Some optional equipment shown.

A distraught patient phoned her doctor's office. "Was it true," the woman
inquired, "that the medication the doctor had prescribed was for the rest
of her life?"
She was told that it was. There was just a moment of silence before
the woman proceeded bravely on. "Well, I'm wondering, then, how serious my
condition is. This prescription is marked `NO REFILLS'".
You'll be called to a post requiring ability in handling groups of people.
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and open a vein.
-- Red Smith
An anarchist is a man who is careful to always use pedestrian crossings, because he
utterly detests talking with policemen.
----+- Georges Brassens -+----
I have to think hard to name an interesting man who does not drink.
-- Richard Burton
Before Xerox, five carbons were the maximum extension of anybody's ego.
No one can guarantee the actions of another.
-- Spock, "Day of the Dove", stardate unknown
"If that makes any sense to you, you have a big problem."
-- C. Durance, Computer Science 234
Moebius always does it on the same side.
Most of us feel that marketing types are like a dangerous weapon - keep
'em unloaded and locked up in a cupboard, and only bring them out when
you need them to do a job.
-- Craig Sanders
Anarchy, today, is attack; it is war against every authority, every power, every
state. In the future society, anarchy will be defence, the prevention of the re-
establishment of any authority, any power, any state.
----+- Carlo Cafiero -+----
Q: How was Thomas J. Watson buried?
A: 9 edge down.
Too much is not enough.
If Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is not by some means abridged, it will soon
fall into disuse.
-- Philip Hale, Boston music critic, 1837
Your csh still thinks true is false. Write to your vendor today and tell
them that next year Configure ought to "rm /bin/csh" unless they fix their
blasted shell. :-) -- Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution
Innovation is hard to schedule.
-- Dan Fylstra
Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised)
are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse
at are called software.
-- Levitating Trains and Kamikaze Genes: Technological
Literacy for the 1990's.
Declared guilty... of displaying feelings of an almost human nature.
-- Pink Floyd, "The Wall"
I believe that professional wrestling is clean and everything else in
the world is fixed.
-- Frank Deford, sports writer
"The Mets were great in 'sixty eight,
The Cards were fine in 'sixty nine,
But the Cubs will be heavenly in nineteen and seventy."
-- Ernie Banks
A computer salesman visits a company president for the purpose of selling
the president one of the latest talking computers.
Salesman: "This machine knows everything. I can ask it any question
and it'll give the correct answer. Computer, what is the
 speed of light?"
Computer: 186,282 miles per second.
Salesman: "Who was the first president of the United States?"
Computer: George Washington.
President: "I'm still not convinced. Let me ask a question.
Where is my father?"
Computer: Your father is fishing in Georgia.
President: "Hah!! The computer is wrong. My father died over twenty
years ago!"
Computer: Your mother's husband died 22 years ago. Your father just
landed a twelve pound bass.
Wheresoever it be, there will exist the power of certain men over others, and there
will not be freedom, but there will be the oppression of one portion of mankind by
another. Therefore power must be abolished.
----+- Leo Tolstoy -+----
(6) Men employees will be given time off each week for courting
purposes, or two evenings a week if they go regularly to church.
(7) After an employee has spent his thirteen hours of labor in the
office, he should spend the remaining time reading the Bible
and other good books.
(8) Every employee should lay aside from each pay packet a goodly
sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years,
so that he will not become a burden on society or his betters.
(9) Any employee who smokes Spanish cigars, uses alcoholic drink
in any form, frequents pool tables and public halls, or gets
shaved in a barber's shop, will give me good reason to suspect
his worth, intentions, integrity and honesty.
(10) The employee who has performed his labours faithfully and
without a fault for five years, will be given an increase of
five cents per day in his pay, providing profits from the
business permit it.
-- "Office Worker's Guide", New England Carriage Works, 1872
The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.
Gumperson's Law:
The probability of a given event occurring is inversely
proportional to its desirability.
Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot
remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about
women.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Alan E. Davis: Some files at llug.sep.bnl.gov/pub/debian/Incoming are
stamped on 10 January 1998. As I write, nowhere on Earth is it now 10 January.

Craig Sanders: That just proves how advanced debian is, doesn't it :-)
-- debian-devel
Have you seen the latest Japanese camera? Apparently it is so fast it can
photograph an American with his mouth shut!
"Don't talk to me about disclaimers! I invented disclaimers!"
-- The Censored Hacker
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.
"The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science
collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke
miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into
the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to
abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all
fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion,
misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the
ideas of their opponents."
-- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism",
The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186
As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code.
I have sacrificed time, health, and fortune, in the desire to complete these
Calculating Engines. I have also declined several offers of great personal
advantage to myself. But, notwithstanding the sacrifice of these advantages
for the purpose of maturing an engine of almost intellectual power, and after
expending from my own private fortune a larger sum than the government of
England has spent on that machine, the execution of which it only commenced,
I have received neither an acknowledgement of my labors, not even the offer
of those honors or rewards which are allowed to fall within the reach of men
who devote themselves to purely scientific investigations...

If the work upon which I have bestowed so much time and thought were a mere
triumph over mechanical difficulties, or simply curious, or if the execution
of such engines were of doubtful practicability or utility, some justification
might be found for the course which has been taken; but I venture to assert
that no mathematician who has a reputation to lose will ever publicly express
an opinion that such a machine would be useless if made, and that no man
distinguished as a civil engineer will venture to declare the construction of
such machinery impracticable...

And at a period when the progress of physical science is obstructed by that

exhausting intellectual and manual labor, indispensable for its advancement,
which it is the object of the Analytical Engine to relieve, I think the
application of machinery in aid of the most complicated and abtruse
calculations can no longer be deemed unworthy of the attention of the country.
In fact, there is no reason why mental as well as bodily labor should not
be economized by the aid of machinery.
-- Charles Babbage, Passage from the Life of a Philosopher
"If I ever get around to writing that language depompisifier, it will change
almost all occurrences of the word "paradigm" into "example" or "model."
-- Herbie Blashtfalt
The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the most likely to be
correct.
-- William of Occam
The eyes of taxes are upon you.
Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.
-- Sir Walter Raleigh
Nutritional Slumming:
Food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from a
complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals, and
packaging semiotics: Katie and I bought this tub of Multi-Whip instead
of real whip cream because we thought petroleum distillate whip
topping seemed like the sort of food that air force wives stationed in
Pensacola back in the early sixties would feed their husbands to
celebrate a career promotion.
-- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
Culture"
It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion.
-- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)
Alexander Graham Bell is alive and well in New York, and still waiting
for a dial tone.
The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or
give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.
What is a utopia? A dream unrealized, but not unrealizable.
----+- Joseph Dejacque -+----
<Slackware> uh oh, what have I started :)
<Debian> rofl... distro nick wars.
* Slackware just waits for /nick Gnome, /nick KDE, and then world war 4
to break out
<WinNT> :oP
<OpenBSD> <duck>
<PalmOS> :)
<Slackware> no'one would dare /nick RedHat
<tru64> mew.
Your best consolation is the hope that the things you failed to get weren't
really worth having.
He who laughs last usually had to have joke explained.
I hate quotations.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mr. Rockford, this is the Thomas Crown School of Dance and Contemporary
Etiquette. We aren't going to call again! Now you want these free
lessons or what?
-- "The Rockford Files"
A man without a woman is like a statue without pigeons.
The part of the world that people find most puzzling is the part called "Me".
Coming to Stores Near You:

101 Grammatically Correct Popular Tunes Featuring:

(You Aren't Anything but a) Hound Dog

It Doesn't Mean a Thing If It Hasn't Got That Swing
I'm Not Misbehaving

And A Whole Lot More...

Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently
than they do.
-- Turgenev
The gentlemen looked one another over with microscopic carelessness.
Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and speech only to
conceal their thoughts.
-- Voltaire
If researchers wrote nursery rhymes...

Little Miss Muffet sat on her gluteal region,

Eating components of soured milk.
On at least one occasion,
along came an arachnid and sat down beside her,
Or at least in her vicinity,
And caused her to feel an overwhelming, but not paralyzing, fear,
Which motivated the patient to leave the area rather quickly.
-- Ann Melugin Williams
This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. If this had been an
actual emergency, do you really think we'd stick around to tell you?
<dark> "Yes, your honour, I have RSA encryption code tattood on my
penis. Shall I show the jury?"
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature
is to build better mice.
I'll give you a definite maybe. -Samuel Goldwyn
The magician is seated in his high chair and looks upon the world with favor.
He is at the height of his powers. If he closes his eyes, he causes the world
to disappear. If he opens his eyes, he causes the world to come back. If
there is harmony within him, the world is harmonious. If rage shatters his
inner harmony, the unity of the world is shattered. If desire arises within
him, he utters the magic syllables that causes the desired object to appear.
His wishes, his thoughts, his gestures, his noises command the universe.
-- Selma Fraiberg, _The Magic Years_, pg. 107
A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.
-- Helen Rowland
Ha. I say let them try -- even vi+perl couldn't match the power of an
editor which is, after all, its own OS. ;-)
-- Johnie Ingram on debian-devel, about linking vim with libperl.so
Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and
cannot.
-- Oscar Wilde
If you wish to succeed, consult three old people.
The new Congressmen say they're going to turn the government around. I
hope I don't get run over again.
Laugh, and the world ignores you. Crying doesn't help either.
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
-- Eric Hoffer
This universe shipped by weight, not by volume. Some expansion of the
contents may have occurred during shipment.
Woman was God's second mistake.
-- Nietzsche
Burbulation:
The obsessive act of opening and closing a refrigerator door in
an attempt to catch it before the automatic light comes on.
-- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends
I dunno, I dream in Perl sometimes...
-- Larry Wall in <8538@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Breaking seal constitutes acceptance of agreement.
Eric Raymond: I want to live in a world where software doesn't suck.
Richard Stallman: Any software that isn't free sucks.
Linus Torvalds: I'm interested in free beer.
Richard Stallman: That's okay, as long as I don't have to drink it. I
don't like beer.
-- LinuxWorld Expo panel, 4 March 1999
You can't get there from here.
Banectomy, n.:
The removal of bruises on a banana.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
Expansion means complexity; and complexity decay.
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.
Although it is still a truism in industry that "no one was ever fired for
buying IBM," Bill O'Neil, the chief technology officer at Drexel Burnham
Lambert, says he knows for a fact that someone has been fired for just that
reason. He knows it because he fired the guy.
"He made a bad decision, and what it came down to was, 'Well, I
bought it because I figured it was safe to buy IBM,'" Mr. O'Neil says.
"I said, 'No. Wrong. Game over. Next contestant, please.'"
-- The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 1989
A penny saved is ridiculous.
Yours is not to reason why,
Just to Sail Away.
And when you find you have to throw
Your Legacy away;
Remember life as was it is,
And is as it were;
Chasing sounds across the galaxy
'Till silence is but a blur.
-- QYX.
Never argue with a woman when she's tired -- or rested.
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that
procession but carrying a banner.
-- Mark Twain
The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be
general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that
any field that had the word "science" in its name was guaranteed thereby
not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library
Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer
Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its
predictive power.
-- Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems
Thinking"
Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is
destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the
program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from
the program.
----+- Richard Stallman -+----
A pushy romeo asked a gorgeous elevator operator, "Don't all these
stops and starts get you pretty worn out?" "It isn't the stops and starts
that get on my nerves, it's the jerks."
If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
Ever notice that even the busiest people are never too busy to tell you
just how busy they are?
<lilo> I've always wanted to have a web site with a big picture of a carrot on it
Chicago law prohibits eating in a place that is on fire.
Without ice cream life and fame are meaningless.
Given some of the recent threads, the interactive discussions might
need to be conducted on canvas, in the presence of a referee, while
wearing padded gloves. ;-)
-- Phil Hands
The three laws of thermodynamics:
(1) You can't get anything without working for it.
(2) The most you can accomplish by working is to break even.
(3) You can only break even at absolute zero.
They're giving bank robbing a bad name.
-- John Dillinger, on Bonnie and Clyde
Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical
lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach your
hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings. Did you
notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in pain? This
teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never
use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical lesson.
It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed
your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects
that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will attract dirt.
The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger,
where they form a spark that leaps to your friend's filling, then travels
down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
Amazing Electronic Fact: If you scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger
would explode! But this is nothing to worry about unless you have
carpeting.
-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
In the beginning there was nothing. And the Lord said "Let There Be Light!"
And still there was nothing, but at least now you could see it.
Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them.
Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark Laboratories.
-- Donn Seeley
* Caytln slaps Lisa
<Caytln> catfight :P
<LisaHere> Watch it girl, I like that.
<LisaHere> :)
<Caytln> figures :D
Bondage maybe, discipline never!
-- T.K.
Don't I know you?
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind.
-- Mark Harrold
Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century. Politics is about
surviving until Friday afternoon.
-- Sir Humphrey Appleby
I have accepted Provolone into my life!
Why do so many foods come packaged in plastic? It's quite uncanny.
Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime.
For a first offense, that is.
<Culus-> libc6 is not essential :|
He who is flogged by fate and laughs the louder is a masochist.
If a man has a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
We must die because we have known them.
-- Ptah-hotep, 2000 B.C.
I used to live in a house by the freeway. When I went anywhere, I had
to be going 65 MPH by the end of my driveway.

I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights. Now it looks

like I'm the only one moving.

I was pulled over for speeding today. The officer said, "Don't you know
the speed limit is 55 miles an hour?" And I said, "Yes, but I wasn't going
to be out that long."

I put a new engine in my car, but didn't take the old one out. Now
my car goes 500 miles an hour.
-- Steven Wright
The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer
them a drink.
-- Fran Lebowitz, "Interview"
Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?
-- Charlie McCarthy
Herth's Law:
He who turns the other cheek too far gets it in the neck.
Excerpt from a conversation between a customer support person and a
customer working for a well-known military-affiliated research lab:

Support: "You're not our only customer, you know."

Customer: "But we're one of the few with tactical nuclear weapons."
In every non-trivial program there is at least one bug.
A man's gotta know his limitations.
-- Clint Eastwood, "Dirty Harry"
To get something clean, one has to get something dirty.
To get something dirty, one does not have to get anything clean.
A novice asked the Master: "Here is a programmer that never designs,
documents, or tests his programs. Yet all who know him consider him one of
the best programmers in the world. Why is this?"
The Master replies: "That programmer has mastered the Tao. He has
gone beyond the need for design; he does not become angry when the system
crashes, but accepts the universe without concern. He has gone beyond the
need for documentation; he no longer cares if anyone else sees his code. He
has gone beyond the need for testing; each of his programs are perfect within
themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident. Truly, he has
entered the mystery of the Tao."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
For years a secret shame destroyed my peace--
I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNiece.
But now I think a thought that brings me hope:
Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.
-- Justin Richardson.
"I've finally learned what `upward compatible' means. It means we
get to keep all our old mistakes."
-- Dennie van Tassel
<Dr^Nick> SGI_Multitexture is bad voodoo now
<Dr^Nick> ARB is good voodoo
<witten> no, voodoo rush is bad voodoo :)
You don't move to Edina, you achieve Edina.
-- Guindon
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?
-- Lily Tomlin
LOGO for the Dead

LOGO for the Dead lets you continue your computing activities from
"The Other Side."

The package includes a unique telecommunications feature which lets you

turn your TRS-80 into an electronic Ouija board. Then, using Logo's
graphics capabilities, you can work with a friend or relative on this
side of the Great Beyond to write programs. The software requires that
your body be hardwired to an analog-to-digital converter, which is then
interfaced to your computer. A special terminal (very terminal) program
lets you talk with the users through Deadnet, an EBBS (Ectoplasmic
Bulletin Board System).

LOGO for the Dead is available for 10 percent of your estate

from NecroSoft inc., 6502 Charnelhouse Blvd., Cleveland, OH 44101.
-- '80 Microcomputing
To stand and be still,
At the Birkenhead drill,
Is a damned tough bullet to chew.
-- Rudyard Kipling
It is better to wear chains than to believe you are free, and weight
yourself down with invisible chains.
On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague:

"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

-- Wolfgang Pauli
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
-- H. L. Mencken, "A Mencken Chrestomathy"
QOTD:
"What do you mean, you had the dog fixed? Just what made you
think he was broken!"
Our cause cannot expect me to become a nun and the movement will not be turned into
a cloister.
----+- Emma Goldman -+----
sushi, n.:
When that-which-may-still-be-alive is put on top of rice and
strapped on with electrical tape.
Courage is your greatest present need.
Ultra Short Term Nostalgia:
Homesickness for the extremely recent past: "God, things seemed
so much better in the world last week."
-- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
Culture"
You have a strong desire for a home and your family interests come first.
I knew her before she was a virgin.
-- Oscar Levant, on Doris Day
Westheimer's Discovery:
A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a
couple of hours in the library.
Q: How does a hacker fix a function which
doesn't work for all of the elements in its domain?
A: He changes the domain.
Moebius always does it on the same side.
Moe: What did you give your wife for Valentine's Day?
Joe: The usual gift -- she ate my heart out.
The right half of the brain controls the left half of the body. This
means that only left handed people are in their right mind.
Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised)
are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse
at are called software.
-- Levitating Trains and Kamikaze Genes: Technological
Literacy for the 1990's.
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause,
while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
-- Wilhelm Stekel
Delores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever
skipping along smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious
to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, and due to an
overdose of flouride as a child which caused her to suffer from chronic
apathy, doomed herself to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless
as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred pound barbell in a
steroid-free fitness center.
-- Winning sentence, 1990 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.
Fortune's Real-Life Courtroom Quote #19:

Q: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?

A: All my autopsies have been performed on dead people.
furbling, v.:
Having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank
even when you are the only person in line.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
A serious public debate about the validity of astrology? A serious believer
in the White House? Two of them? Give me a break. What stifled my laughter
is that the image fits. Reagan has always exhibited a fey indifference toward
science. Facts, like numbers, roll off his back. And we've all come to
accept it. This time it was stargazing that became a serious issue....Not
that long ago, it was Reagan's support of Creationism....Creationists actually
got equal time with evolutionists. The public was supposed to be open-minded
to the claims of paleontologists and fundamentalists, as if the two were
scientific colleagues....It has been clear for a long time that the president
is averse to science...In general, these attitudes fall onto friendly American
turf....But at the outer edges, this skepticism about science easily turns
into a kind of naive acceptance of nonscience, or even nonsense. The same
people who doubt experts can also believe any quackery, from the benefits of
laetrile to eye of newt to the movement of planets. We lose the capacity to
make rational -- scientific -- judgments. It's all the same.
-- Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe Newspaper Company-Washington Post Writers
 Group
For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.
-- Abraham Lincoln
Death to all fanatics!
Paranoid Club meeting this Friday. Now ... just try to find out where!
Asked how she felt being the first woman to make a major-league team, she
said, "Like a pig in mud," or words to that effect, and then turned and
released a squirt of tobacco juice from the wad of rum soaked plug in her
right cheek. She chewed a rare brand of plug called Stuff It, which she
learned to chew when she was playing Nicaraguan summer ball. She told the
writers, "They were so mean to me down there you couldn't write it in your
newspaper. I took a gun everywhere I went, even to bed. *Especially* to
bed. Guys were after me like you can't believe. That's when I started
chewing tobacco -- because no matter how bad anybody treats you, it's not
as bad as this. This is the worst chew in the world. After this,
everything else is peaches and cream." The writers elected Gentleman Jim,
the Sparrow's P.R. guy, to bite off a chunk and tell them how it tasted,
and as he sat and chewed it tears ran down his old sunburnt cheeks and he
couldn't talk for a while. Then he whispered, "You've been chewing this for
two years? God, I had no idea it was so hard to be a woman."
-- Garrison Keillor
Every one says that politicians lie all the time, and that just isn't so!
But you do have to understand body language to know when they're lying and
when they aren't.

When a politician rubs his nose, he isn't lying.

When a politician tugs on his ear, he isn't lying.
When a politician scratches his collar bone, he isn't lying.
When his mouth starts moving, that's when he's lying!
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a
test load.
The flush toilet is the basis of Western civilization.
-- Alan Coult
Never delay the ending of a meeting or the beginning of a cocktail hour.
Ever feel like life was a game and you had the wrong instruction book?
There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
-- Henry Kissinger
I have a VISION! It's a RANCID double-FISHWICH on an ENRICHED BUN!!
It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.
-- Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid)
There is nothing wrong with writing ... as long as it is done in private
and you wash your hands afterward.
Dead? No excuse for laying off work.
Her days were spent in a kind of slow bustle; always busy without getting
on, always behind hand and lamenting it, without altering her ways;
wishing to be an economist, without contrivance or regularity; dissatisfied
with her servants, without skill to make them better, and whether helping, or
reprimanding, or indulging them, without any power of engaging their respect.
-- J. Austen
Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.
Forest fires cause Smokey Bears.
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
I've always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.
Death rays don't kill people, people kill people!!
... an anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center. When a
programmer used his new computer terminal, all was fine when he was sitting
down, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up. That
behavior was 100 percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and
never when standing.

Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story; how could that terminal
know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing? Good debuggers, though,
know that there has to be a reason. Electrical theories are the easiest to
hypothesize: was there a loose wire under the carpet, or problems with static
electricity? But electrical problems are rarely consistently reproducible.
An alert IBMer finally noticed that the problem was in the terminal's keyboard:
the tops of two keys were switched. When the programmer was seated he was a
touch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led
astray by hunting and pecking.
-- "Programming Pearls" column, by Jon Bentley in CACM February 1985
The person who can smile when something goes wrong has thought of
someone to blame it on.
No use getting too involved in life -- you're only here for a limited time.
A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours.
-- Milton Berle
Do you realize how many holes there could be if people would just take
the time to take the dirt out of them?
Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be a young June-bug
than an old bird of paradise.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
During the American Revolution, a Britisher tried to raid a farm. He
stumbled across a rock on the ground and fell, whereupon an agressive Rhode
Island Red hopped on top. Seeing this, the farmer commented, "Chicken catch
a Tory!"
I know th'MAMBO!! I have a TWO-TONE CHEMISTRY SET!!
"Mr. Spock succumbs to a powerful mating urge and nearly kills Captain Kirk."
-- TV Guide, describing the Star Trek episode _Amok_Time_
A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother
drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
-- Shaw
This land is full of trousers!
this land is full of mausers!
And pussycats to eat them when the sun goes down!
-- Firesign Theater
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
-- Milton Friendman
Satire is tragedy plus time.
-- Lenny Bruce
All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact,
barely presentable.
-- Fran Lebowitz, "Metropolitan Life"
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor...
is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics.
-- N. Wiener
We found you hiding
We found you lying
Choking on the dirt and sand.

Your former glories

And all the stories
Dragged and washed with eager hands.
-- ``Cities in Dust'', "Tinderbox", Siouxsie & the Banshees.
"The student in question is performing minimally for his peer group and
is an emerging underachiever."
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
-- Muriel Rukeyser
Would you care to drift aimlessly in my direction?
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.
(Presuming for the sake of argument that it's even *possible* to design
better code in Perl than in C. :-)
-- Larry Wall on core code vs. module code design
"I got into an elevator at work and this man followed in after me... I
pushed '1' and he just stood there... I said 'Hi, where you going?' He
said, 'Phoenix.' So I pushed Phoenix. A few seconds later the doors
opened, two tumbleweeds blew in... we were in downtown Phoenix. I looked
at him and said 'You know, you're the kind of guy I want to hang around
with.' We got into his car and drove out to his shack in the desert.
Then the phone rang. He said 'You get it.' I picked it up and said
'Hello?'... the other side said 'Is this Steven Wright?'... I said 'Yes...'
The guy said 'Hi, I'm Mr. Jones, the student loan director from your bank...
It seems you have missed your last 17 payments, and the university you
attended said that they received none of the $17,000 we loaned you... we
would just like to know what happened to the money?' I said, 'Mr. Jones,
I'll give it to you straight. I gave all of the money to my friend Slick,
and with it he built a nuclear weapon... and I would appreciate it if you never
called me again."
-- Steven Wright
** MAXIMUM TERMINALS ACTIVE. TRY AGAIN LATER **
"Pseudocode can be used to some extent to aid the maintenance
process. However, pseudocode that is highly detailed -
approaching the level of detail of the code itself - is not of
much use as maintenance documentation. Such detailed
documentation has to be maintained almost as much as the code,
thus doubling the maintenance burden. Furthermore, since such
voluminous pseudocode is too distracting to be kept in the
listing itself, it must be kept in a separate folder. The
result: Since pseudocode - unlike real code - doesn't have to be
maintained, no one will maintain it. It will soon become out of
date and everyone will ignore it. (Once, I did an informal
survey of 42 shops that used pseudocode. Of those 42, 0 [zero!],
found that it had any value as maintenance documentation."
--Meilir Page-Jones, "The Practical Guide to Structured
Design", Yourdon Press (c) 1988
When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced
to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
-- Brendan Behan
Yow! Am I having fun yet?
Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
-- Dylan Thomas, "Was There A Time"
After two or three weeks of this madness, you begin to feel As One with
the man who said, "No news is good news." In twenty-eight papers, only
the rarest kind of luck will turn up more than two or three articles of
any interest... but even then the interest items are usually buried deep
around paragraph 16 on the jump (or "Cont. on ...") page...

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

Now that's good journalism. Totally objective; very active and straight
to the point.
-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"
A company is known by the men it keeps.
Don't despair; your ideal lover is waiting for you around the corner.
Why are you doing this to me?
Because knowledge is torture, and there must be awareness before
there is change.
-- Jim Starlin, "Captain Marvel", #29
<dark> "Let's form the Linux Standard Linux Standardization Association
Board. The purpose of this board will be to standardize Linux
Standardization Organizations."
Apply only to affected area.
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
"It's my cookie file and if I come up with something that's lame and I like it,
it goes in."
-- karl (Karl Lehenbauer)
The hope that springs eternal
Springs right up your behind.
-- Ian Drury, "This Is What We Find"
Marriage is learning about women the hard way.
Diplomacy is the art of letting the other party have things your way.
-- Daniele Vare
Absence makes the heart forget.
Kids, don't gross me off ... "Adventures with MENTAL HYGIENE" can be
carried too FAR!
When this load is DONE I think I'll wash it AGAIN ...
You have only to mumble a few words in church to get married and few words
in your sleep to get divorced.
There's something the technicians need to learn from the artists.
If it isn't aesthetically pleasing, it's probably wrong.
Some people have no respect for age unless it's bottled.
A man sank into the psychiatrist's couch and said, "I have a
terrible problem, Doctor. I have a son at Harvard and another son at
Princeton; I've just gifted each of them with a new Ferrari; I've got
homes in Beverly Hills, Palm Beach, and a co-op in New York; and I've
got a thriving ranch in Venezuela. My wife is a gorgeous young actress
who considers my two mistresses to be her best friends."
The psychiatrist looked at the patient, confused. "Did I miss
something? It sounds to me like you have no problems at all."
"But, Doctor, I only make $175 a week."
You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle
is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
-- W. Somerset Maugham, "The Circle"
The FIELD GUIDE to NORTH AMERICAN MALES

SPECIES: Cranial Males

SUBSPECIES: The Hacker (homo computatis)
Courtship & Mating:
Due to extreme deprivation, HOMO COMPUTATIS maintains a near perpetual
state of sexual readiness. Courtship behavior alternates between
awkward shyness and abrupt advances. When he finally mates, he
chooses a female engineer with an unblinking stare, a tight mouth, and
 a complete collection of Campbell's soup-can recipes.
Track:
Trash cans full of pale green and white perforated paper and old
copies of the Allen-Bradley catalog.
Comments:
Extremely fond of bad puns and jokes that need long explanations.
Famous last words:
(1) Don't unplug it, it will just take a moment to fix.
(2) Let's take the shortcut, he can't see us from there.
(3) What happens if you touch these two wires tog--
(4) We won't need reservations.
(5) It's always sunny there this time of the year.
(6) Don't worry, it's not loaded.
(7) They'd never (be stupid enough to) make him a manager.
(8) Don't worry! Women love it!
Anyone can become angry -- that is easy; but to be angry with the right
person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose
and in the right way -- that is not easy.
-- Aristotle
He hath eaten me out of house and home.
-- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV"
Mary Tyler Moore's SEVENTH HUSBAND is wearing my DACRON TANK TOP in a
cheap hotel in HONOLULU!
The notion that science does not concern itself with first causes -- that it
leaves the field to theology or metaphysics, and confines itself to mere
effects -- this notion has no support in the plain facts. If it could,
science would explain the origin of life on earth at once--and there is
every reason to believe that it will do so on some not too remote tomorrow.
To argue that gaps in knowledge which will confront the seeker must be filled,
not by patient inquiry, but by intuition or revelation, is simply to give
ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity....
-- H. L. Mencken, 1930
The poor are to blame for there being rich men.
----+- Max Stirner -+----
"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be, and
if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!"
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"
* dark greets liw with a small yellow frog.
* liw kisses the frog and watches it transform to a beautiful nerd
girl, takes her out to ice cream, and lives happily forever after
with her
<dark> liw: Umm it's too late to have the frog back?
The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.
-- Ogden Nash
Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
-- James Thurber
Blessed are they that have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded
to say it.
-- James Russell Lowell
Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of telling you to stop writing.
-- R. Geis
More are taken in by hope than by cunning.
-- Vauvenargues
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
-- Mark Twain
<Tarzan> hey did you fall off your pirch or something?
<knghtbrd> me? heh.
There is nothing which cannot be answered by means of my doctrine," said
a monk, coming into a teahouse where Nasrudin sat.
"And yet just a short time ago, I was challenged by a scholar with
an unanswerable question," said Nasrudin.
"I could have answered it if I had been there."
"Very well. He asked, 'Why are you breaking into my house in
the middle of the night?'"
As a goatherd learns his trade by goat, so a writer learns his trade by wrote.
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
SUN Microsystems:
The Network IS the Load Average.
You are transported to a room where you are faced by a wizard who
points to you and says, "Them's fighting words!" You immediately get
attacked by all sorts of denizens of the museum: there is a cobra
chewing on your leg, a troglodyte is bashing your brains out with a
gold nugget, a crocodile is removing large chunks of flesh from you, a
rhinoceros is goring you with his horn, a sabre-tooth cat is busy
trying to disembowel you, you are being trampled by a large mammoth, a
vampire is sucking you dry, a Tyrannosaurus Rex is sinking his six inch
long fangs into various parts of your anatomy, a large bear is
dismembering your body, a gargoyle is bouncing up and down on your
head, a burly troll is tearing you limb from limb, several dire wolves
are making mince meat out of your torso, and the wizard is about to
transport you to the corner of Westwood and Broxton. Oh dear, you seem
to have gotten yourself killed, as well.

You scored 0 out of 250 possible points.

That gives you a ranking of junior beginning adventurer.
To achieve the next higher rating, you need to score 32 more points.
Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.
What do you give a man who has everything? Penicillin.
-- Jerry Lester
Non-Determinism is not meant to be reasonable.
-- M. J. 0'Donnell
Robustness, adj.:
Never having to say you're sorry.
We should start referring to processes which run in the background by their
correct technical name... paenguins.
-- Kevin M. Bealer, commenting on the penguin Linux logo
Humor in the Court:
Q: Could you see him from where you were standing?
A: I could see his head.
Q: And where was his head?
A: Just above his shoulders.
Real Users find the one combination of bizarre input values that shuts
down the system for days.
There is no comfort without pain; thus we define salvation through suffering.
-- Cato
You've been leading a dog's life. Stay off the furniture.
I think $[ is more like a coelacanth than a mastadon.
-- Larry Wall in <199705101952.MAA00756@wall.org>
No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas.
The task of teachers, those obscure soldiers of civilization, is to give to the
people the intellectual means to revolt.
----+- Louise Michel -+----
Ultra Short Term Nostalgia:
 Homesickness for the extremely recent past: "God, things seemed
so much better in the world last week."
-- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
Culture"
Hmm... Which would do a better job at driving physicists crazy? Travel
faster than light, or a floating-point boolean value?
-- Michael Mol
On a morning from a Bogart movie, in a country where they turned back time,
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime.
She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain.
Don't bother asking for explanations, she'll just tell you that she came
In the Year of the Cat.

She doesn't give you time for questions, as she locks up your arm in hers,
And you follow 'till your sense of which direction completely disappears.
By the blue-tiled walls near the market stall there's a hidden door she
leads you to.
These days, she say, I feel my life just like a river running through
The Year of the Cat.

Well, she looks at you so coolly,

And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea.
She comes in incense and patchouli,
So you take her to find what's waiting inside
The Year of the Cat.

Well, morning comes and you're still with her, but the bus and the tourists
are gone,
And you've thrown away your choice and lost your ticket, so you have to stay on.
But the drum-beat strains of the night remain in the rhythm of the new-born day.
You know some time you're bound to leave her, but for now you're going to stay
In the Year of the Cat.
-- Al Stewart, "Year of the Cat"
<Knghtbrd> glDisable (GL_BUGS);
<Endy> heh
<Endy> Is that in 1.2? :)
Randal can write one-liners again. Everyone is happy, and peace spreads
over the whole Earth.
-- Larry Wall in <199705101952.MAA00756@wall.org>
It is impossible for an optimist to be pleasantly surprised.
Now KEN and BARBIE are PERMANENTLY ADDICTED to MIND-ALTERING DRUGS ...
QOTD:
"What women and psychologists call `dropping your armor', we call
"baring your neck."
[Astrology is] 100 percent hokum, Ted. As a matter of fact, the first edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, written in 1771 -- 1771! -- said that this
belief system is a subject long ago ridiculed and reviled. We're dealing with
beliefs that go back to the ancient Babylonians. There's nothing there....
It sounds a lot like science, it sounds like astronomy. It's got technical
terms. It's got jargon. It confuses the public....The astrologer is quite
glib, confuses the public, uses terms which come from science, come from
metaphysics, come from a host of fields, but they really mean nothing. The
fact is that astrological beliefs go back at least 2,500 years. Now that
should be a sufficiently long time for astrologers to prove their case. They
have not proved their case....It's just simply gibberish. The fact is, there's
no theory for it, there are no observational data for it. It's been tested
and tested over the centuries. Nobody's ever found any validity to it at
all. It is not even close to a science. A science has to be repeatable, it
has to have a logical foundation, and it has to be potentially vulnerable --
you test it. And in that astrology is really quite something else.
-- Astronomer Richard Berendzen, President, American University, on ABC
News "Nightline," May 3, 1988
It is the quality rather than the quantity that matters.
-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Oregano, n.:
The ancient Italian art of pizza folding.
"This isn't brain surgery; it's just television."
-- David Letterman
Those who do things in a noble spirit of self-sacrifice are to be avoided
at all costs.
-- N. Alexander.
A memorandum is written not to inform the reader, but to protect the writer.
-- Dean Acheson
You will be surprised by a loud noise.
Where do you think you're going today?
Moishe Margolies, who weighed all of 105 pounds and stood an even five feet
in his socks, was taking his first airplane trip. He took a seat next to a
hulking bruiser of a man who happened to be the heavyweight champion of
the world. Little Moishe was uneasy enough before he even entered the plane,
but now the roar of the engines and the great height absolutely terrified him.
So frightened did he become that his stomach turned over and he threw up all
over the muscular giant siting beside him. Fortunately, at least for Moishe,
the man was sound asleep. But now the little man had another problem. How in
the world would he ever explain the situation to the burly brute when he
awakened? The sudden voice of the stewardess on the plane's intercom, finally
woke the bruiser, and Moishe, his heart in his mouth, rose to the occasion.
"Feeling better now?" he asked solicitously.
Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
-- Ambrose Bierce
Horner's Five Thumb Postulate:
Experience varies directly with equipment ruined.
Celebrity Schadenfreude:
Lurid thrills derived from talking about celebrity deaths.
-- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
Culture"
An economist is a man who would marry Farrah Fawcett-Majors for her money.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Love conquers all things; let us too surrender to love.
-- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)
Bernard Shaw is an excellent man; he has not an enemy in the world, and
none of his friends like him either.
-- Oscar Wilde
Every program has (at least) two purposes:
the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
Symptom: Floor blurred.
Fault: You are looking through bottom of empty glass.
Action Required: Find someone who will buy you another beer.

Symptom: Floor moving.

Fault: You are being carried out.
Action Required: Find out if you are taken to another bar. If not,
complain loudly that you are being kidnapped.
-- Bar Troubleshooting
At times discretion should be thrown aside,
and with the foolish we should play the fool.
-- Menander
There's no heavier burden than a great potential.
We the Users, in order to form a more perfect system, establish priorities,
ensure connective tranquility, provide for common repairs, promote preventive
maintenance, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our
processes, do ordain and establish this Software of The Unixed States
of America.
One reason why George Washington
Is held in such veneration:
He never blamed his problems
On the former Administration.
-- George O. Ludcke
Beware the one behind you.
He's just a politician trying to save both his faces...
Thus spake the master programmer:
"Without the wind, the grass does not move. Without software,
hardware is useless."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could
know how seldom they do.
-- Olin Miller.
<Joy> Flinny: black crontab magic kinda stuff :)
<knghtbrd> Joy: does that mean people get to dance naked around bonfires
chanting strange things and waving their arms about in a silly
manner?
<rcw> knghtbrd: what do you *think* people do at novare?
<taniwha> Knghtbrd: it's not bloat if it's used
<Knghtbrd> taniwha: how do you explain windoze then?
<taniwha> Knghtbrd: most of it is used only as ballast to make sure your
harddrive is full
<Knghtbrd> taniwha: ballast... Isn't that what makes subs sink to the
bottom of the ocean?
<Knghtbrd> taniwha: that would explain why winboxes are always going down.
They're only trying to make me LOOK paranoid!
Cinemuck, n.:
The combination of popcorn, soda, and melted chocolate which
covers the floors of movie theaters.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
The computer industry is journalists in their 20's standing in awe of
entrepreneurs in their 30's who are hiring salesmen in their 40's and
50's and paying them in the 60's and 70's to bring their marketing into
the 80's.
-- Marty Winston
I wouldn't be so paranoid if you weren't all out to get me!!
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
-- Albert Schweitzer
While the year 2000 (y2k) problem is not an issue for us, all Linux
implementations will impacted by the year 2038 (y2.038k) issue. The
Debian Project is committed to working with the industry on this issue
and we will have our full plans and strategy posted by the first quarter
of 2020.
Whatever became of eternal truth?
This is a NO-FRILLS flight -- hold th' CANADIAN BACON!!
Microsoft Corp., concerned by the growing popularity of the free 32-bit
operating system for Intel systems, Linux, has employed a number of top
programmers from the underground world of virus development. Bill Gates stated
yesterday: "World domination, fast -- it's either us or Linus". Mr. Torvalds
was unavailable for comment ...
(rjm@swift.eng.ox.ac.uk (Robert Manners), in comp.os.linux.setup)
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb
to you till your life has illustrated it. -- John Keats
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first
overcome.
-- Dr. Johnson
QOTD:
The forest may be quiet, but that doesn't mean
the snakes have gone away.
"I only touch base with reality on an as-needed basis!"
-- Royal Floyd Mengot (Klaus)
Flying saucers on occasion
Show themselves to human eyes.
Aliens fume, put off invasion
While they brand these tales as lies.
Near the Studio Jean Cocteau
On the Rue des Ecoles
lived an old man
with a blind dog
Every evening I would see him
guiding the dog along
the sidewalk, keeping
a firm grip on the leash
so that the dog wouldn't
run into a passerby
Sometimes the dog would stop
and look up at the sky
Once the old man
noticed me watching the dog
and he said, "Oh, yes,
this one knows
when the moon is out,
he can feel it on his face"
-- Barry Gifford
You say you are lying. But if everything you say is a lie, then you are
telling the truth. You cannot tell the truth because everything you say
is a lie. You lie, you tell the truth ... but you cannot, for you lie.
-- Norman the android, "I, Mudd", stardate 4513.3
Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, offer no angles to the wind.
The universe is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be
ruled by interfering.
-- Chinese proverb
Has anyone realized that the purpose of the fortune cookie program is to
defuse project tensions? When did you ever see a cheerful cookie, a
non-cynical, or even an informative cookie?
Perhaps inadvertently, we have a channel for our aggressions. This
still begs the question of whether the cookie releases the pressure or only
serves to blunt the warning signs.

Long live the revolution!

Have a nice day.
For children with short attention spans: boomerangs that don't come back.
Historians have now definitely established that Juan Cabrillo, discoverer
of California, was not looking for Kansas, thus setting a precedent that
continues to this day.
-- Wayne Shannon
And the next time you consider complaining that running Lucid Emacs
19.05 via NFS from a remote Linux machine in Paraguay doesn't seem to
get the background colors right, you'll know who to thank.
-- Matt Welsh
<robert> i understand there are some reasonable limits to free speech in
america, for example I cannot scream Fire into a crowded theatre
 .. But can i scream fire into a theatre with only 5 or 6 poeple
in it ?
Davis' Law of Traffic Density:
The density of rush-hour traffic is directly proportional to
1.5 times the amount of extra time you allow to arrive on time.
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.
QOTD:
"I used to get high on life but lately I've built up a resistance."
[It is] best to confuse only one issue at a time.
-- K&R
The cost of feathers has risen, even down is up!
Yuppie Wannabes:
An X generation subgroup that believes the myth of a yuppie
life-style being both satisfying and viable. Tend to be highly in
debt, involved in some form of substance abuse, and show a willingness
to talk about Armageddon after three drinks.
-- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
Culture"
Edwin Meese made me wear CORDOVANS!!
"Gotcha, you snot-necked weenies!"
-- Post Bros. Comics
A friend of mine is into Voodoo Acupuncture. You don't have to go.
You'll just be walking down the street and... Ooohh, that's much better.
-- Steven Wright
First Law of Bicycling:
No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the wind.
There is no education that is not political. An apolitical
education is also political because it is purposely isolating.
Insanity is the final defense ... It's hard to get a refund when the
salesman is sniffing your crotch and baying at the moon.
One day the King decided that he would force all his subjects to tell the
truth. A gallows was erected in front of the city gates. A herald announced,
"Whoever would enter the city must first answer the truth to a question
which will be put to him." Nasrudin was first in line. The captain of the
guard asked him, "Where are you going? Tell the truth -- the alternative
is death by hanging."
"I am going," said Nasrudin, "to be hanged on that gallows."
"I don't believe you."
"Very well, if I have told a lie, then hang me!"
"But that would make it the truth!"
"Exactly," said Nasrudin, "your truth."
HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 2

proof by cumbersome notation:

Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special
symbols.

proof by exhaustion:
An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful.

proof by omission:
'The reader may easily supply the details'
'The other 253 cases are analogous'
'...'

Woodward's Law:
 A theory is better than its explanation.
Anarchists prepare for social revolution and use every means -- speech, writing, or
deed, whichever is more to the point -- to accelerate revolutionary development.
----+- Johann Most -+----
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
-- Andy Finkel, computer guy
No Canadian coins.
"I assure you the thought never even crossed my mind, lord."
"Indeed? Then if I were you I'd sue my face for slander."
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic"
A distraught patient phoned her doctor's office. "Was it true," the woman
inquired, "that the medication the doctor had prescribed was for the rest
of her life?"
She was told that it was. There was just a moment of silence before
the woman proceeded bravely on. "Well, I'm wondering, then, how serious my
condition is. This prescription is marked `NO REFILLS'".
VICARIOUSLY experience some reason to LIVE!!
FORTUNE'S RULES TO LIVE BY: #23
Don't cut off a police car when making an illegal U-turn.
It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.
-- Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid)
He looked at me as if I were a side dish he hadn't ordered.
-- Ring Lardner
You can do very well in speculation where land or anything to do with dirt
is concerned.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack
The rate at which a disease spreads through a corn field is a precise
measurement of the speed of blight.
My band career ended late in my senior year when John Cooper and I threw my
amplifier out the dormitory window. We did not act in haste. First we
checked to make sure the amplifier would fit through the frame, using the
belt from my bathrobe to measure, then we picked up the amplifier and backed
up to my bedroom door. Then we rushed forward, shouting "The WHO! The
WHO!" and we launched my amplifier perfectly, as though we had been doing it
all our lives, clean through the window and down onto the sidewalk, where a
small but appreciative crowd had gathered. I would like to be able to say
that this was a symbolic act, an effort on my part to break cleanly away
from one state in my life and move on to another, but the truth is, Cooper
and I really just wanted to find out what it would sound like. It sounded
OK.
-- Dave Barry, "The Snake"
I think that's easier to read. Pardon me. Less difficult to read.
-- Larry Wall in <199710120226.TAA06867@wall.org>
Americans' greatest fear is that America will turn out to have been a
phenomenon, not a civilization.
-- Shirley Hazzard, "Transit of Venus"
Center meeting at 4pm in 2C-543.
<muggles> i'm trying to convince some netcom admins i know to convert
to Debian from RH, netgod, but they are DAMN stubborn
<muggles> why RH users so damned hard headed?
<Espy> it's the hat
Go not unto the Usenet for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (and
quite a few things that just have nothing at all to do with the question).
-- seen in a .sig somewhere
Good people don't much like those who tread a different path.
----+- Georges Brassens -+----
[From an announcement of a congress of the International Ontopsychology
Association, in Rome]:
The Ontopsychological school, availing itself of new research criteria and
of a new telematic epistemology, maintains that social modes do not spring
from dialectics of territory or of class, or of consumer goods, or of means
of power, but rather from dynamic latencies capillarized in millions of
individuals in system functions which, once they have reached the event
maturation, burst forth in catastrophic phenomenology engaging a suitable
stereotype protagonist or duty marionette (general, president, political
party, etc.) to consummate the act of social schizophrenia in mass genocide.
So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far
as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical
way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.
-- T. S. Eliot, essay on Baudelaire
You will always find something in the last place you look.
Sign my PETITION.
He that would govern others, first should be the master of himself.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
They call them "squares" because it's the most complicated shape they can
deal with.
If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress?
What do you have when you have six lawyers buried up to their necks in sand?
Not enough sand.
Just a few of the perfect excuses for having some strawberry shortcake.
Pick one.

(1) It's less calories than two pieces of strawberry shortcake.

(2) It's cheaper than going to France.
(3) It neutralizes the brownies I had yesterday.
(4) Life is short.
(5) It's somebody's birthday. I don't want them to celebrate alone.
(6) It matches my eyes.
(7) Whoever said, "Let them eat cake." must have been talking to me.
(8) To punish myself for eating dessert yesterday.
(9) Compensation for all the time I spend in the shower not eating.
(10) Strawberry shortcake is evil. I must help rid the world of it.
(11) I'm getting weak from eating all that healthy stuff.
(12) It's the second anniversary of the night I ate plain broccoli.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.