminating handcraftsmanship. For the individual who is truly able to discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting things by hand. Fabricated of 100 percent 24-karat gold. No watch parts or anything. Just a great big chunk on your wrist. Truly a timeless statement. For the individual who is very secure. Who doesn't need to be reminded all the time that he is very successful. Much more successful than the people who laughed at him in high school. Because of his acne. People who are probably nowhere near as successful as he is now. Maybe he'll go to his 20th reunion, and they'll see his Rolex Hyperion. Hahahahahahahahaha." %% An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it. %% Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no government at all. %% Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out and Buy. -- Tom Leher %% Anybody who doesn't cut his speed at the sight of a police car is probably parked. %% Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love" %% Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% "Arguments with furniture are rarely productive." -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" %% As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. -- Oscar Wilde %% As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code. %% "As part of the conversion, computer specialists rewrote 1,500 programs -- a process that traditionally requires some debugging." --- USA Today, referring to the IRS switchover to a new computer system. %% At a recent meeting in Snowmass, Colorado, a participant from Los Angeles fainted from hyperoxygenation, and we had to hold his head under the exhaust of a bus until he revived. %% Bacchus, n.: A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Bagdikian's Observation: Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" on a ukelele. %% Barach's Rule: An alcoholic is a person who drinks more than his own physician. %% Barth's Distinction: There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types, and those who don't. %% Baruch's Observation: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. %% Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors and miss. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love" %% Besides the device, the box should contain: * Eight little rectangular snippets of paper that say "WARNING" * A plastic packet containing four 5/17 inch pilfer grommets and two club-ended 6/93 inch boxcar prawns. YOU WILL NEED TO SUPPLY: a matrix wrench and 60,000 feet of tram cable. IF ANYTHING IS DAMAGED OR MISSING: You IMMEDIATELY should turn to your spouse and say: "Margaret, you know why this country can't make a car that can get all the way through the drive-through at Burger King without a major transmission overhaul? Because nobody cares, that's why." WARNING: This is assuming your spouse's name is Margaret. %% better !pout !cry better watchout lpr why santa claus town cat /etc/passwd >list ncheck list ncheck list cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist cat list | grep nice >giftlist santa claus town who | grep sleeping who | grep awake who | egrep 'bad|good' for (goodness sake) { be good } %% Beware of low-flying butterflies. %% Bombeck's Rule of Medicine: Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died. %% But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company. Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again. This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact the last year any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases. %% Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get _____there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be. -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Cahn's Axiom: When all else fails, read the instructions. %% California is a fine place to live -- if you happen to be an orange. -- Fred Allen %% Call on God, but row away from the rocks. -- Indian proverb %% Canada Bill Jone's Motto: It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money. Supplement: A .44 magnum beats four aces. %% Canada Post doesn't really charge 32 cents for a stamp. It's 2 cents for postage and 30 cents for storage. -- Gerald Regan, Cabinet Minister, 12/31/83 Financial Post %% CAPRICORN (Dec 23 - Jan 19) You are conservative and afraid of taking risks. You don't do much of anything and are lazy. There has never been a Capricorn of any importance. Capricorns should avoid standing still for too long as they take root and become trees. %% Carperpetuation (kar' pur pet u a shun), n.: The act, when vacuuming, of running over a string at least a dozen times, reaching over and picking it up, examining it, then putting it back down to give the vacuum one more chance. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Chicago, n.: Where the dead still vote ... early and often! %% Chicken Soup, n.: An ancient miracle drug containing equal parts of aureomycin, cocaine, interferon, and TLC. The only ailment chicken soup can't cure is neurotic dependence on one's mother. -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% Children are natural mimic who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners. %% Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said. %% Cinemuck, n.: The combination of popcorn, soda, and melted chocolate which covers the floors of movie theaters. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Cloning is the sincerest form of flattery. %% Cold, adj.: When the local flashers are handing out written descriptions. %% Cold, adj.: When the lawyers walk around with their hands in their own pockets. %% College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity. -- H. L. Mencken %% Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are. %% Congratulations! You have purchased an extremely fine device that would give you thousands of years of trouble-free service, except that you undoubtably will destroy it via some typical bonehead consumer maneuver. Which is why we ask you to PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE READ THIS OWNER'S MANUAL CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU UNPACK THE DEVICE. YOU ALREADY UNPACKED IT, DIDN'T YOU? YOU UNPACKED IT AND PLUGGED IT IN AND TURNED IT ON AND FIDDLED WITH THE KNOBS, AND NOW YOUR CHILD, THE SAME CHILD WHO ONCE SHOVED A POLISH SAUSAGE INTO YOUR VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDED AND SET IT ON "FAST FORWARD", THIS CHILD ALSO IS FIDDLING WITH HE KNOBS, RIGHT? AND YOU'RE JUST NOW STARTING TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS, RIGHT??? WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST BREAK THESE DEVICES RIGHT AT THE FACTORY BEFORE WE SHIP THEM OUT, YOU KNOW THAT? %% Darth Vader sleeps with a Teddywookie. %% Dear Miss Manners: Please list some tactful ways of removing a man's saliva from your face. Gentle Reader: Please list some decent ways of acquiring a man's saliva on your face ... %% Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired. -- R. Geis %% Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down. %% Decisions of the judges will be final unless shouted down by a really overwhelming majority of the crowd present. Abusive and obscene language may not be used by contestants when addressing members of the judging panel, or, conversely, by members of the judging panel when addressing contestants (unless struck by a boomerang). -- Mudgeeraba Creek Emu-Riding and Boomerang-Throwing Assoc. %% Don't look back, the lemmings are gaining on you. %% Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you. They're too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them. %% Don't you feel more like you do now than you did when you came in? %% Drive defensively. Buy a tank. %% Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together ... -- Carl Zwanzig %% Due to a shortage of devoted followers, the production of great leaders has been discontinued. %% E Pluribus Unix %% Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% Eggnog is a traditional holiday drink invented by the English. Many people wonder where the word "eggnog" comes from. The first syllable comes from the English word "egg", meaning "egg". I don't know where the "nog" comes from. To make eggnog, you'll need rum, whiskey, wine gin and, if they are in season, eggs... %% Eisenhower was very nice, Nixon was his only vice. -- C. Degen %% Electrical Engineers do it with less resistance. %% Endless Loop: n., see Loop, Endless. Loop, Endless: n., see Endless Loop. -- Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary %% Es brilig war. Die schlichte Toven Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben; Und aller-m"umsige Burggoven Dir mohmen R"ath ausgraben. -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass" %% Even though they raised the rate for first class mail in the United States we really shouldn't complain -- it's still only 2 cents a day. %% Every Horse has an Infinite Number of Legs (proof by intimidation): Horses have an even number of legs. Behind they have two legs, and in front they have fore-legs. This makes six legs, which is certainly an odd number of legs for a horse. But the only number that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, horses have an infinite number of legs. Now to show this for the general case, suppose that somewhere, there is a horse that has a finite number of legs. But that is a horse of another color, and by the [above] lemma ["All horses are the same color"], that does not exist. %% Every little picofarad has a nanohenry all its own. -- Don Vonada %% Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work. %% Every program has two purposes -- written and another for which it wasn't. %% Everyone talks about apathy, but no one ____does anything about it. %% Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again. -- F. P. Jones %% Experience is the worst teacher. It always gives the test first and the instruction afterward. %% Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones. %% F u cn rd ths u cnt spl wrth a dm! %% f u cn rd ths, itn tyg h myxbl cd. %% f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng. %% Families, when a child is born Want it to be intelligent. I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life By becoming a Cabinet Minister -- Su Tung-p'o %% Famous last words: 1. Don't unplug it, it will just take a moment to fix. 2. Let's take the shortcut, he can't see us from there. 3. What happens if you touch these two wires tog-- 4. We won't need reservations. 5. It's always sunny there this time of the year. 6. Don't worry, it's not loaded. 7. They'd never (be stupid enough to) make him a manager. %% Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. -- Oscar Wilde %% Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors d'oeuvres. Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "I Gotta Be Me" around the upright piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres. Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with inanimate objects, singing "I can't get no satisfaction," gulping down other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when the little hammers strike. Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning Christmas tree. The piano is missing. You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level 4. The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog. %% Fifth Law of Applied Terror: If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book. Corollary: If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you live. %% Fifth Law of Procrastination: Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do. %% Finagle's Creed: Science is true. Don't be misled by facts. %% Finagle's First Law: If an experiment works, something has gone wrong. %% Finagle's Second Law: No matter what the anticipated result, there will always be someone eager to (a) misinterpret it, (b) fake it, or (c) believe it happened according to his own pet theory. %% Finagle's Third Law: In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake. Corollaries: 1. Nobody whom you ask for help will see it. 2. The first person who stops by, whose advice you really don't want to hear, will see it immediately. %% Fine day to work off excess energy. Steal something heavy. %% First Law of Socio-Genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary. %% First Rule of History: History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each other. %% FLASH! Intelligence of mankind decreasing. Details at ... uh, when the little hand is on the .... %% Flon's Law: There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programs. %% For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken %% For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill. -- R. Clopton %% For some reason a glaze passes over people's faces when you say "Canada". Maybe we should invade South Dakota or something. -- Sandra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian ambassador to the U.S. %% For some reason, this fortune reminds everyone of Marvin Zelkowitz. %% Fortune's graffito of the week (or maybe even month): Don't Write On Walls! (and underneath) You want I should type? %% Frisbeetarianism, n.: The belief that when you die, your soul goes up the on roof and gets stuck. %% Frobnicate, v.: To manipulate or adjust, to tweak. Derived from FROBNITZ. Usually abbreviated to FROB. Thus one has the saying "to frob a frob". See TWEAK and TWIDDLE. Usage: FROB, TWIDDLE, and TWEAK sometimes connote points along a continuum. FROB connotes aimless manipulation; TWIDDLE connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; TWEAK connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it. %% Gay shlafen: Yiddish for "go to sleep". Now doesn't "gay shlafen" have a softer, more soothing sound than the harsh, staccato "go to sleep"? Listen to the difference: "Go to sleep, you little wretch!" ... "Gay shlafen, darling." Obvious, isn't it? Clearly the best thing you can do for you children is to start speaking Yiddish right now and never speak another word of English as long as you live. This will, of course, entail teaching Yiddish to all your friends, business associates, the people at the supermarket, and so on, but that's just the point. It has to start with committed individuals and then grow ... Some minor adjustments will have to be made, of course: those signs written in what look like Yiddish letters won't be funny when everything is written in Yiddish. And we'll have to start driving on the left side of the road so we won't be reading the street signs backwards. But is that too high a price to pay for world peace? I think not, my friend, I think not. -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% Genderplex, n.: The predicament of a person in a restaurant who is unable to determine his or her designated restroom (e.g., turtles and tortoises). -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why you should. %% Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped. -- Elbert Hubbard %% -- 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. %% -- Gifts for Men -- Men are amused by almost any idiot thing -- that is why professional ice hockey is so popular -- so buying gifts for them is easy. But you should never buy them clothes. Men believe they already have all the clothes they will ever need, and new ones make them nervous. For example, your average man has 84 ties, but he wears, at most, only three of them. He has learned, through humiliating trial and error, that if he wears any of the other 81 ties, his wife will probably laugh at him ("You're not going to wear THAT tie with that suit, are you?"). So he has narrowed it down to three safe ties, and has gone several years without being laughed at. If you give him a new tie, he will pretend to like it, but deep inside he will hate you. If you want to give a man something practical, consider tires. More than once, I would have gladly traded all the gifts I got for a new set of tires. %% Ginsberg's Theorem: 1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't even quit the game. Freeman's Commentary on Ginsberg's theorem: Every major philosophy that attempts to make life seem meaningful is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg's Theorem. To wit: 1. Capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win. 2. Socialism is based on the assumption that you can break even. 3. Mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the game. %% Give thought to your reputation. Consider changing name and moving to a new town. %% Give your child mental blocks for Christmas. %% //GO.SYSIN DD *, DOODAH, DOODAH %% God did not create the world in 7 days; he screwed around for 6 days and then pulled an all-nighter. %% "God gives burdens; also shoulders" Jimmy Carter cited this Jewish saying in his concession speech at the end of the 1980 election. At least he said it was a Jewish saying; I can't find it anywhere. I'm sure he's telling the truth though; why would he lie about a thing like that? -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% God is Dead -- Nietzsche Nietzsche is Dead -- God Nietzsche is God -- The Dead %% God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board. -- Mark Twain %% God made the integers; all else is the work of Man. -- Kronecker %% God must love the Common Man; He made so many of them. %% Going to church does not make a person a Christian, nor does going to school make a person educated, any more than going to a garage makes a person a car. %% Gold, n.: A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold hasn't done anything to them. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Goldenstern's Rules: 1. Always hire a rich attorney. 2. Never buy from a rich salesman. %% Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example. -- La Rouchefoucauld %% Good day to avoid cops. Crawl to school. %% Good news. Ten weeks from Friday will be a pretty good day. %% Got Mole problems? Call Avogadro 602-1023. %% Goto, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to complain about unstructured programmers. -- Ray Simard %% Goy: ... The distinction between Jewish and goyish can be quite subtle, as the following quote from Lenny Bruce illustrates: "I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. The B'nai Brith is goyish. The Hadassah is Jewish. Marine Corps -- heavy goyish, dangerous. "Kool-Aid is goyish. All Drake's Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes -- goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish. Macaroons are ____very Jewish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O is goyish. Lime soda is ____very goyish. Trailer parks are so goyish that Jews won't go near them ..." -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% Grandpa Charnock's Law: You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive. %% Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks. %% Gray's Law of Programming: `_n+1' trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same time as `_n' tasks. Logg's Rebuttal to Gray's Law: `_n+1' trivial tasks take twice as long as `_n' trivial tasks. %% Grelb's Reminder: Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above average drivers. %% Gyroscope, n.: A wheel or disk mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and also free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpendicular to each other and the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two mutually perpendicular axes results from application of torque to the other when the wheel is spinning and so that the entire apparatus offers considerable opposition depending on the angular momentum to any torque that would change the direction of the axis of spin. -- Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary %% H. L. Mencken's Law: Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach. Martin's Extension: Those who cannot teach -- administrate. %% Hacker's Law: The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions. %% "...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed." %% Hail to the sun god He sure is a fun god Ra! Ra! Ra! %% Half-done: This is the best way to eat a kosher dill -- when it's still crunchy, light green, yet full of garlic flavor. The difference between this and the typical soggy dark green cucumber corpse is like the the difference between life and death. You may find it difficult to find a good half-done kosher dill there in Seattle, so what you should do is take a cab out to the airport, fly to New York, take the JFK Express to Jay Street-Borough Hall, transfer to an uptown F, get off at East Broadway, walk north on Essex (along the park), make your first left onto Hester Street, walk about fifteen steps, turn ninety degrees left, and stop. Say to the man, "Let me have a nice half-done." Worth the trouble, wasn't it? -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% Hardware, n.: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked. %% Harris's Lament: All the good ones are taken. %% Harry is heavily into camping, and every year in the late fall, he makes us all go to Assateague, which is an island on the Atlantic Ocean famous for its wild horses. I realize that the concept of wild horses probably stirs romantic notions in many of you, but this is because you have never met any wild horses in person. In person, they are like enormous hooved rats. They amble up to your camp site, and their attitude is: "We're wild horses. We're going to eat your food, knock down your tent and poop on your shoes. We're protected by federal law, just like Richard Nixon." %% Harvard Law: Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases. %% He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered. %% He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace. -- John Mason Brown, drama critic %% He who attacks the fundamentals of the American broadcasting industry attacks democracy itself. -- William S. Paley, chairman of CBS %% "Heisenberg may have slept here." %% Heller's Law: The first myth of management is that it exists. Johnson's Corollary: Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within the organization. %% "Here at the Phone Company, we serve all kinds of people; from Presidents and Kings to the scum of the earth ..." %% Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings. Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in pain? This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical lesson. It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will attract dirt. The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friend's filling, then travels down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit. Amazing Electronic Fact: If you scuffed your feet long enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger would explode! But this is nothing to worry about unless you have carpeting. %% Here is the fact of the week, maybe even the fact of the month. According to probably reliable sources, the Coca-Cola people are experiencing severe marketing anxiety in China. The words "Coca-Cola" translate into Chinese as either (depending on the inflection) "wax-fattened mare" or "bite the wax tadpole". Bite the wax tadpole. There is a sort of rough justice, is there not? The trouble with this fact, as lovely as it is, is that it's hard to get a whole column out of it. I'd like to teach the world to bite a wax tadpole. Coke -- it's the real wax-fattened mare. Not bad, but broad satiric vistas do not open up. -- John Carrol, San Francisco Chronicle %% "His super power is to turn into a scotch terrier." %% Hlade's Law: If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they will find an easier way to do it. %% Hoare's Law of Large Problems: Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out. %% Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account. %% Hollywood is where if you don't have happiness you send out for it. -- Rex Reed %% Honk if you love peace and quiet. %% Horngren's Observation: Among economists, the real world is often a special case. %% Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people. -- W. C. Fields %% How come wrong numbers are never busy? %% How do you explain school to a higher intelligence? -- Elliot, "E.T." %% How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail, And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale! How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws! -- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland" %% How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you're on. %% How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: "We'll fix it in software." How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: "We'll document it in the manual." How many tech writers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: "The user can work it out." %% "I am not sure what this is, but an `F' would only dignify it." -- English Professor %% "I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top." --English Professor, Ohio University %% I am the mother of all things, and all things should wear a sweater. %% I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar. What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: "Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America," or "Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II." %% "I cannot read the fiery letters," said Frodo in a quavering voice. "No," Said Gandalf, "but I can. The letters are Elvish, of course, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which I will not utter here. They are lines of a verse long known in Elven-lore: "This Ring, no other, is made by the elves, Who'd pawn their own mother to grab it themselves. Ruler of creeper, mortal, and scallop, This is a sleeper that packs quite a wallop. The Power almighty rests in this Lone Ring. The Power, alrighty, for doing your Own Thing. If broken or busted, it cannot be remade. If found, send to Sorhed (with postage prepaid)." %% "I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem." -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it. -- Clarence Darrow %% I don't object to sex before marriage, but two minutes before?!? %% I have learned To spell hors d'oeuvres Which still grates on Some people's n'oeuvres. -- Warren Knox %% I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer. -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" %% I haven't lost my mind -- it's backed up on tape somewhere. %% I haven't lost my mind; I know exactly where I left it. %% "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein %% 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 want to buy a husband who, every week when I sit down to watch `St. Elsewhere', won't scream, `FORGET IT, BLANCHE ... IT'S TIME FOR "HEE HAW"!!'" -- Berke Breathed, "Bloom County" %% I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know. -- Mark Twain %% I went on to test the program in every way I could devise. I strained it to expose its weaknesses. I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold. I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be absent -- not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case. Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar's temperature to be less than absolute zero. I had found an error. I chased down the error and fixed it. Now I had improved the program to the point where it would not run at all. -- George Greenstein, "Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black Holes and the Fate of Stars" %% I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't work. -- Gallagher %% "I'd love to go out with you, but I have to floss my cat." %% "I'd love to go out with you, but I never go out on days that end in `Y.'" %% "I'd love to go out with you, but I want to spend more time with my blender." %% "I'd love to go out with you, but I'm attending the opening of my garage door." %% "I'd love to go out with you, but I'm converting my calendar watch from Julian to Gregorian." %% "I'd love to go out with you, but I'm staying home to work on my cottage cheese sculpture." %% "I'd love to go out with you, but it's my parakeet's bowling night." %% "I'd love to go out with you, but my favorite commercial is on TV." %% I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. %% I'm all for computer dating, but I wouldn't want one to marry my sister. %% I'm not under the alkafluence of inkahol that some thinkle peep I am. It's just the drunker I sit here the longer I get. %% IBM had a PL/I, Its syntax worse than JOSS; And everywhere this language went, It was a total loss. %% Idiot Box, n.: The part of the envelope that tells a person where to place the stamp when they can't quite figure it out for themselves. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% If a group of _N persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be _N-1 passes. Someone in the group has to be the manager. -- T. Cheatham %% If an S and an I and an O and a U With an X at the end spell Su; And an E and a Y and an E spell I, Pray what is a speller to do? Then, if also an S and an I and a G And an HED spell side, There's nothing much left for a speller to do But to go commit siouxeyesighed. -- Charles Follen Adams, "An Orthographic Lament" %% If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that shows you tried. %% If everything is coming your way then you're in the wrong lane. %% If God had intended Man to Smoke, He would have set him on Fire. %% If God had intended Men to Smoke, He would have put Chimneys in their Heads. %% If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way. %% If God had meant for us to use the metric system, we would have been born with ten fingers and ten toes. %% If I had any humility I would be perfect. -- Ted Turner %% If I kiss you, that is a 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" %% If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people? %% If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it. -- Thomas Carlyle %% If little green men land in your back yard, hide any little green women you've got in the house. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% If mathematically you end up with the wrong answer, try multiplying by the page number. %% If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank. -- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers" %% "If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa 1920) %% If the weather is extremely bad, church attendance will be down. If the weather is extremely good, church attendance will be down. If the bulletin covers are in short supply, however, church attendance will exceed all expectations. -- Reverend Chichester %% If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex? -- Art Hoppe %% If you cannot convince them, confuse them. -- Harry S Truman %% If you don't care where you are, then you ain't lost. %% If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think they'll hate you. %% If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. -- Maslow %% If you push the "extra ice" button on the soft drink vending machine, you won't get any ice. If you push the "no ice" button, you'll get ice, but no cup. %% If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard %% If you think last Tuesday was a drag, wait till you see what happens tomorrow! %% If you throw a New Year's Party, the worst thing that you can do would be to throw the kind of party where your guests wake up today, and call you to say they had a nice time. Now you'll be be expected to throw another party next year. What you should do is throw the kind of party where your guest wake up several days from now and call their lawyers to find out if they've been indicted for anything. You want your guests to be so anxious to avoid a recurrence of your party that they immediately start planning parties of their own, a year in advance, just to prevent you from having another one ... If your party is successful, the police will knock on your door, unless your party is very successful in which case they will lob tear gas through your living room window. As host, your job is to make sure that they don't arrest anybody. Or if they're dead set on arresting someone, your job is to make sure it isn't you ... %% "If you wants to get elected president, you'se got to think up some memoraboble homily so's school kids can be pestered into memorizin' it, even if they don't know what it means." -- Walt Kelly, "The Pogo Party" %% If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. %% Il brilgue: les t^oves libricilleux Se gyrent et frillant dans le guave, Enm^im'es sont les gougebosquex, Et le m^omerade horgrave. -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass" %% Important letters which contain no errors will develop errors in the mail. Corresponding errors will show up in the duplicate while the Boss is reading it. %% In a five year period we can get one superb programming language. Only we can't control when the five year period will begin. %% In America, any boy may become president and I suppose that's just one of the risks he takes. -- Adlai Stevenson %% In an organization, each person rises to the level of his own incompetency. -- The Peter Principle %% In case of injury notify your superior immediately. He'll kiss it and make it better. %% "In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable." -- Winston Curchill, of Montgomery %% In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. -- Mark Twain %% In the force if Yoda's so strong, construct a sentence with words in the proper order then why can't he? %% In the olden days in England, you could be hung for stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread. However, if a sheep stole a loaf of bread and gave it to you, you would only be tried for receiving, a crime punishable by forty lashes with the cat or the dog, whichever was handy. If you stole a dog and were caught, you were punished with twelve rabbit punches, although it was hard to find rabbits big enough or strong enough to punch you. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Ingrate, n.: A man who bites the hand that feeds him, and then complains of indigestion. %% Insanity is the final defense ... It's hard to get a refund when the salesman is sniffing your crotch and baying at the moon. %% Iron Law of Distribution: Them that has, gets. %% Issawi's Laws of Progress: The Course of Progress: Most things get steadily worse. The Path of Progress: A shortcut is the longest distance between two points. %% It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either. -- Mark Twain %% It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. -- R. Serling %% It is generally agreed that "Hello" is an appropriate greeting because if you entered a room and said "Goodbye," it could confuse a lot of people. -- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot" %% It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious. %% It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off. -- Woody Allen %% "It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give up because by that time I was too famous." %% It was the next morning that the armies of Twodor marched east laden with long lances, sharp swords, and death-dealing hangovers. The thousands were led by Arrowroot, who sat limply in his sidesaddle, nursing a whopper. Goodgulf, Gimlet, and the rest rode by him, praying for their fate to be quick, painless, and if possible, someone else's. Many an hour the armies forged ahead, the war-merinos bleating under their heavy burdens and the soldiers bleating under their melting icepacks. -- The Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings" %% It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. %% It's lucky you're going so slowly, because you're going in the wrong direction. %% Just because your doctor has a name for your condition doesn't mean he knows what it is. %% Just once, I wish we would encounter an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets. -- The Brigader, "Dr. Who" %% Keep America beautiful. Swallow your beer cans. %% Keep emotionally active. Cater to your favorite neurosis. %% Keep in mind always the two constant Laws of Frisbee: 1. The most powerful force in the world is that of a disc straining to land under a car, just out of reach (this force is technically termed "car suck"). 2. Never precede any maneuver by a comment more predictive than "Watch this!" %% Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gage, nor any of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the center of the dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will usually know what's wrong." %% Kerr's Three Rules for a Successful College: Have plenty of football for the alumni, sex for the students, and parking for the faculty. %% Kinkler's First Law: Responsibility always exceeds authority. Kinkler's Second Law: All the easy problems have been solved. %% "Kirk to Enterprise -- beam down yeoman Rand and a six-pack." %% Klein bottle for sale ... inquire within. %% Krogt, n. (chemical symbol: Kr): The metallic silver coating found on fast-food game cards. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Lactomangulation, n.: Manhandling the "open here" spout on a milk carton so badly that one has to resort to using the "illegal" side. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Larkinson's Law: All laws are basically false. %% Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with was made up of idiots. Remember? One of them was always getting pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the farmhouse to alert the other ones. She'd whimper and tug at their sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: "Do you think something's wrong? Do you think she wants us to follow her? What is it, girl?", etc., as if this had never happened before, instead of every week. What with all the time these people spent pinned under the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops whatsoever. They probably got by on federal crop supports, which Lassie filed the applications for. %% Law of Probable Dispersal: Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed. %% Law of Selective Gravity: An object will fall so as to do the most damage. Jenning's Corollary: The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet. %% Law of the Perversity of Nature: You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter. %% Leibowitz's Rule: When hammering a nail, you will never hit your finger if you hold the hammer with both hands. %% LEO (July 23 - Aug 22) Your determination and sense of humor will come to the fore. Your ability to laugh at adversity will be a blessing because you've got a day coming you wouldn't believe. As a matter of fact, if you can laugh at what happens to you today, you've got a sick sense of humor. %% Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return. Here's an often overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of dollars: For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your tax return around under your armpit. No IRS agent is going to want to spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document. So even if you owe money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit. What does he care? It's not his money. %% LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (The Times of London) Dear Sir, I am firmly opposed to the spread of microchips either to the home or to the office. We have more than enough of them foisted upon us in public places. They are a disgusting Americanism, and can only result in the farmers being forced to grow smaller potatoes, which in turn will cause massive unemployment in the already severely depressed agricultural industry. Yours faithfully, Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J. P. Sevenoaks %% Lewis's Law of Travel: The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone, ever. %% LIBRA (Sep. 23 to Oct. 22) Your desire for justice and truth will be overshadowed by your desire for filthy lucre and a decent meal. Be gracious and polite. Someone is watching you, so stop staring like that. %% Lie, n.: A very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one discovered to date. %% Lieberman's Law: Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens. %% Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while. %% Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. %% Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem. -- Alan McKay %% Line Printer paper is strongest at the perforations. %% Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun. %% Living your life is a task so difficult, it has never been attempted before. %% Losing your drivers' license is just God's way of saying "BOOGA, BOOGA!" %% Love at first sight is one of the greatest labor-saving devices the world has ever seen. %% Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up to. %% Lowery's Law: If it jams -- force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway. %% LSD melts in your mind, not in your hand. %% Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There's always one more bug. %% "MacDonald has the gift on compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts." -- Winston Churchill %% Maier's Law: If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of. Corollaries: 1. The bigger the theory, the better. 2. The experiment may be considered a success if no more than 50% of the observed measurements must be discarded to obtain a correspondence with the theory. %% Maintainer's Motto: If we can't fix it, it ain't broke. %% Making files is easy under the UNIX operating system. Therefore, users tend to create numerous files using large amounts of file space. It has been said that the only standard thing about all UNIX systems is the message-of-the-day telling users to clean up their files. -- System V.2 administrator's guide %% Mankind's yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history, dating back to the time millions of years ago, when the first primitive man picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the air, and whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first primitive umpire. What inner force drove this first athlete? Your guess is as good as mine. Better, probably, because you haven't had four beers. %% Mark's Dental-Chair Discovery: Dentists are incapable of asking questions that require a simple yes or no answer. %% May a Misguided Platypus lay its Eggs in your Jockey Shorts. %% May Euell Gibbons eat your only copy of the manual! %% Maybe Computer Science should be in the College of Theology. -- R. S. Barton %% Maybe you can't buy happiness, but these days you can certainly charge it. %% Mayor Vincent J. `Buddy' Cianci on the ACLU's suit to have a city nativity scene removed: "They're just jealous because they don't have three wise men and a virgin in the whole organization." %% McGowan's Madison Avenue Axiom: If an item is advertised as "under $50", you can bet it's not $19.95. %% Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe. %% Men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Spirits were brave, men boldly split infinitives that no man had split before. Thus was the Empire forged. -- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Douglas Adams %% "Might as well be frank, monsieur. It would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca and the Germans have outlawed miracles." %% Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz %% More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly. -- Woody Allen %% Mosher's Law of Software Engineering: Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job. %% Mr. Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing. %% Murray and Esther, a middle-aged Jewish couple, are touring Chile. Murray just got a new camera and is constantly snapping pictures. One day, without knowing it, he photographs a top-secret military installation. In an instant, armed troops surround Murray and Esther and hustle them off to prison. They can't prove who they are because they've left their passports in their hotel room. For three weeks they're tortured day and night to get them to name their contacts in the liberation movement.. Finally they're hauled in front of a military court, charged with espionage, and sentenced to death. The next morning they're lined up in front of the wall where they'll be shot. The sergeant in charge of the firing squad asks them if they have any lasts requests. Esther wants to know if she can call her daughter in Chicago. The sergeant says he's sorry, that's not possible, and turns to Murray. "This is crazy!" Murray shouts. "We're not spies!" And he spits in the sergeants face. "Murray!" Esther cries. "Please! Don't make trouble." -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% Mustgo, n.: Any item of food that has been sitting in the refrigerator so long it has become a science project. -- Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends" %% My God, I'm depressed! Here I am, a computer with a mind a thousand times as powerful as yours, doing nothing but cranking out fortunes and sending mail about softball games. And I've got this pain right through my ALU. I've asked for it to be replaced, but nobody ever listens. I think it would be better for us both if you were to just log out again. %% My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right. %% Mythology, n.: The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% Never drink coke in a moving elevator. The elevator's motion coupled with the chemicals in coke produce hallucinations. People tend to change into lizards and attack without warning, and large bats usually fly in the window. Additionally, you begin to believe that elevators have windows. %% Never eat more than you can lift. -- Miss Piggy %% Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat. %% Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name correctly (Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les Worth). Which is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value. %% Nine megs for the secretaries fair, Seven megs for the hackers scarce, Five megs for the grads in smoky lairs, Three megs for system source; One disk to rule them all, One disk to bind them, One disk to hold the files And in the darkness grind 'em. %% Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations: Negative expectations yield negative results. Positive expectations yield negative results. %% Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong. %% "Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree." --Professor W. %% Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it's time to get up. %% Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love. -- Charlie Brown %% Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the double lock will keep; May no brick through the window break, And, no one rob me till I awake. %% ... Now you're ready for the actual shopping. Your goal should be to get it over with as quickly as possible, because the longer you stay in the mall, the longer your children will have to listen to holiday songs on the mall public-address system, and many of these songs can damage children emotionally. For example: "Frosty the Snowman" is about a snowman who befriends some children, plays with them until they learn to love him, then melts. And "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is about a young reindeer who, because of a physical deformity, is treated as an outcast by the other reindeer. Then along comes good, old Santa. Does he ignore the deformity? Does he look past Rudolph's nose and respect Rudolph for the sensitive reindeer he is underneath? No. Santa asks Rudolph to guide his sleigh, as if Rudolph were nothing more than some kind of headlight with legs and a tail. So unless you want your children exposed to this kind of insensitivity, you should shop quickly. %% "Of ______course it's the murder weapon. Who would frame someone with a fake?" %% Ogden's Law: The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up. %% Oh, when I was in love with you, Then I was clean and brave, And miles around the wonder grew How well did I behave. And now the fancy passes by, And nothing will remain, And miles around they'll say that I Am quite myself again. -- A. E. Housman %% Old soldiers never die. Young ones do. %% On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli %% Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice. In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukka" and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy Hanukka!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!" %% ... Once you're safely in the mall, you should tie your children to you with ropes so the other shoppers won't try to buy them. Holiday shoppers have been whipped into a frenzy by months of holiday advertisements, and they will buy anything small enough to stuff into a shopping bag. If your children object to being tied, threaten to take them to see Santa Claus; that ought to shut them up. %% One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone. %% One of the oldest problems puzzled over in the Talmud is: "Why did God create goyim?" The generally accepted answer is "________somebody has to buy retail." -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% One Page Principle: A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood. -- Mark Ardis %% One seldom sees a monument to a committee. %% One way to stop a runaway horse is to bet on him. %% Only adults have difficulty with childproof caps. %% Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl. -- Mike Adams %% Osborn's Law: Variables won't; constants aren't. %% Overflow on /dev/null, please empty the bit bucket. %% Overload -- core meltdown sequence initiated. %% Pardo's First Postulate: Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. Arnold's Addendum: Anything not fitting into these categories causes cancer in rats. %% "Pascal is not a high-level language." -- Steven Feiner %% Pascal Users: To show respect for the 313th anniversary (tomorrow) of the death of Blaise Pascal, your programs will be run at half speed. %% Pascal, n.: A programming language named after a man who would turn over in his grave if he knew about it. %% Paul's Law: You can't fall off the floor. %% Peanut Blossoms 4 cups sugar 16 tbsp. milk 4 cups brown sugar 4 tsp. vanilla 4 cups shortening 14 cups flour 8 eggs 4 tsp. soda 4 cups peanut butter 4 tsp. salt Shape dough into balls. Roll in sugar and bake on ungreased cookie sheet at 375 F. for 10-12 minutes. Immediately top each cookie with a Hershey's kiss or star pressing down firmly to crack cookie. Makes a hell of a lot. %% Philadelphia is not dull -- it just seems so because it is next to exciting Camden, New Jersey. %% pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff %% PISCES (Feb. 19 - Mar. 20) You have a vivid imagination and often think you are being followed by the CIA or FBI. You have minor influence over your associates and people resent your flaunting of your power. You lack confidence and you are generally a coward. Pisces people do terrible things to small animals. %% PISCES (Feb. 19 to Mar. 20) Take the high road, look for the good things, carry the American Express card and a weapon. The world is yours today, as nobody else wants it. Your mortgage will be foreclosed. You will probably get run over by a bus. %% Pittsburgh Driver's Test 7: The car directly in front of you has a flashing right tail light but a steady left tail light. This means (a) one of the tail lights is broken; you should blow your horn to call the problem to the driver's attention. (b) the driver is signaling a right turn. (c) the driver is signaling a left turn. (d) the driver is from out of town. The correct answer is (d). Tail lights are used in some foreign countries to signal turns. %% Pittsburgh Driver's Test 8: Pedestrians are (a) irrelevant. (b) communists. (c) a nuisance. (d) difficult to clean off the front grille. The correct answer is (a). Pedestrians are not in cars, so they are totally irrelevant to driving; you should ignore them completely. %% PL/1, "the fatal disease", belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. -- E. W. Dijkstra %% Please ignore previous fortune. %% Police: Good evening, are you the host? Host: No. Police: We've been getting complaints about this party. Host: About the drugs? Police: No. Host: About the guns, then? Is somebody complaining about the guns? Police: No, the noise. Host: Oh, the noise. Well that makes sense because there are no guns or drugs here. (An enormous explosion is heard in the background.) Or fireworks. Who's complaining about the noise? The neighbors? Police: No, the neighbors fled inland hours ago. Most of the recent complaints have come from Pittsburgh. Do you think you could ask the host to quiet things down? Host: No Problem. (At this point, a Volkswagon bug with primitive religious symbols drawn on the doors emerges from the living room and roars down the hall, past the police and onto the lawn, where it smashes into a tree. Eight guests tumble out onto the grass, moaning.) See? Things are starting to wind down. %% Pope Goestheveezl was the shortest reigning pope in the history of the Church, reigning for two hours and six minutes on 1 April 1866. The white smoke had hardly faded into the blue of the Vatican skies before it dawned on the assembled multitudes in St. Peter's Square that his name had hilarious possibilities. The crowds fell about, helpless with laughter, singing Half a pound of tuppenny rice Half a pound of treacle That's the way the chimney smokes Pope Goestheveezl The square was finally cleared by armed carabineri with tears of laughter streaming down their faces. The event set a record for hilarious civic functions, smashing the previous record set when Baron Hans Neizant B"ompzidaize was elected Landburgher of K"oln in 1653. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Predestination was doomed from the start. %% Pretend to spank me -- I'm a pseudo-masochist! %% Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning: It's on the other side. %% Professor Gorden Newell threw another shutout in last week's Chem. Eng. 130 midterm. Once again a student did not receive a single point on his exam. Newell has now tossed 5 shutouts this quarter. Newell's earned exam average has now dropped to a phenomenal 30% %% Proof techniques #1: Proof by Induction. This technique is used on equations with "_n" in them. Induction techniques are very popular, even the military used them. SAMPLE: Proof of induction without proof of induction. We know it's true for _n equal to 1. Now assume that it's true for every natural number less than _n. _N is arbitrary, so we can take _n as large as we want. If _n is sufficiently large, the case of _n+1 is trivially equivalent, so the only important _n are _n less than _n. We can take _n = _n (from above), so it's true for _n+1 because it's just about _n. QED. (QED translates from the Latin as "So what?") %% Proof techniques #2: Proof by Oddity. SAMPLE: To prove that horses have an infinite number of legs. (1) Horses have an even number of legs. (2) They have two legs in back and fore legs in front. (3) This makes a total of six legs, which certainly is an odd number of legs for a horse. (4) But the only number that is both odd and even is infinity. (5) Therefore, horses must have an infinite number of legs. Topics is be covered in future issues include proof by: Intimidation Gesticulation (handwaving) "Try it; it works" Constipation (I was just sitting there and ...) Blatant assertion Changing all the 2's to _n's Mutual consent Lack of a counterexample, and "It stands to reason" %% Putt's Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand. %% Q: Why do mountain climbers rope themselves together? A: To prevent the sensible ones from going home. %% Q: How many DEC repairmen does it take to fix a flat ? A: Five; four to hold the car up and one to swap tires. %% Q: How many DEC repairmen does it take to fix a flat? A: Five; four to hold the car up and one to swap tires. Q: How long does it take? A: It's indeterminate. It will depend upon how many flats they've brought with them. Q: What happens if you've got TWO flats? A: They replace your generator. %% Q: How many existentialists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the lightbulb itself symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a maudlin cosmos of nothingness. %% Q: How many IBM cpu's does it take to do a logical right shift? A: 33. 1 to hold the bits and 32 to push the register. %% Q: How many IBM CPU's does it take to execute a job? A: Four; three to hold it down, and one to rip its head off. %% Q: How many journalists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Three. One to report it as an inspired government program to bring light to the people, one to report it as a diabolical government plot to deprive the poor of darkness, and one to win a pulitzer prize for reporting that Electric Company hired a lightbulb-assassin to break the bulb in the first place. %% Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Three. One to screw in the lightbulb and two to fend off all those Californians trying to share the experience. %% Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road? A: Because it was on the other side. %% Quality Control, n.: The process of testing one out of every 1,000 units coming off a production line to make sure that at least one out of 100 works. %% Ray's Rule of Precision: Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe. %% Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. -- Dorothy Parker %% Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room. %% Real Programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN. %% Real Programs don't use shared text. Otherwise, how can they use functions for scratch space after they are finished calling them? %% Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose your job. These economic downturns are very difficult to predict, but sophisticated econometric modeling houses like Data Resources and Chase Econometrics have successfully predicted 14 of the last 3 recessions. %% Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea. %% Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun %% Review Questions 1: If Nerd on the planet Nutley starts out in his spaceship at 20 KPH, and his speed doubles every 3.2 seconds, how long will it be before he exceeds the speed of light? How long will it be before the Galactic Patrol picks up the pieces of his spaceship? 2: If Roger Rowdy wrecks his car every week, and each week he breaks twice as many bones as before, how long will it be before he breaks every bone in his body? How long will it be before they cut off his insurance? Where does he get a new car every week? 3: If Johnson drinks one beer the first hour (slow start), four beers the next hour, nine beers the next, etc., and stacks the cans in a pyramid, how soon will Johnson's pyramid be larger than King Tut's? When will it fall on him? Will he notice? %% Rocky's Lemma of Innovation Prevention Unless the results are known in advance, funding agencies will reject the proposal. %% Rule 46, Oxford Union Society, London: Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of one pound. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat. %% Rule of Creative Research: 1) Never draw what you can copy. 2) Never copy what you can trace. 3) Never trace what you can cut out and paste down. %% Rule of Defactualization: Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies. %% Rule of Feline Frustration: When your cat has fallen asleep on your lap and looks utterly content and adorable, you will suddenly have to go to the bathroom. %% Rule of the Great: When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch. %% Rules for driving in New York: 1) Anything done while honking your horn is legal. 2) You may park anywhere if you turn your four-way flashers on. 3) A red light means the next six cars may go through the intersection. %% RULES OF EATING -- THE BRONX DIETER'S CREED 1. Never eat on an empty stomach. 2. Never leave the table hungry. 3. When traveling, never leave a country hungry. 4. Enjoy your food. 5. Enjoy your companion's food. 6. Really taste your food. It may take several portions to accomplish this, especially if subtly seasoned. 7. Really feel your food. Texture is important. Compare, for example, the texture of a turnip to that of a brownie. Which feels better against your cheeks? 8. Never eat between snacks, unless it's a meal. 9. Don't feel you must finish everything on your plate. You can always eat it later. 10. Avoid any wine with a childproof cap. 11. Avoid blue food. -- Richard Smit, "The Bronx Diet" %% Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence Tip #1: How to tell when you are dead. 1. Little things start bothering you: little things like worms, bugs, ants. 2. Something is missing in your personal relationships. 3. Your dog becomes overly affectionate. 4. You have a hard time getting a waiter. 5. Exotic birds flock around you. 6. People ignore you at parties. 7. You have a hard time getting up in the morning. 8. You no longer get off on cocaine. %% Safety Tips for the Post-Nuclear Existence 1. Never use an elevator in a building that has been hit by a nuclear bomb; use the stairs. 2. When you're flying through the air, remember to roll when you hit the ground. 3. If you're on fire, avoid gasoline and other flammable materials. 4. Don't attempt communication with dead people; it will only lead to psychological problems. 5. Food will be scarce; you will have to scavenge. Learn to recognize foods that will be available after the bomb: mashed potatoes, shredded wheat, tossed salad, ground beef, etc. 6. Put your hand over your mouth when you sneeze; internal organs will be scarce in the post-nuclear age. 7. Try to be neat; fall only in designated piles. 8. Drive carefully in "Heavy Fallout" areas; people could be staggering illegally. 9. Nutritionally, hundred dollar bills are equal to ones, but more sanitary due to limited circulation. 10. Accumulate mannequins now; spare parts will be in short supply on D-Day. %% Sattinger's Law: It works better if you plug it in. %% Save the whales. Collect the whole set. %% SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out! -- Ken Thompson %% Scotty: Captain, we din' can reference it! Kirk: Analysis, Mr. Spock? Spock: Captain, it doesn't appear in the symbol table. Kirk: Then it's of external origin? Spock: Affirmative. Kirk: Mr. Sulu, go to pass two. Sulu: Aye aye, sir, going to pass two. %% Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer. -- Swami X %% Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated. -- M. C. Reed. %% Shamus, n.: A shamus is a guy who takes care of handyman tasks around the temple, and makes sure everything is in working order. A shamus is at the bottom of the pecking order of synagogue functionaries, and there's a joke about that: A rabbi, to show his humility before God, cries out in the middle of a service, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The cantor, not to be bested, also cries out, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The shamus, deeply moved, follows suit and cries, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The rabbi turns to the cantor and says, "Look who thinks he's nobody!" -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% Shaw's Principle: Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it. %% SHIFT TO THE LEFT! SHIFT TO THE RIGHT! POP UP, PUSH DOWN, BYTE, BYTE, BYTE! %% Silverman's Law: If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will. %% Since I hurt my pendulum My life is all erratic. My parrot, who was cordial, Is now transmitting static. The carpet died, a palm collapsed, The cat keeps doing poo. The only thing that keeps me sane Is talking to my shoe. -- My Shoe %% Skinner's Constant (or Flannagan's Finagling Factor): That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you should have gotten. %% Slick's Three Laws of the Universe: 1. Nothing in the known universe travels faster than a bad check. 2. A quarter-ounce of chocolate = four pounds of fat. 3. There are two types of dirt: the dark kind, which is attracted to light objects, and the light kind, which is attracted to dark objects. %% Slurm, n.: The slime that accumulates on the underside of a soap bar when it sits in the dish too long. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Snacktrek, n.: The peculiar habit, when searching for a snack, of constantly returning to the refrigerator in hopes that something new will have materialized. -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets" %% Some of you ... may have decided that, this year, you're going to celebrate it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on "The Waltons". Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: it would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall. %% Some points to remember [about animals]: 1. Don't go to sleep under big animals, e.g., elephants, rhinoceri, hippopotamuses; 2. Don't put animals with sharp teeth or poisonous fangs down the front of your clothes; 3. Don't pat certain animals, e.g., crocodiles and scorpions or dogs you have just kicked. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% Somebody ought to cross ball point pens with coat hangers so that the pens will multiply instead of disappear. %% Someone will try to honk your nose today. %% "Sometimes I simply feel that the whole world is a cigarette and I'm the only ashtray." %% Sooner or later you must pay for your sins. (Those who have already paid may disregard this fortune). %% Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space. -- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% Spark's Sixth Rule for Managers: If a subordinate asks you a pertinent question, look at him as if he had lost his senses. When he looks down, paraphrase the question back at him. %% Speak roughly to your little VAX, And boot it when it crashes; It knows that one cannot relax Because the paging thrashes! Wow! Wow! Wow! I speak severely to my VAX, And boot it when it crashes; In spite of all my favorite hacks My jobs it always thrashes! Wow! Wow! Wow! %% Speak softly and carry a +6 two-handed sword. %% Speaking as someone who has delved into the intricacies of PL/I, I am sure that only Real Men could have written such a machine-hogging, cycle-grabbing, all-encompassing monster. Allocate an array and free the middle third? Sure! Why not? Multiply a character string times a bit string and assign the result to a float decimal? Go ahead! Free a controlled variable procedure parameter and reallocate it before passing it back? Overlay three different types of variable on the same memory location? Anything you say! Write a recursive macro? Well, no, but Real Men use rescan. How could a language so obviously designed and written by Real Men not be intended for Real Man use? %% Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love; Husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on (and in real life, I might add) spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very _____least he can do is to Shut Up! -- Tom Lehrer, "That Was the Year that Was" %% Spirtle, n.: The fine stream from a grapefruit that always lands right in your eye. -- Sniglets, "Rich Hall & Friends" %% Stay away from hurricanes for a while. %% Steele's Plagiarism of Somebody's Philosophy: Everybody should believe in something -- I believe I'll have another drink. %% Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. %% Stupid, n.: Losing $25 on the game and $25 on the instant replay. %% Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. -- Mark Twain %% Succumb to natural tendencies. Be hateful and boring. %% (Sung to the tune of "The Impossible Dream" from MAN OF LA MANCHA) To code the impossible code, To bring up a virgin machine, To pop out of endless recursion, To grok what appears on the screen, To right the unrightable bug, To endlessly twiddle and thrash, To mount the unmountable magtape, To stop the unstoppable crash! %% Sweater, n.: A garment worn by a child when its mother feels chilly. %% System/3! System/3! See how it runs! See how it runs! Its monitor loses so totally! It runs all its programs in RPG! It's made by our favorite monopoly! System/3! %% Take everything in stride. Trample anyone who gets in your way. %% Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting enough cheese. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada" %% Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves and the teacher says: "Imagine what it does to your TEETH!" So Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to improve ... %% Teamwork is essential -- it allows you to blame someone else. %% Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. -- Aldous Huxley %% The advertisement is the most truthful part of a newspaper. -- Thomas Jefferson %% ... The Anarchists' [national] anthem is an international anthem that consists of 365 raspberries blown in very quick succession to the tune of "Camptown Races". Nobody has to stand up for it, nobody has to listen to it, and, even better, nobody has to play it. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The Army has carried the American ... ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability. -- T. Lehrer %% The Army needs leaders the way a foot needs a big toe. -- Bill Murray %% The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think. %% 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 ... %% "The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language." %% The chief cause of problems is solutions. %% "The climate of Bombay is such that its inhabitants have to live elsewhere." %% The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: "Of course it is none of my business, but --" is to place a period after the word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love" %% The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity. %% The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship. -- Robert Heinlein %% The earth is like a tiny grain of sand, only much, much heavier. %% The fact that it works is immaterial. -- L. Ogborn %% The first Great Steward, Parrafin the Climber, was employed in King Chloroplast's kitchen as second scullery boy when the old King met a tragic death. He apparently fell backward by accident on a dozen salad forks. Simultaneously the true heir, his son Carotene, mysteriously fled the city, complaining of some sort of plot and a lot of threatening notes left on his breakfast tray. At the time, this looked suspicious what with his father's death, and Carotene was suspected of foul play. Then the rest of the King's relatives began to drop dead one after the other in an odd fashion. Some were found strangled with dishrags and some succumbed to food poisoning. A few were found drowned in the soup vats, and one was attacked by assailants unknown and beaten to death with a pot roast. At least three appear to have thrown themselves backward on salad forks, perhaps in a noble gesture of grief over the King's untimely end. Finally there was no one left in Minas Troney who was either eligible or willing to wear the accursed crown, and the rule of Twodor was up for grabs. The scullery slave Parrafin bravely accepted the Stewardship of Twodor until that day when a lineal descendant of Carotene's returns to reclaim his rightful throne, conquer Twodor's enemies, and revamp the postal system. -- Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings" %% The first riddle I ever heard, one familiar to almost every Jewish child, was propounded to me by my father: "What is it that hangs on the wall, is green, wet -- and whistles?" I knit my brow and thought and thought, and in final perplexity gave up. "A herring," said my father. "A herring," I echoed. "A herring doesn't hang on the wall!" "So hang it there." "But a herring isn't green!" I protested. "Paint it." "But a herring isn't wet." "If its just painted its still wet." "But -- " I sputtered, summoning all my outrage, "-- a herring doesn't whistle!!" "Right, " smiled my father. "I just put that in to make it hard." -- Leo Rosten, "The Joys of Yiddish" %% The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet. -- Michael Jackson %% The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. %% The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End. %% The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it. %% The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice. %% The Great Bald Swamp Hedgehog: The Great Bald Swamp Hedgehog of Billericay displays, in courtship, his single prickle and does impressions of Holiday Inn desk clerks. Since this means him standing motionless for enormous periods of time he is often eaten in full display by The Great Bald Swamp Hedgehog Eater. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein -- it rejects it. -- P. Medawar %% "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer." -- Henry Kissinger %% The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless. So, for guidance, you want to look to big business. Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes... %% The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -- Anatole France %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #12 -- LITHP This otherwise unremarkable language is distinguished by the absence of an "S" in its character set; users must substitute "TH". LITHP is said to be useful in protheththing lithtth. %% THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #13 -- SLOBOL SLOBOL is best known for the speed, or lack of it, of its compiler. Although many compilers allow you to take a coffee break while they compile, SLOBOL compilers allow you to travel to Bolivia to pick the coffee. %% The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching train. %% The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep. -- Woody Allen %% The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been. -- Alan Ashley-Pitt %% The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on. %% The new Congressmen say they're going to turn the government around. I hope I don't get run over again. %% The New Testament offers the basis for modern computer coding theory, in the form of an affirmation of the binary number system. But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. -- Matthew 5:37 %% The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe. %% The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't. -- Ernest Rutherford %% The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine %% The people of Halifax invented the trampoline. During the Victorian period the tripe-dressers of Halifax stretched tripe across a large wooden frame and jumped up and down on it to `tender and dress' it. The tripoline, as they called it, degenerated into becoming the apparatus for a spectator sport. The people of Halifax also invented the harmonium, a device for castrating pigs during Sunday service. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change. -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers %% The problem ... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with. Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil using other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle Eastern countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats, etc., but so far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous bulldozer-rental bill and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons. None of the animals turned into oil, although most of the laboratory rats developed cancer. %% The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. %% The Psblurtex is an 18-inch long anaconda that hides in the gentlemen's outfitting departments of Amazonian stores and is often bought by mistake since its colors are those of the London Reform Club. Once tied around its victim's neck, it strangles him gently and then claims the insurance before running off to Germany where it lives in hiding. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw %% The Ruffed Pandanga of Borneo and Rotherham spreads out his feathers in his courtship dance and imitates Winston Churchill and Tommy Cooper on one leg. The padanga is dying out because the female padanga doesn't take it too seriously. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% The Schwine-Kitzenger Institute study of 47 men over the age of 100 showed that all had these things in common: 1. They all had moderate appetites. 2. They all came from middle class homes 3. All but two of them were dead. %% "The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exaulted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy ... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." %% The steady state of disks is full. --Ken Thompson %% The sun was shining on the sea, Shining with all his might: He did his very best to make The billows smooth and bright -- And this was very odd, because it was The middle of the night. -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" %% The trouble with a kitten is that When it grows up, it's always a cat -- Ogden Nash. %% The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was. %% The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation. -- Oscar Wilde %% The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. -- E. W. Dijkstra %% The world is coming to an end! Repent and return those library books! %% The world is coming to an end. Please log off. %% There are some goyisha names that just about guarantee that someone isn't Jewish. For example, you'll never meet a Jew named Johnson or Wright or Jones or Sinclair or Ricks or Stevenson or Reid or Larsen or Jenks. But some goyisha names just about guarantee that every other person you meet with that name will be Jewish. Why is this? Who knows? Learned rabbis have pondered this question for centuries and have failed to come up with an answer, and you think ___you can find one? Get serious. You don't even understand why it's forbidden to eat crab -- fresh cold crab with mayonnaise -- or lobster -- soft tender morsels of lobster dipped in melted butter. You don't even understand a simple thing like that, and yet you hope to discover why there are more Jews named Miller than Katz? Fat Chance. -- Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish" %% There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. -- Disraeli %% "There are three possibilities: Pioneer's solar panel has turned away from the sun; there's a large meteor blocking transmission; or someone loaded Star Trek 3.2 into our video processor." %% There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted. -- Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour %% There are three ways to get something done: 1. Do it yourself. 2. Hire someone to do it for you. 3. Forbid your kids to do it. %% There are two kinds of solar-heat systems: "passive" systems collect the sunlight that hits your home, and "active" systems collect the sunlight that hits your neighbors' homes, too. %% There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives. %% There has been an alarming increase in the number of things you know nothing about. %% There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. -- Mark Twain %% There is no substitute for good manners, except, perhaps, fast reflexes. %% There once was a girl named Irene Who lived on distilled kerosene But she started absorbin' A new hydrocarbon And since then has never benzene. %% There once was an old man from Esser, Who's knowledge grew lesser and lesser. It at last grew so small, He knew nothing at all, And now he's a College Professor. %% "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." -- C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia %% There was a plane crash over mid-ocean, and only three survivors were left in the life-raft: the Pope, the President, and Mayor Daley. Unfortunately, it was a one-man life-raft, and quickly sinking, so they started debating who should be allowed to stay. The Pope pointed out that he was the spiritual leader of millions all over the world, the President explained that if he died then America would be stuck with the Vice-President, and so forth. Then Mayor Daley said, "Look! We're not solving anything like this! The only fair thing to do is to vote on it." So they did, and Mayor Daley won by 97 votes. %% There was a young lady from Hyde Who ate a green apple and died. While her lover lamented The apple fermented And made cider inside her inside. %% There were in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double- digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard. The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite. Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business? %% There's a fine line between courage and foolishness. Too bad its not a fence. %% There's an old proverb that says just about whatever you want it to. %% There's no future in time travel. %% There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who %% There's no real need to do housework -- after four years it doesn't get any worse. %% "These are DARK TIMES for all mankind's HIGHEST VALUES!" "These are DARK TIMES for FREEDOM and PROSPERITY!" "These are GREAT TIMES to put your money on BAD GUY to kick the CRAP out of MEGATON MAN!" %% Things will be bright in P.M. A cop will shine a light in your face. %% Think honk if you're a telepath. %% Think of your family tonight. Try to crawl home after the computer crashes. %% "This is a country where people are free to practice their religion, regardless of race, creed, color, obesity, or number of dangling keys ..." %% This is National Non-Dairy Creamer Week. %% THIS IS PLEDGE WEEK FOR THE FORTUNE PROGRAM If you like the fortune program, why not support it now with your contribution of a pithy fortune, clean or obscene? We cannot continue without your support. Less than 14% of all fortune users are contributors. That means that 86% of you are getting a free ride. We can't go on like this much longer. Federal cutbacks mean less money for fortunes, and unless user contributions increase to make up the difference, the fortune program will have to shut down between midnight and 8 a.m. Don't let this happen. Mail your fortunes right now to "fortune". Just type in your favorite pithy saying. Do it now before you forget. Our target is 300 new fortunes by the end of the week. Don't miss out. All fortunes will be acknowledged. If you contribute 30 fortunes or more, you will receive a free subscription to "The Fortune Hunter", our monthly program guide. If you contribute 50 or more, you will receive a free "Fortune Hunter" coffee mug .... %% This life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been an actual life, you would have received further instructions as to what to do and where to go. %% This login session: $13.99, but for you $11.88 %% This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. -- Douglas Adams %% ... This striving for excellence extends into people's personal lives as well. When '80s people buy something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability. Eighties people buy imported dental floss. They buy gourmet baking soda. If an '80s couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent restaurant. If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of excellence-oriented people like themselves waiting, their beepers going off like crickets in the night. An excellent restaurant wouldn't have a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli. %% Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does. As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about it. I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily sane. But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians. The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson's disease. I don't have it this morning. It comes and goes. This morning I don't have Hunter Thompson's disease. -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: Excerpt from "A Political Disease", Vonnegut's review of "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" %% Time flies like an arrow Fruit flies like a banana %% Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. %% To A Quick Young Fox: Why jog exquisite bulk, fond crazy vamp, Daft buxom jonquil, zephyr's gawky vice? Guy fed by work, quiz Jove's xanthic lamp -- Zow! Qualms by deja vu gyp fox-kin thrice. -- Lazy Dog %% To be is to do. -- I. Kant To do is to be. -- A. Sartre Yabba-Dabba-Doo! -- F. Flinstone %% To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and, whatever you hit, call it the target. %% To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. -- Thomas Edison %% Today is National Existential Ennui Awareness Day. %% Today is the first day of the rest of the mess. %% Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday %% Tomorrow will be canceled due to lack of interest. %% Try not to have a good time ... This is supposed to be educational. -- Charles Schulz %% Try to get all of your posthumous medals in advance. %% Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly. %% Uncle Ed's Rule of Thumb: Never use your thumb for a rule. You'll either hit it with a hammer or get a splinter in it. %% Under deadline pressure for the next week. If you want something, it can wait. Unless it's blind screaming paroxysmally hedonistic ... %% Underlying Principle of Socio-Genetics: Superiority is recessive. %% Usage: fortune -P [] -a [xsz] [Q: [file]] [rKe9] -v6[+] dataspec ... inputdir %% Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach. -- S. C. Johnson %% Van Roy's Law: An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys. %% Velilind's Laws of Experimentation: 1. If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only once. 2. If a straight line fit is required, obtain only two data points. %% "Verily and forsooth," replied Goodgulf darkly. "In the past year strange and fearful wonders I have seen. Fields sown with barley reap crabgrass and fungus, and even small gardens reject their artichoke hearts. There has been a hot day in December and a blue moon. Calendars are made with a month of Sundays and a blue-ribbon Holstein bore alive two insurance salesmen. The earth splits and the entrails of a goat were found tied in square knots. The face of the sun blackens and the skies have rained down soggy potato chips." "But what do all these things mean?" gasped Frito. "Beats me," said Goodgulf with a shrug, "but I thought it made good copy." -- Harvard Lampoon, "Bored of the Rings" %% Very few profundities can be expressed in less than 80 characters. %% VIRGO (Aug 23 - Sept 22) Learn something new today, like how to spell or how to count to ten without using your fingers. Be careful dressing this morning. You may be hit by a car later in the day and you wouldn't want to be taken to the doctor's office in some of that old underwear you own. %% VIRGO (Aug 23 - Sept 22) You are the logical type and hate disorder. This nitpicking is sickening to your friends. You are cold and unemotional and sometimes fall asleep while making love. Virgos make good bus drivers. %% Washington [D.C.] is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm. -- John F. Kennedy %% We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities. -- Walt Kelly, "Pogo" %% We can defeat gravity. The problem is the paperwork involved. %% "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company." %% We will have solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical problem -- how to run a sunbeam through a meter. %% We wish you a Hare Krishna We wish you a Hare Krishna We wish you a Hare Krishna And a Sun Myung Moon! -- Maxwell Smart %% We're deep into the holiday gift-giving season, as you can tell from the fact that everywhere you look, you see jolly old St. Nick urging you to purchase things, to the point where you want to slug him right in his bowl full of jelly. %% Weinberg's First Law: Progress is made on alternate Fridays. %% Weinberg's Principle: An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy. %% Well, I would -- if they realized that we -- again if -- if we led them back to that stalemate only because our retaliatory power, our seconds, or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive they they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off. -- President Ronald Reagan, on the MX missile %% "Well, if you can't believe what you read in a comic book, what *___can* you believe?!" -- Bullwinkle J. Moose [Jay Ward] %% "What do you give a man who has everything?" the pretty teenager asked her mother. "Encouragement, dear," she replied. %% What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. -- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875 %% What is the difference between a Turing machine and the modern computer? It's the same as that between Hillary's ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton on its peak. %% "What's that thing?" "Well, it's a highly technical, sensitive instrument we use in computer repair. Being a layman, you probably can't grasp exactly what it does. We call it a two-by-four." -- Jeff MacNelly, "Shoe" %% Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down. -- Collis P. Huntingdon %% When a Banker jumps out of a window, jump after him -- that's where the money is. -- Robespierre %% When God endowed human beings with brains, He did not intend to guarantee them. %% When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it. -- Clarence Darrow %% When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me. -- Woody Allen %% When love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom! -- Laurie Anderson %% When the Ngdanga tribe of West Africa hold their moon love ceremonies, the men of the tribe bang their heads on sacred trees until they get a nose bleed, which usually cures them of ____that. -- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac" %% When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. -- George Bernard Shaw %% When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. -- Thomas Paine %% Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth. -- Mark Twain "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" %% Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. -- Mark Twain %% WHERE CAN THE MATTER BE Oh, dear, where can the matter be When it's converted to energy? There is a slight loss of parity. Johnny's so long at the fair. %% Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will. -- John Kenneth Galbraith %% While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position. %% While you don't greatly need the outside world, it's still very reassuring to know that it's still there. %% Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad. %% I'd LOVE to, but I have to floss my cat. %% I'd LOVE to, but I need to spend more time with my blender. %% I'd LOVE to, but I have to check the freshness dates on my dairy products. %% I'd LOVE to, but I'm going down to the bakery to watch the buns rise. %% I'd LOVE to, but I have some really hard words to look up. %% I'd LOVE to, but I promised to help a friend fold road maps. %% Why not have an old-fashioned Christmas for your family this year? Just picture the scene in your living room on Christmas morning as your children open their old-fashioned presents. Your 11-year-old son: "What the heck is this?" You: "A spinning top! You spin it around, and then eventually it falls down. What fun! Ha, ha!" Son: "Is this a joke? Jason Thompson's parents got him a computer with two disk drives and 128 kilobytes of random-access memory, and I get this cretin TOP?" Your 8-year-old daughter: "You think that's bad? Look at this." You: "It's figgy pudding! What a treat!" Daughter: "It looks like goat barf." %% William Safire's Rules for Writers: Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.) Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives. %% Williams and Holland's Law: If enough data is collected, anything may be proven by statistical methods. %% Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat. %% With a rubber duck, one's never alone. -- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" %% With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress. -- Ransom K. Ferm %% Wood is highly ecological, since trees are a renewable resource. If you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place. And if you cut down the new tree, still another will grow. And if you cut down that tree, yet another will grow, only this one will be a mutation with long, poisonous tentacles and revenge in its heart, and it will sit there in the forest, cackling and making elaborate plans for when you come back. Wood heat is not new. It dates back to a day millions of years ago, when a group of cavemen were sitting around, watching dinosaurs rot. Suddenly, lightning struck a nearby log and set it on fire. One of the cavemen stared at the fire for a few minutes, then said: "Hey! Wood heat!" The other cavemen, who did not understand English, immediately beat him to death with stones. But the key discovery had been made, and from that day forward, the cavemen had all the heat they needed, although their insurance rates went way up. %% Worst Month of 1981 for Downhill Skiing: August. The lines are the shortest, though. -- Steve Rubenstein %% Worst Month of the Year: February. February has only 28 days in it, which means that if you rent an apartment, you are paying for three full days you don't get. Try to avoid Februarys whenever possible. -- Steve Rubenstein %% Worst Vegetable of the Year: The brussels sprout. This is also the worst vegetable of next year. -- Steve Rubenstein %% Write-Protect Tab, n.: A small sticker created to cover the unsightly notch carelessly left by disk manufacturers. The use of the tab creates an error message once in a while, but its aesthetic value far outweighs the momentary inconvenience. -- Robb Russon %% Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement. -- Snoopy %% Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today -- I think he's from the CIA. %% 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. %% You can create your own opportunities this week. Blackmail a senior executive. %% You can get more of what you want with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word. -- Bumper Sticker %% You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular. %% You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of FORTRAN. -- Alan Perlis %% You can take all the impact that science consider