Professional Documents
Culture Documents
usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody
thinks of complaining."
-- Jeff Raskin, interviewed in Doctor Dobb's Journal
%%
Hide the wenches and batten down the access codes... yer about to be
boarded, ye scurvy dogs! Har Har....
-- Bloom County
%%
"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 want to spend more time with my
blender."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but the man on television told me to say
tuned."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I've been scheduled for a karma
transplant."
%%
"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 I did my own thing and now I've got
to undo it."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm doing door-to-door collecting for
static cling."
%%
"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 taking punk totem pole carving."
%%
"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 the last time I went out, I never
came back."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I'm having all my plants neutered."
%%
"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 there are important world issues that
need worrying about."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but my favorite commercial is on TV."
%%
"I'd love to go out with you, but I have to stay home and see if I
snore."
%%
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved
it."
-- C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
%%
Well, we've come full circle, Lord; I'd like to think there's some
higher meaning to all this. It would certainly reflect well on you.
-- Matthew Broderick in LADYHAWKE
%%
I can give you my word, but I know what it's worth and you don't.
-- Nero Wolfe
%%
Save the whales -- collect the whole set.
%%
"My sense of purpose is gone! I have no idea who I AM!"
"Oh, my God.... You've... you've turned him into a DEMOCRAT!"
-- Doonesbury
%%
"Scotty, I need warp drive in three minutes or we're all dead!"
%%
"You are WRONG, you ol' brass-breasted fascist poop!"
-- Bloom County
%%
After his Ignoble Disgrace, Satan was being expelled from
Heaven. As he passed through the Gates, he paused a moment in thought,
and turned to God and said, "A new creature called Man, I hear, is soon
to be created."
"This is true," He replied.
"He will need laws," said the Demon slyly.
"What! You, his appointed Enemy for all Time! You ask for the
right to make his laws?"
"Oh, no!" Satan replied, "I ask only that he be allowed to make
his own."
It was so granted.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Ink: A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic, and
water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote
intellectual crime.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Kleptomaniac: A rich thief.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Labor: One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Once Law was sitting on the bench
And Mercy knelt a-weeping.
"Clear out!" he cried, "disordered wench!
Nor come before me creeping.
Upon you knees if you appear,
'Tis plain you have no standing here."
The two definition immediately foregoing are condensed from the works
of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject
with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human
knowledge.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Man: An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks
he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief
occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species,
which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest
the whole habitable earth and Canada.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Misfortune: The kind of fortune that never misses.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Miss: A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that
they are in the market.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Molecule: The ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. It is
distinguished from the corpuscle, also the ultimate, indivisible unit
of matter, by a closer resemblance to the atom, also the ultimate,
indivisible unit of matter ... The ion differs from the molecule, the
corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion ...
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Three great scientific theories of the structure of the universe are
the molecular, the corpuscular and the atomic. A fourth affirms, with
Haeckel, the condensation or precipitation of matter from ether --
whose existence is proved by the condensation or precipitation ... A
fifth theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any
more about the matter than the others.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Monday: In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Mythology: 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"
%%
It has been observed that one's nose is never so happy as when it is
thrust into the affairs of another, from which some physiologists have
drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
November: The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Once, adv.: Enough.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last
resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but
inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Pig: An animal (Porcus omnivorous) closely allied to the human race by
the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior
in scope, for it balks at pig.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Positive: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
%%
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!"
%%
Frisbeetarianism: The belief that when you die, your soul goes up the
on roof and gets stuck.
%%
Hofstadter's Law:
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take
Hofstadter's Law into account.
%%
"It is bad luck to be superstitious."
-- Andrew W. Mathis
%%
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law.
-- Roy Santoro
%%
Beckhap's Law:
Beauty times brains equals a constant.
%%
Main's Law:
For every action there is an equal and opposite government
program.
%%
"When you are in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut."
%%
Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning:
It's on the other side.
%%
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.
%%
The shortest distance between two points is under construction.
-- Noelie Altito
%%
Any small object that is accidentally dropped will hide under a
larger object.
%%
If while you are in school, there is a shortage of qualified personnel
in a particular field, then by the time you graduate with the necessary
qualifications, that field's employment market is glutted.
-- Marguerite Emmons
%%
Pro is to con as progress is to Congress.
%%
The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the
stupidity of your action.
%%
Hurewitz's Memory Principle:
The chance of forgetting something is directly proportional
to ..... to ........ uh ..............
%%
Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots.
%%
It is said that the lonely eagle flies to the mountain peaks while the
lowly ant crawls the ground, but cannot the soul of the ant soar as
high as the eagle?
%%
"And that was the end of Grogan, the man who killed my father, raped and
murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible!"
-- from ROMANCING THE STONE
%%
"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 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.
-- Lewis Carroll
%%
"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door --
Pray what is the reason of that?"
-- Lewis Carroll
%%
"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak --
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"
-- Lewis Carroll
%%
"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose --
What made you so awfully clever?"
-- Lewis Carroll
%%
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to _#n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our symptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
I'll grant the random access to my heart,
Thoul't tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove
And in our bound partition never part.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die
Had he but known such _#a-squared cos 2(phi)!
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
A very intelligent turtle
Found programming UNIX a hurdle
The system, you see,
Ran as slow as did he,
And that's not saying much for the turtle.
%%
This fortune cookie program out of order. For those in desperate need,
please use the program "________########randchar". This program generates random
characters, and, given enough time, will undoubtedly come up with
something profound. It will, however, take it no time at all to be
more profound than THIS program has ever been.
%%
This fortune intentionally not included.
%%
Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy
Because he knows it teases.
-- A. E. Housman
%%
Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.
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.
%%
Finagle's Fourth Law:
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only
makes it worse.
%%
Do not believe in miracles -- rely on them.
%%
Issawi's Laws of Progress:
Jenning's Corollary:
The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is
directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.
%%
Paul's Law:
You can't fall off the floor.
%%
Johnson's First Law:
When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will do so at the
most inconvenient possible time.
%%
Watson's Law:
The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the
number and significance of any persons watching it.
%%
Sattinger's Law:
It works better if you plug it in.
%%
Lowery's Law:
If it jams -- force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
%%
Fudd's First Law of Opposition:
Push something hard enough and it will fall over.
%%
Cahn's Axiom:
When all else fails, read the instructions.
%%
Jenkinson's Law:
It won't work.
%%
Murphy's Law of Research:
Enough research will tend to support your theory.
%%
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.
%%
Williams and Holland's Law:
If enough data is collected, anything may be proven by
statistical methods.
%%
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.
%%
Hoare's Law of Large Problems:
Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get
out.
%%
Brooke's Law:
Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool
discovers something which either abolishes the system or
expands it beyond recognition.
%%
Meskimen's Law:
There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to
do it over.
%%
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.
%%
Peter's Law of Substitution:
Look after the molehills, and the mountains will look after
themselves.
%%
Parkinson's Fourth Law:
The number of people in any working group tends to increase
regardless of the amount of work to be done.
%%
Parkinson's Fifth Law:
If there is a way to delay in important decision, the good
bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
%%
Zymurgy's Law of Volunteer Labor:
People are always available for work in the past tense.
%%
Iron Law of Distribution:
Them that has, gets.
%%
H. L. Mencken's Law:
Those who can -- do.
Those who can't -- teach.
Martin's Extension:
Those who cannot teach -- administrate.
%%
Jone's Law:
The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone
to blame it on.
%%
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.
%%
A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by
blowing first.
%%
After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access
cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been
removed.
%%
After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found
on the bench.
%%
In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks)
are to be treated as variables.
%%
Parts that positively cannot be assembled in improper order will be.
%%
First Law of Bicycling:
No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the wind.
%%
Boob's Law:
You always find something in the last place you look.
%%
Osborn's Law:
Variables won't; constants aren't.
%%
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.
%%
Miksch's Law:
If a string has one end, then it has another end.
%%
Law of Communications:
The inevitable result of improved and enlarged communications
between different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased
area of misunderstanding.
%%
Harris's Lament:
All the good ones are taken.
%%
If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
-- Harry S Truman
%%
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.
%%
First Law of Procrastination:
Procrastination shortens the job and places the responsibility
for its termination on someone else (i.e., the authority who
imposed the deadline).
%%
Second Law of Procrastination:
Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that
there is nothing important to do.
%%
Swipple's Rule of Order:
He who shouts the loudest has the floor.
%%
Wiker's Law:
Government expands to absorb revenue and then some.
%%
Gray's Law of Programming:
`_#n+1' trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same
time as `_#n' tasks.
Arnold's Addendum:
Anything not fitting into these categories causes cancer in rats.
%%
Parker's Law:
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
%%
Captain Penny's Law:
You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of
the people all of the time, but you Can't Fool Mom.
%%
Katz' Law:
Man and nations will act rationally when all other
possibilities have been exhausted.
%%
Mr. Cole's Axiom:
The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the
population is growing.
%%
Steele's Plagiarism of Somebody's Philosophy:
Everybody should believe in something -- I believe I'll have
another drink.
%%
The Kennedy Constant:
Don't get mad -- get even.
%%
Canada Bill Jones' Motto:
It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.
Supplement:
A .44 magnum beats four aces.
%%
Jone's Motto:
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
%%
The Fifth Rule:
You have taken yourself too seriously.
%%
Hartley's First Law:
You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float
on his back, you've got something.
%%
Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Government:
No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the
legislature is in session.
%%
Churchill's Commentary on Man:
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the
time he will pick himself up and continue on.
%%
Newton's Little-Known Seventh Law:
A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead.
%%
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.
%%
ROMEO: Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.
MERCUTIO: No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-
door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.
%%
"He is now rising from affluence to poverty."
-- Mark Twain
%%
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody
wants to read.
-- Mark Twain
%%
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite
you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
-- Mark Twain
%%
Cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.
-- Mark Twain
%%
But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery -- go!
-- Mark "The Bard" Twain
%%
"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:
-- Ogden Nash
%%
Who made the world I cannot tell;
'Tis made, and here am I in hell.
My hand, though now my knuckles bleed,
I never soiled with such a deed.
-- A. E. Housman
%%
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
%%
The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for
lists of "Ten Best".
-- H. Allen Smith
%%
we will invent new lullabies, new songs, new acts of love,
we will cry over things we used to laugh &
our new wisdom will bring tears to eyes of gentle
creatures from other planets who were afraid of us till then &
in the end a summer with wild winds &
new friends will be.
%%
This is for all ill-treated fellows
Unborn and unbegot,
For them to read when they're in trouble
And I am not.
-- A. E. Housman
%%
"Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time.
Moping, melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad."
-- A. E. Housman
%%
Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the
Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats
in their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the
moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter -- for they had a machine,
a dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every
respect. And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside
it, for it was all they had -- first they saved up all their atoms,
then they put them all together, and if one didn't fit, why they
chipped at it a bit, and everything was just fine ...
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the
stars were lined up in their proper places, you could easily count them
from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones
were set apart, and the smaller yellowing types pushed off to the
corners as bodies of a lower grade ...
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%%
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the
beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get
out, and such as are out wish to get in?
-- Ralph Emerson
%%
The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue,
a custom whereof the memory of man runneth not howsomever to
the contrary, nohow.
%%
Emersons' Law of Contrariness:
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we
can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it.
%%
"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others
as it is to invent. (R. Emerson)"
-- Quoted from a fortune cookie program
(whose author claims, "Actually, stealing IS easier.")
[to which I reply, "You think it's easy for me to
misconstrue all these misquotations?!?"]
%%
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
%%
There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature: that of
paying literary men by the quantity they do NOT write.
%%
A fool must now and then be right by chance.
%%
"So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple
pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street pops
its head into the shop. "What! no soap?" So he died, and she very
imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies,
and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top,
and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the
gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots."
-- Samuel Foote
%%
Hi there! This is just a note from me, to you, to tell you, the person
reading this note, that I can't think up any more famous quotes, jokes,
nor bizarre stories, so you may as well go home.
%%
Arnold's Laws of Documentation:
1. If it should exist, it doesn't.
2. If it does exist, it's out of date.
3. Only documentation for useless programs transcends the
first two laws.
%%
Harrisberger's Fourth Law of the Lab:
Experience is directly proportional to the amount of
equipment ruined.
%%
Boren's Laws:
1. When in charge, ponder.
2. When in trouble, delegate.
3. When in doubt, mumble.
%%
Chisolm's First Corollary to Murphy's Second Law:
When things just can't possibly get any worse, they will.
%%
Rudin's Law:
If there is a wrong way to do something, most people will
do it every time.
%%
Bucy's Law:
Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
%%
Hacker's Law:
The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir
a nation to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions.
%%
Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she's unable to postulate how.
-- Frederick Winsor
%%
Vail's Second Axiom:
The amount of work to be done increases in proportion to the
amount of work already completed.
%%
Never count your chickens before they rip your lips off.
%%
"Sometimes I simply feel that the whole world is a cigarette and I'm
the only ashtray."
%%
Santa Claus wears a Red Suit,
He must be a communist.
And a beard and long hair,
Must be a pacifist.
-- Arlo Guthrie
%%
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
-- G. B. Shaw
%%
Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long.
-- Howard Kandel
%%
Where there's a will, there's an Inheritance Tax.
%%
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"
%%
Hand: A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and commonly
thrust into somebody's pocket.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for
freedom and liberty.
-- Henrick Ibsen
%%
Wit: The salt with which the American Humorist spoils his cookery...
by leaving it out.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Yield to Temptation... it may not pass your way again.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
%%
I like work...
I can sit and watch it for hours.
%%
Know thyself. If you need help, call the C.I.A.
%%
"The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as
we could with both of them."
-- Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"
%%
Crime does not pay... as well as politics.
-- A. E. Newman
%%
Keep your Eye on the Ball,
Your Shoulder to the Wheel,
Your Nose to the Grindstone,
Your Feet on the Ground,
Your Head on your Shoulders.
Now... try to get something DONE!
%%
Love is a word that is constantly heard,
Hate is a word that is not.
Love, I am told, is more precious than gold.
Love, I have read, is hot.
But hate is the verb that to me is superb,
And Love but a drug on the mart.
Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But Hating, my boy, is an Art.
-- Ogden Nash
%%
Magpie: A bird whose thievish disposition suggested to someone that it
might be taught to talk.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Many years ago in a period commonly know as Next Friday Afternoon,
there lived a King who was very Gloomy on Tuesday mornings because he
was so Sad thinking about how Unhappy he had been on Monday and how
completely Mournful he would be on Wednesday....
-- Walt Kelly,
%%
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by
Jackasses.
-- H. L. Mencken
%%
Peace: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two
periods of fighting.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Guiseppe? Everything he
says is wrong.
GUISEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says
will be right.
-- G. B. Shaw, "The Man of Destiny"
%%
People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who
haven't what they want that they don't want it.
-- Ogden Nash
%%
Avoid Quiet and Placid persons unless you are in Need of Sleep.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada"
%%
A lot of people I know believe in positive thinking, and so do I. I
believe everything positively stinks.
-- Lew Col
%%
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most Souls would scarcely
get your Feet wet. Fall not in Love, therefore: it will stick to your
face.
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorada"
%%
Receiving a million dollars tax-free will make you feel better than
being flat broke and having a stomach ache.
-- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So Hot"
%%
The Schwine-Kitzenger Institute study of 47 men over the age of 100
showed that all had these things in common:
-- Ogden Nash
%%
Reporter: A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with
a tempest of words.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
"Hey! Who took the cork off my lunch??!"
-- W. C. Fields
%%
Fats Loves Madelyn!
%%
Anyone who hates Dogs and Kids Can't be All Bad.
-- W. C. Fields
%%
A dozen, a gross, and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five time eleven,
Equals nine squared plus zero, no more.
%%
Who's on first?
%%
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on
society.
-- Mark Twain
%%
We really don't have any enemies. It's just that some of our best
friends are trying to kill us.
%%
If there is no God, who pops up the next Kleenex?
-- Art Hoppe
%%
The Killer Ducks are coming!!!
%%
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity
and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted
activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy ...
neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
%%
There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine:
This living, this living, this living,
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle --
Would you kindly direct me to hell?
-- Dorothy Parker
%%
"This is a country where people are free to practice their religion,
regardless of race, creed, color, obesity, or number of dangling keys...."
%%
The ladies men admire, I've heard,
Would shudder at a wicked word.
Their candle gives a single light;
They'd rather stay at home at night.
They do not keep awake till three,
Nor read erotic poetry.
They never sanction the impure,
Nor recognize an overture.
They shrink from powders and from paints...
So far, I've had no complaints.
-- Dorothy Parker
%%
THEORY
Into love and out again,
Thus I went and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen:
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
Someone dropped me on my head?
-- Dorothy Parker
%%
My own dear love, he is strong and bold
And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled --
Oh, a girl, she'd not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world --
And I wish I'd never met him.
-- Dorothy Parker
%%
My love, he's mad, and my love, he's fleet,
And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams --
And I wish he were in Asia.
-- Dorothy Parker
%%
My love runs by like a day in June,
And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He'll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway or the morrows.
He'll live his days where the sunbeams start
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart --
And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
-- Dorothy Parker
%%
Here in my heart, I am Helen;
I'm Aspasia and Hero, at least.
I'm Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Sta"#el;
I'm Salome, moon of the East.
-- Dorothy Parker
%%
If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again.
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much;
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.
-- Dorothy Parker
%%
FIGHTING WORDS
Name #
%%
You might have mail
%%
Never put off till tomorrow what you can avoid all together.
%%
Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him.
%%
Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.
%%
A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a unicorn.
%%
Stop searching. Happiness is right next to you.
%%
Stop searching. Happiness is right next to you. Now, if they'd only
take a bath....
%%
"He was so narrow minded he could see through a keyhole with both
eyes...."
%%
It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.
%%
Why did the Lord give us so much quickness of movement unless it was to
avoid responsibility with?
%%
SHIFT TO THE LEFT! SHIFT TO THE RIGHT!
POP UP, PUSH DOWN, BYTE, BYTE, BYTE!
%%
The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the
average man can see better than he can think.
%%
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"
%%
"If God lived on Earth, people would knock out all His windows."
-- Yiddish saying
%%
Waiter: "Tea or coffee, gentlemen?"
1st customer: "I'll have tea."
2nd customer: "Me, too -- and be sure the glass is clean!"
(Waiter exits, returns)
Waiter: "Two teas. Which one asked for the clean glass?"
%%
On his first day as a bus driver, Maxey Eckstein handed in
receipts of $65. The next day his take was $67. The third day's
income was $62. But on the fourth day, Eckstein emptied no less than
$283 on the desk before the cashier.
"Eckstein!" exclaimed the cashier. "This is fantastic. That
route never brought in money like this! What happened?"
"Well, after three days on that cockamamie route, I figured
business would never improve, so I drove over to Fourteenth Street and
worked there. I tell you, that street is a gold mine!"
%%
The men sat sipping their tea in silence. After a while the
klutz said, "Life is like a bowl of sour cream."
-- Maxwell Smart
%%
If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.
%%
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.
%%
If I traveled to the end of the rainbow
As Dame Fortune did intend,
Murphy would be there to tell me
The pot's at the other end.
-- Bert Whitney
%%
Silverman's Law:
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
%%
Hindsight is an exact science.
%%
Ducharme's Precept:
Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment.
%%
If you don't care where you are, then you ain't lost.
%%
Naeser's Law:
You can make it foolproof, but you can't make it
damnfoolproof.
%%
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
%%
The Third Law of Photography:
If you did manage to get any good shots, they will be ruined
when someone inadvertently opens the darkroom door and all of
the dark leaks out.
%%
Mollison's Bureaucracy Hypothesis:
If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and be implemented
it wasn't worth doing.
%%
Conway's Law:
In any organization there will always be one person who knows
what is going on.
Roll out bottom crust of pastry and fit into 9-inch pie plate. Break
RITZ Crackers coarsely into pastry-lined plate. Combine water, sugar
and cream of tartar in saucepan, boil gently for 15 minutes. Add lemon
juice and rind. Cool. Pour this syrup over Crackers, dot generously
with butter or margarine and sprinkle with cinnamon. Cover with top
crust. Trim and flute edges together. Cut slits in top crust to let
steam escape. Bake in a hot oven (425 F) 30 to 35 minutes, until crust
is crisp and golden. Serve warm. Cut into 6 to 8 slices.
The First Law: You can't get anything without working for it.
The Second Law: The most you can accomplish by working is to break
even.
The Third Law: You can only break even at absolute zero.
%%
Famous last words:
1) "Don't worry, I can handle it."
2) "You and what army?"
3) "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be
a cop."
%%
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name.
Thy programs run, thy syscalls done,
in kernel as it is in user!
%%
Nothing is faster than the speed of light ...
A: Both of them.
%%
San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never was.
-- Herb Caen
%%
Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.
%%
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?"
%%
Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no
government at all.
%%
Buzz off, Banana Nose; Relieve mine eyes
Of hateful soreness, purge mine ears of corn;
Less dear than army ants in apple pies
Art thou, old prune-face, with thy chestnuts worn,
Dropt from thy peeling lips like lousy fruit;
Like honeybees upon the perfum'd rose
They suck, and like the double-breasted suit
Are out of date; therefore, Banana Nose,
Go fly a kite, thy welcome's overstayed;
And stem the produce of thy waspish wits:
Thy logick, like thy locks, is disarrayed;
Thy cheer, like thy complexion, is the pits.
Be off, I say; go bug somebody new,
Scram, beat it, get thee hence, and nuts to you.
%%
Do molecular biologists wear designer genes?
%%
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"
%%
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
%%
The University of California Bears announced the signing of Reggie
Philbin to a letter of intent to attend Cal next Fall. Philbin is said
to make up for no talent by cheating well. Says Philbin of his
decision to attend Cal, "I'm in it for the free ride."
%%
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%.
%%
"Now is the time for all good men to come to."
-- Walt Kelly
%%
Laetrile is the pits.
%%
Got Mole problems?
Call Avogardo 6.02 x 10^23
%%
There's no future in time travel.
%%
Vitamin C deficiency is apauling.
%%
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
%%
Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.
%%
"Really?? What a coincidence---I'm shallow too!!"
%%
But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the
system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed,
analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.
-- Bruce Leverett
"Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers"
%%
Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are mentally ill. Check
three friends. If they're ok, you're it.
%%
Support Mental Health, or I'll kill you.
%%
We're all Bozos on this bus.
-- The Firesign Theatre
%%
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."
%%
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.
%%
USER n.: A programmer who will believe anything you tell him.
%%
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
%%
Easiest Color to Solve on a Rubik's Cube: Black. Simply remove all the
little colored stickers on the cube, and each of side of the cube will
now be the original color of the plastic underneath -- black.
According to the instructions, this means the puzzle is solved.
-- Steve Rubenstein
%%
Worst Month of 1981 for Downhill Skiing: August. The lines are the
shortest, though.
-- Steve Rubenstein
%%
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.
%%
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus
handicapped.
-- Elbert Hubbard
%%
"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
%%
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
%%
I must have slipped a disk -- my pack hurts.
%%
What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do.
%%
This login session: $13.99, but for you $11.88.
%%
"I just need enough to tide me over until I need more."
-- Bill Hoest
%%
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.
%%
Now and then an innocent person is sent to the legislature.
%%
She missed an invaluable opportunity to give him a look that you could
have poured on a waffle....
%%
He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered.
%%
People will buy anything that's one to a customer.
%%
It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.
%%
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
%%
The new Congressmen say they're going to turn the government around. I
hope I don't get run over again.
%%
What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.
%%
Don't take life too seriously -- you'll never get out of it alive.
%%
Forgetfulness: A gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for
their destitution of conscience.
%%
Absentee: A person with an income who has had the forethought to remove
himself from the sphere of exaction.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
You will be surprised by a loud noise.
%%
As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code.
%%
"In short, _#N is Richardian if, and only if, _#N is not Richardian."
%%
President Reagan has noted that there are too many economic pundits and
forecasters and has decided on an excess prophets tax.
%%
Absent: Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed;
slandered.
%%
Brain, v.: [as in "to brain"] To rebuke bluntly, but not pointedly; to
dispel a source of error in an opponent.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
Truthful: Dumb and illiterate.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%%
A computer, to print out a fact,
Will divide, multiply, and subtract.
But this output can be
No more than debris,
If the input was short of exact.
-- Gigo
%%
Corrupt: In politics, holding an office of trust or profit.
%%
Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light.
In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and null,
and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM
was moving over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there be
registers"; and there were registers. And DEC saw that they carried;
and DEC separated the data from the instructions. DEC called the data
Stack, and the instructions they called Code. And there was evening
and there was morning, one interrupt....
-- Rico Tudor
%%
Never try to outstubborn a cat.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
%%
FLASH! Intelligence of mankind decreasing. Details at ... uh, when
the little hand is on the ....
%%
Only God can make random selections.
%%
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.
None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master stays out of
the way.
%%
University: Like a software house, except the software's free, and it's
usable, and it works, and if it breaks they'll quickly tell you how to
fix it, and ...
%%
How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
None: "We'll fix it in software."
He then said: If a man does not see or hear the waters of the Jordan,
then he should not taste the pomegranate or ply his wares in an open
market.
If a man would not labour in the salt and rock quarries then he should
not accept of the Earth that which he refuses to give of himself.
And he answered:
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.
That's all right, said the priest. I wanted to know what Freight was
too.
-- Ogden Nash
%%
Maturity is only a short break in adolescence.
-- Jules Feiffer
%%
Some people in this department wouldn't recognize subtlety if it hit
them on the head.
%%
You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd.
%%
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly
what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly
disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and
inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has
already happened.
-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%%
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat,
and wrong.
-- H. L. Mencken
%%
Death is God's way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.
%%
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Wernher von Braun
%%
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.
%%
Death is Nature's way of recycling human beings.
%%
"Grub first, then ethics."
-- Bertolt Brecht
%%
"I drink to make other people interesting."
-- George Jean Nathan
%%
DETERIORATA
-- National Lampoon
%%
I sent a letter to the fish,
I told them, "This is what I wish."
The little fishes of the sea,
They sent an answer back to me.
The little fishes' answer was
"We cannot do it, sir, because ..."
I sent a letter back to say
It would be better to obey.
But someone came to me and said
"The little fishes are in bed."
I said to him, and I said it plain
"Then you must wake them up again."
I said it very loud and clear,
I went and shouted in his ear.
But he was very stiff and proud,
He said "You needn't shout so loud."
And he was very proud and stiff,
He said "I'll go and wake them if ..."
I took a kettle from the shelf,
I went to wake them up myself.
But when I found the door was locked
I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked,
And when I found the door was shut,
I tried to turn the handle, But ...
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 ...
Dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J. P.
Sevenoaks
%%
Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 A.D. He was a
pagan, and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city
until about his 35th year, when he became a Christian .... To him is
ascribed the sublime confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe
because it is absurd). This does not altogether accord with historical
fact, for he merely said:
"And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because
it is absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain
because it is impossible."
On this day, New York City hotel detectives burst in and caught then-
Senator Warren G. Harding in bed with an underage girl. He bought them
off with a $20 bribe, and later remarked thankfully, "I thought I
wouldn't get out of that under $1000!" Always one to learn from his
mistakes, in later years President Harding carried on his affairs in a
tiny closet in the White House Cabinet Room while Secret Service men
stood lookout.
%%
I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
%%
"The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity
that would be clearly understood."
-- Alexander Haig
%%
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.
%%
"Earth is a great, big funhouse without the fun."
-- Jeff Berner
%%
Cocaine -- the thinking man's Dristan.
%%
This is National Non-Dairy Creamer Week.
%%
When in doubt, do what the President does -- guess.
%%
When in doubt, tell the truth.
-- Mark Twain
%%
When in doubt, book 'em.
-- Steve McGarret, Hawaii Five-O
%%
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 ....
%%
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
-- Voltaire
%%
Q: How many DEC repairman does it take to fix a flat ?
A: Four; three to hold it down, and one to rip its head off.
%%
SEMINARS: From `semi' and `arse', hence, any half-assed discussion.
%%
POLITICIAN: From the Greek `poly' ("many") and the French `tete'
("head" or "face," as in `tete-a-tete': head to head or face to face).
Hence `polytetien', a person of two or more faces.
-- Martin Pitt
%%
CALIFORNIA: From Latin `calor', meaning "heat" (as in English `calorie'
or Spanish `caliente'); and `fornia', for "sexual intercourse" or
"fornication." Hence: Tierra de California, "the land of hot sex."
-- Ed Moran
%%
ETYMOLOGY: Some early etymological scholars come up with derivations
that were hard for the public to believe. The term `etymology' was
formed from the Latin `etus' ("eaten"), the root `mal' ("bad"), and
`logy' ("study of"). It meant "the study of things that are hard to
swallow."
-- Mike Kellen
%%
Another Glitch in the Call
------- ------ -- --- ----
(Sung to the tune of a recent Pink Floyd song.)
Chorus:
All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.
All in all, it's just a pure-LISP function call.
%%
Armadillo: to provide weapons to a Spanish pickle
%%
Micro Credo:
Never trust a computer bigger than you can lift.
%%
Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong.
%%
Bumper sticker:
"All the parts falling off this car are of the very finest British
manufacture."
%%
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
-- Lewis Carroll
%%
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.
%%
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the
Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an
utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life
forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches
are a pretty neat idea ...
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-- Wolfgang Pauli
%%
Leibowitz's Rule:
When hammering a nail, you will never hit your finger if you
hold the hammer with both hands.
%%
Drew's Law of Highway Biology:
The first bug to hit a clean windshield lands directly in front
of your eyes.
%%
Langsam's Laws:
1) Everything depends.
2) Nothing is always.
3) Everything is sometimes.
%%
Law of Probable Dispersal:
Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly
distributed.
%%
Meader's Law:
Whatever happens to you, it will previously have happened to
everyone you know, only more so.
%%
Fourth Law of Revision:
It is usually impractical to worry beforehand about
interferences -- if you have none, someone will make one for
you.
%%
Sodd's Second Law:
Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is
bound to occur.
%%
Murphy's Law is recursive. Washing your car to make it rain doesn't
work.
%%
Rule of Defactualization:
Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies.
%%
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.
%%
Anthony's Law of Force:
Don't force it; get a larger hammer.
%%
Ray's Rule of Precision:
Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe.
%%
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.
%%
Barach's Rule:
An alcoholic is a person who drinks more than his own
physician.
%%
"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"All your papers these days look the same;
Those William's would be better unread --
Do these facts never fill you with shame?"
Corollary:
On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first strike
your toes.
%%
Second Law of Business Meetings:
If there are two possible ways to spell a person's name, you
will pick the wrong one.
Corollary:
If there is only one way to spell a name, you will spell it
wrong, anyway.
%%
Grelb's Reminder:
Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above
average drivers.
%%
Grandpa Charnock's Law:
You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
%%
Rule of the Great:
When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep
thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.
%%
Lieberman's Law:
Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
%%
Goldenstern's Rules:
1. Always hire a rich attorney.
2. Never buy from a rich salesman.
%%
Weiner's Law of Libraries:
There are no answers, only cross references.
%%
Brook's Law:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
%%
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
Murphy was an optimist.
%%
May Euell Gibbons eat your only copy of the manual!
%%
If you had any brains, you'd be dangerous.
%%
That secret you've been guarding, isn't.
%%
"Adopted kids are such a pain -- you have to teach them how to look
like you...."
--- Gilda Radner
%%
The trouble with a kitten is that
When it grows up, it's always a cat
-- Ogden Nash.
%%
"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical."
-- Jon Carroll
%%
Love's Drug
Don't some of these fortunes just drive you nuts?! Wouldn't you like
to see some of them deleted from the system? You can! Just mail to
`fortune' with the fortune you hate most, and we MIGHT make sure it
gets expunged.
%%
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 ...
%%
"Deep" is a word like "theory" or "semantic" -- it implies all
sorts of marvelous things. It's one thing to be able to say "I've got
a theory", quite another to say "I've got a semantic theory", but, ah,
those who can claim "I've got a deep semantic theory", they are truly
blessed.
-- Randy Davis
%%
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people
are right more than half of the time.
-- E. B. White
%%
Different all twisty a of in maze are you, passages little.
%%
Disc space -- the final frontier!
%%
Disco is to music what Etch-A-Sketch is to art.
%%
Do infants have as much fun in infancy as adults do in adultery?
%%
Don't abandon hope: your Tom Mix decoder ring arrives tomorrow.
%%
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you
nothing. It was here first.
-- Mark Twain
%%
Don't look back, the lemmings are gaining on you.
%%
Don't you feel more like you do now than you did when you came in?
%%
/Earth is 98% full ... please delete anyone you can.
%%
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
%%
Eighty percent of air pollution comes from plants and trees.
-- Ronald Reagan [famous movie star]
%%
Eisenhower was very nice,
Nixon was his only vice.
-- C. Degen
%%
Endless Loop: n., see Loop, Endless.
Loop, Endless: n., see Endless Loop.
-- Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary
%%
Entropy isn't what it used to be.
%%
Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.
-- Woody Allen
%%
Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to
speak it to?
-- Clarence Darrow
%%
Every creature has within him the wild, uncontrollable urge to punt.
%%
Every little picofarad has a nanohenry all its own.
-- Don Vonada
%%
Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.
-- Miguel de Cervantes
%%
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
-- Beckett
%%
Everything you know is wrong!
%%
Excessive login messages are a sure sign of senility.
%%
Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old
ones.
%%
Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.
%%
Experience varies directly with equipment ruined.
%%
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
-- Olivier
%%
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.
%%
Faith, n: That quality which enables us to believe what we know to be
untrue.
%%
Fakir, n: A psychologist whose charismatic data have inspired almost
religious devotion in his followers, even though the sources seem to
have shinnied up a rope and vanished.
%%
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.
%%
Flugg's Law:
When you need to knock on wood is when you realize that the
world is composed of vinyl, naugahyde and aluminum.
%%
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
by Mark Twain
Since the composite numbers are formed from primes, their qualities are
derived from those primes. So, for instance, the number 6 is "odd but
true", while the powers of 2 are all extremely odd numbers.
%%
One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible
from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at
least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts
are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but
when He's good, nobody can touch Him.
-- John Gardner, NYT Book Review, Jan 1983
%%
One seldom sees a monument to a committee.
%%
Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a
great crystal river. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to
the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of
life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But
one creature said at last, "I trust that the current knows where it is
going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I
shall die of boredom."
The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that
current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the
rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!"
But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go,
and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.
Yet, in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current
lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.
And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried,
"See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the
Messiah, come to save us all!" And the one carried in the current
said, "I am no more Messiah than you. The river delight to lift us
free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this
adventure.
But they cried the more, "Saviour!" all the while clinging to
the rocks, making legends of a Saviour.
%%
Optimization hinders evolution.
%%
You or I must yield up his life to Ahrimanes. I would rather it were
you. I should have no hesitation in sacrificing my own life to spare
yours, but we take stock next week, and it would not be fair on the
company.
-- J. Wellington Wells
%%
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.
Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
-- Mike Adams
%%
Our policy is, when in doubt, do the right thing.
-- Roy L. Ash [ex-president Litton Industries]
%%
Overflow on /dev/null, please empty the bit bucket.
%%
Overload -- core meltdown sequence initiated.
%%
Ozman's Laws:
1. If someone says he will do something "without fail," he
won't.
2. The more people talk on the phone, the less money they
make.
3. People who go to conferences are the ones who shouldn't.
4. Pizza always burns the roof of your mouth.
%%
PL/1, "the fatal disease", belongs more to the problem set than to the
solution set.
-- E. W. Dijkstra
%%
Pascal Users:
To show respect for the 313th anniversary (tomorrow) of the
death of Blaise Pascal, your programs will be run at half
speed.
%%
Pecor's Health-Food Principle:
Never eat rutabaga on any day of the week that has a "y" in
it.
%%
People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of
the future.
%%
Pittsburgh Driver's Test
(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.
%%
Please try to limit the amount of `this room doesn't have any bazingas'
until you are told that those rooms are `punched out.' Once punched
out, we have a right to complain about atrocities, missing bazingas,
and such.
-- N. Meyrowitz
%%
Please, won't somebody tell me what diddie-wa-diddie means?
%%
President Thieu says he'll quit if he doesn't get more than 50% of the
vote. In a democracy, that's not called quitting.
-- The Washington Post
%%
[Prime Minister Joseph] Chamberlain loves the working man -- he loves
to see him work.
-- Winston Churchill
%%
Power, n: The only narcotic regulated by the SEC instead of the FDA.
%%
Q: How many journalists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
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 chief cause of problems is solutions.
%%
The day-to-day travails of the IBM programmer are so amusing to most of
us who are fortunate enough never to have been one -- like watching
Charlie Chaplin trying to cook a shoe.
%%
The debate rages on: Is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary?
%%
The fact that it works is immaterial.
-- L. Ogborn
%%
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
-- Abbie Hoffman
%%
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to
chance.
%%
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
-- Albert Einstein
%%
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity
-- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
%%
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
-- Mark Twain
%%
The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching
train.
%%
The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.
-- Henry Kissinger
%%
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 moon may be smaller than Earth, but it's further away.
%%
The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and
robbers there will be.
-- Lao Tsu
%%
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
%%
The more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us
is right.
%%
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."
-- Isaac Asimov
%%
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to
choose from.
-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
%%
The notion of a "record" is an obsolete remnant of the days of the
80-column card.
-- Dennis M. Ritchie
%%
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the
`social sciences' is: some do, some don't.
-- Ernest Rutherford
%%
The only problem with being a man of leisure is that you can never stop
and take a rest.
%%
The opossum is a very sophisticated animal. It doesn't even get up
until 5 or 6 pm.
%%
The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- Bohr
%%
The optimum committee has no members.
-- Norman Augustine
%%
The pitcher wound up and he flang the ball at the batter. The batter
swang and missed. The pitcher flang the ball again and this time the
batter connected. He hit a high fly right to the center fielder. The
center fielder was all set to catch the ball, but at the last minute
his eyes were blound by the sun and he dropped it.
-- Dizzy Dean
%%
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 with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go
to erase it.
-- Glaser and Way
%%
The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
%%
The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much.
%%
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 revolution will not be televised.
%%
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
-- Emerson
%%
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And
vice versa.
%%
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. Please log off.
%%
The years of peak mental activity are undoubtedly between the ages of
four and eighteen. At four we know all the questions, at eighteen all
the answers.
%%
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 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 is a green, multi-legged creature crawling on your shoulder.
%%
There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
-- Mark Twain
%%
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 man who said "God,
I find it exceedingly odd,
That the willow oak tree
Continues to be,
When there's no one about in the Quad."
And that, I think, was the handle -- the sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we
didn't need that. Our energy would simply `prevail'. There was no
point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum;
we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost
___###see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and
rolled back.
-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
%%
There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is
becoming an endangered synthetic.
-- Lily Tomlin
%%
They spell it "da Vinci" and pronounce it "da Vinchy". Foreigners
always spell better than they pronounce.
-- Mark Twain
%%
They told me you had proven it When they discovered our results
About a month before. Their hair began to curl
The proof was valid, more or less Instead of understanding it
But rather less than more. We'd run the thing through PRL.
He sent them word that we would try Don't tell a soul about all this
To pass where they had failed For it must ever be
And after we were done, to them A secret, kept from all the rest
The new proof would be mailed. Between yourself and me.
If you think that it's nice that you get what you C,
Then go : illogical statement with your whole family,
'Cause the Supreme Court ain't the only place with : Bus error views.
I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.
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"
%%
... if forced to travel on an airplane, try and get in the cabin with
the Captain, so you can keep an eye on him and nudge him if he falls
asleep or point out any mountains looming up ahead ...
-- Mike Harding, "The Armchair Anarchist's Almanac"
%%
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"
%%
Some points to remember [about animals]:
"It's simple, Skyler ... you've seen what food processors do to food,
right?"
-- MacNelley, "Shoe"
%%
A new dramatist of the absurd
Has a voice that will shortly be heard.
I learn from my spies
He's about to devise
An unprintable three-letter word.
%%
"Don't say yes until I finish talking."
-- Darryl F. Zanuck
%%
"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit
longer."
-- Henry Kissinger
%%
Bug, n.: An aspect of a computer program which exists because the
PROGRAMMER was thinking about Jumbo Jacks or stock options when s/he
wrote the program.
-- Ray Simard
%%
C, n.: A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more
like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or
anything else. It is either the best language available to the art
today, or it isn't.
-- Ray Simard
%%
Goto, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured
programmers to complain about unstructured programmers.
-- Ray Simard
%%
Manual, n.: A unit of documentation. There are always three or more on
a given item. One is on the shelf; someone has the others. The
information you need in in the others.
-- Ray Simard
%%
If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?
%%
Do you realize how many holes there could be if people would just take
the time to take the dirt out of them?
%%
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.
%%
You need no longer worry about the future. This time tomorrow you'll
be dead.
%%
Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Two. One to hold the girrafe and the other to fill the bathtub with
brightly colored machine tools.
%%
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.
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.
%%
... Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer,
my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any
resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic.
The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold
them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the
existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god
coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism
is beyond the scope of this article.)
%%
Carelessly planned projects take three times longer to complete than
expected. Carefully planned projects take four times longer to
complete than expected, mostly because the planners expect their
planning to reduce the time it takes.
%%
"His mind is like a steel trap -- full of mice"
-- Foghorn Leghorn
%%
I have learned
To spell hors d'oeuvres
Which still grates on
Some people's n'oeuvres.
-- Warren Knox
%%
'Twas the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period
preceding the annual Yuletide celebration, And
throughout our place of residence,
Kinetic activity was not in evidence among the
possessors of this potential, including that
species of domestic rodent known as Mus musculus.
Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward
edge of the woodburning caloric apparatus,
Pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure regarding an
imminent visitation from an eccentric
philanthropist among whose folkloric appellations
is the honorific title of St. Nicklaus ...
%%
Nobody here but us folk heroes....
-- Doonesbury
%%
Greener's Law:
Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.
%%
Bombeck's Rule of Medicine:
Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
%%
Self Test for Paranoia:
You know you have it when you can't think of anything that's
your own fault.
%%
Laws of Serendipity:
'Twas the night before crisis, and all through the house,
Not a program was working not even a browse.
The programmers were wrung out too mindless to care,
Knowing chances of cutover hadn't a prayer.
The users were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of inquiries danced in their heads.
When out in the lobby there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my tube to see what was the matter.
And what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a Super Programmer, oblivious to fear.
More rapid than eagles, his programs they came,
And he whistled and shouted and called them by name;
On Update! On Add! On Inquiry! On Delete!
On Batch Jobs! On Closing! On Functions Complete!
His eyes were glazed over, his fingers were lean,
From Weekends and nights in front of a screen.
A wink of his eye, and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread...
%%
Q: How many Martians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: One and a half.
%%
He hadn't a single redeeming vice.
-- Oscar Wilde
%%
For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they
like.
-- Abraham Lincoln
%%
Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
-- Samuel Goldwyn
%%
I have made mistakes but I have never made the mistake of claiming that
I have never made one.
-- James Gordon Bennett
%%
She's genuinely bogus.
%%
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 ...
%%
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.
To make eggnog, you'll need rum, whiskey, wine, gin, and, if they are in
season, eggs...
%%
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.
%%
"But what we need to know is, do people want nasally-insertable
computers?"
%%
Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity?
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?"
%%
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.
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.
-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
%%
Workers of the world, arise! You have nothing to lose but your
chairs.
%%
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!"
-- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
%%
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
And the Division Head spake unto his Department Head, saying,
"It is a crock of excrement and none may abide the odor thereof." Now,
the Department Head spake unto his Directorate Head, saying, "It is a
container of excrement, and is very strong, such that none may abide
before it." And it came to pass that the Directorate Head spake unto
the Assistant Technical Director, saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer
and none may abide by its strength."
And the Captain looked down upon the Project, and He saw that
it was Good!
%%
"When I grow up, I want to be an honest lawyer so things like that
can't happen."
-- Richard Nixon as a boy (on the Teapot Dome scandal)
%%
Avoid fruits, nuts, flakes, and vegetables -- after all, you are what
you eat.
%%
"White House carpenters have reworked the master bedroom, remodeling it
so that Ronnie can sleep with his head in the hall. That way, by the
time he wakes up, somebody will have already shined his hair."
%%
He wasn't much of an actor, he wasn't much of a Governor -- Hell, they
_#H_#A_#D to make him President of the United States. It's the only
job he's qualified for!
-- Michael Cain
%%
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never
learned to walk.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
%%
Conservative: One who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.
-- Leo C. Rosten
%%
A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for
the first time.
-- Alfred E. Wiggam
%%
Sure, Reagan has promised to take senility tests. But what if he
forgets?
%%
"How do you like the new America? We've cut the fat out of the
government, and more recently the heart and brain (the backbone was
gone some time ago). All we seem to have left now is muscle. We'll be
lucky to escape with our skins!"
%%
A person who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely
called a liberal.
%%
If Reagan is the answer, it must have been a VERY silly question.
%%
Ronald Reagan: America's favorite placebo.
%%
Ignorance is the Mother of Devotion.
-- Robert Burton
%%
"A witty saying proves nothing."
-- Voltaire
%%
If money can't buy happiness, I guess you'll just have to rent it.
%%
"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 not sure what this is, but an `F' would only dignify it."
--English Professor
%%
"Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper
is from the wrong kind of tree."
--Professor W.
%%
"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.
%%
"When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite."
-- Winston Churchill, On formal declarations of war
%%
"In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable."
-- Winston Churchill, of Montgomery
%%
"Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense."
%%
Aquadextrous, adj.: Possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet
on and off with your toes.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
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"
%%
Cinemuck, n.: The combination of popcorn, soda, and melted chocolate
which covers the floors of movie theaters.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
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"
%%
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"
%%
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"
%%
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"
%%
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"
%%
Yinkel, n.: A person who combs his hair over his bald spot, hoping no
one will notice.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
%%
Just remember: when you go to court, you are trusting your fate to
twelve people that weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty!
%%
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.
-- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
%%
You first have to decide whether to use the short or the long form. The
short form is what the Internal Revenue Service calls "simplified",
which means it is designed for people who need the help of a Sears
tax-preparation expert to distinguish between their first and last
names. Here's the complete text:
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...
-- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
%%
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?"
-- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
%%
Harry is heavily into camping, and every year in the late fall, he
makes us all go to Assateague, which is an island on the Atlantic Ocean
famous for its wild horses. I realize that the concept of wild horses
probably stirs romantic notions in many of you, but this is because you
have never met any wild horses in person. In person, they are like
enormous hooved rats. They amble up to your camp site, and their
attitude is: "We're wild horses. We're going to eat your food, knock
down your tent and poop on your shoes. We're protected by federal law,
just like Richard Nixon."
-- Dave Barry, "Tenting Grandpa Bob"
%%
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.
-- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag"
%%
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?
-- Dave Barry, "Read This First!"
%%
Besides the device, the box should contain:
* 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.
"A horrible little boy came up to me and said, `You know in your book
_The_Martian_Chronicles_?' I said, `Yes?' He said, `You know where you
talk about Deimos rising in the East?' I said, `Yes?' He said `No.'
-- So I hit him."
%%
The Hydrogen Dog and the Cobalt Cat
Side by side in the Armory sat.
Nobody thought about fusion or fission,
Everyone spoke of their peacetime mission,
Till somebody came and opened the door.
There they were, in a neutron fog,
The Codrogen Cat and the Hybalt Dog;
They mushroomed up with a terrible roar--
And Nobody Never was there -- Nomore.
%%
Well, my terminal's locked up, and I ain't got any Mail,
And I can't recall the last time that my program didn't fail;
I've got stacks in my structs, I've got arrays in my queues,
I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.
If you think that it's nice that you get what you C,
Then go : illogical statement with your whole family,
'Cause the Supreme Court ain't the only place with : Bus error views.
I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.
Bullshit.
- Karl
%%
Don't let your mouth write no check that your tail can't cash.
- Bo Diddley
%%
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a
profound truth may well be another profound truth.
- Niels Bohr
%%
Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.
- Southern California Oracle
%%
The most merciful thing in the world ... is the inability of the human mind to
correlate all its contents.
- H. P. Lovecraft
%%
Take what you can use and let the rest go by.
- Ken Kesey
%%
Its not the size of the ship, its the size of the waves.
- Little Richard
%%
I never loved another person the way I loved myself.
- Mae West
%%
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
- Sigmund Freud
%%
When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried
before.
- Mae West
%%
Her life was saved by rock and roll.
- Lou Reed
%%
I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital
intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.
- J. Edgar Hoover
%%
"Honest Officer, had I known my health stood in jeopardy I would never had lit
one." - Maxim of the Hells Angels
%%
It is a rather pleasant experience to be alone in a bank at night.
- Willie Sutton
%%
Never invest your money in anything that eats or needs painting.
- Billy Rose
%%
The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.
- Karl Marx
The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they could write
the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months, three more
than the schedule allowed.
The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they could prepare
the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating; it would be
well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule. Futhermore, if
the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs
for ten months.
To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program
team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would
also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and it was. He
was right on both counts. Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made
the system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it
added a year to debugging time.
- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
%%
The reason ESP, for example, is not considered a viable topic in contemporary
psychology is simply that its investigation has not proven fruitful...After
more than 70 years of study, there still does not exist one example of an ESP
phenomenon that is replicable under controlled conditions. This simple but
basic scientific criterion has not been met despite dozens of studies conducted
over many decades...It is for this reason alone that the topic is now of little
interest to psychology...In short, there is no demonstrated phenomenon that
needs explanation.
-- Keith E. Stanovich, "How to Think Straight About Psychology", pp. 160-161
%%
The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand
years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man
is and will always be a wild animal.
-- Charles Galton Darwin
%%
Natural selection won't matter soon, not anywhere as much as conscious
selection. We will civilize and alter ourselves to suit our ideas of
what we can be. Within one more human lifespan, we will have changed
ourselves unrecognizably.
-- Greg Bear
%%
"Jesus may love you, but I think you're garbage wrapped in skin."
-- Michael O'Donohugh
%%
...though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from
beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"
%%
"It's like deja vu all over again." -- Yogi Berra
%%
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
-- Blaise Pascal
%%
"Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked. "Begin at the beginning,"
the King said, gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
%%
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.
-- Thomas Jefferson
%%
To be awake is to be alive. -- Henry David Thoreau, in "Walden"
%%
A person with one watch knows what time it is; a person with two watches is
never sure. Proverb
%%
You see but you do not observe.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes"
%%
A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle
unless there be two. -- Seneca
%%
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb
to you till your life has illustrated it. -- John Keats
%%
The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order
of space and time. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
%%
What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expect generally happens.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
%%
Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of
rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant. -- Edmund Burke
%%
For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong.
-- H. L. Mencken
%%
Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.
-- James J. Ling
%%
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought,
a rivalry of aim. -- Henry Brook Adams
%%
Remember thee
Ay, thou poor ghost while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there.
Hamlet, I : v : 95 William Shakespeare
%%
Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the information on which he
has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has
the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted
and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda
and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and
make him something less than a man.
-- Arthur Hays Sulzberger
%%
Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy
based on excellence of performance. -- James Bryant Conant
%%
You can observe a lot just by watching. -- Yogi Berra
%%
If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of a circuit, I
see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted instantaneously by
electricity. -- Samuel F. B. Morse
%%
"Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." -- Alexander Graham Bell
%%
It's currently a problem of access to gigabits through punybaud.
-- J. C. R. Licklider
%%
It is important to note that probably no large operating system using current
design technology can withstand a determined and well-coordinated attack,
and that most such documented penetrations have been remarkably easy.
-- B. Hebbard, "A Penetration Analysis of the Michigan Terminal System",
Operating Systems Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, June 1980, pp. 7-20
%%
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
-- Ramsey Clark
%%
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate
knowledge of its ugly side. -- James Baldwin
%%
Small is beautiful.
%%
...the increased productivity fostered by a friendly environment and quality
tools is essential to meet ever increasing demands for software.
-- M. D. McIlroy, E. N. Pinson and B. A. Tague
%%
It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river.
-- Abraham Lincoln
%%
Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
-- Jean Cocteau
%%
Suppose for a moment that the automobile industry had developed at the same
rate as computers and over the same period: how much cheaper and more efficient
would the current models be? If you have not already heard the analogy, the
answer is shattering. Today you would be able to buy a Rolls-Royce for $2.75,
it would do three million miles to the gallon, and it would deliver enough
power to drive the Queen Elizabeth II. And if you were interested in
miniaturization, you could place half a dozen of them on a pinhead.
-- Christopher Evans
%%
In the future, you're going to get computers as prizes in breakfast cereals.
You'll throw them out because your house will be littered with them.
-- Robert Lucky
%%
Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"
%%
Overall, the philosophy is to attack the availability problem from two
complementary directions: to reduce the number of software errors through
rigorous testing of running systems, and to reduce the effect of the
remaining errors by providing for recovery from them. An interesting footnote
to this design is that now a system failure can usually be considered to be
the result of two program errors: the first, in the program that started the
problem; the second, in the recovery routine that could not protect the
system. -- A. L. Scherr, "Functional Structure of IBM Virtual Storage Operating
Systems, Part II: OS/VS-2 Concepts and Philosophies," IBM Systems Journal,
Vol. 12, No. 4, 1973, pp. 382-400
%%
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...
"Well, the diagnostics say it's fine, buddy, so it's a software problem."
%%
"Don't try to outweird me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you free
with my breakfast cereal."
- Zaphod Beeblebrox in "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%%
Uncompensated overtime? Just Say No.
%%
Decaffeinated coffee? Just Say No.
%%
"Show business is just like high school, except you get paid."
- Martin Mull
%%
"This isn't brain surgery; it's just television."
- David Letterman
%%
"Morality is one thing. Ratings are everything."
- A Network 23 executive on "Max Headroom"
%%
Live free or die.
%%
"...if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust,
this would be a better world." - Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days"
%%
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it is too
dark to read.
%%
"Probably the best operating system in the world is the [operating system]
made for the PDP-11 by Bell Laboratories." - Ted Nelson, October 1977
%%
"All these black people are screwing up my democracy." - Ian Smith
%%
Use the Force, Luke.
%%
I've got a bad feeling about this.
%%
The power to destroy a planet is insignificant when compared to the power of
the Force.
- Darth Vader
%%
When I left you, I was but the pupil. Now, I am the master.
- Darth Vader
%%
"Well, well, well! Well if it isn't fat stinking billy goat Billy Boy in
poison! How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip oil? Come
and get one in the yarbles, if ya have any yarble, ya eunuch jelly thou!"
- Alex in "Clockwork Orange"
%%
"There was nothing I hated more than to see a filthy old drunkie, a howling
away at the sons of his father and going blurp blurp in between as if it were
a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts. I could never stand to
see anyone like that, especially when they were old like this one was."
- Alex in "Clockwork Orange"
%%
186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW.
%%
Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward.
%%
Gee, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.
%%
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely,
if ever, do they forgive them.
- Oscar Wilde
%%
Single tasking: Just Say No.
%%
"Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world."
- The Beach Boys
%%
"Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them
seemed to come from Texas."
- Ian Fleming, "Casino Royale"
%%
"I think trash is the most important manifestation of culture we have in my
lifetime."
- Johnny Legend
%%
By one count there are some 700 scientists with respectable academic credentials
(out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life scientists) who give credence
to creation-science, the general theory that complex life forms did not evolve
but appeared "abruptly."
- Newsweek, June 29, 1987, pg. 23
%%
Even if you can deceive people about a product through misleading statements,
sooner or later the product will speak for itself.
- Hajime Karatsu
%%
In order to succeed in any enterprise, one must be persistent and patient.
Even if one has to run some risks, one must be brave and strong enough to
meet and overcome vexing challenges to maintain a successful business in
the long run. I cannot help saying that Americans lack this necessary
challenging spirit today.
- Hajime Karatsu
%%
Memories of you remind me of you.
- Karl
%%
Life. Don't talk to me about life.
- Marvin the Paranoid Android
%%
On a clear disk you can seek forever.
%%
The world is coming to an end--save your buffers!
%%
grep me no patterns and I'll tell you no lines.
%%
It is your destiny.
- Darth Vader
%%
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at
your side.
- Han Solo
%%
How many QA engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
3: 1 to screw it in and 2 to say "I told you so" when it doesn't work.
%%
How many NASA managers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
All to prove
You're on the move
and vanishing
- The Cars
%%
Could be you're crossing the fine line
A silly driver kind of...off the wall
One to hold the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with brightly colored
power tools.
%%
How many Bavarian Illuminati does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
In 1969, only 66 years after Orville Wright flew two feet off the ground
for 12 seconds, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and I rocketed to the moon
in Apollo 11."
-- Michael Collins
Former astronaut and past Director of the National Air and Space Museum
%%
Most people exhibit what political scientists call "the conservatism of the
peasantry." Don't lose what you've got. Don't change. Don't take a chance,
because you might end up starving to death. Play it safe. Buy just as much
as you need. Don't waste time.
When we think about risk, human beings and corporations realize in their
heads that risks are necessary to grow, to survive. But when it comes down
to keeping good people when the crunch comes, or investing money in
something untried, only the brave reach deep into their pockets and play
the game as it must be played.
And it was because the word had come down from the mountain.
Amen.
A. Three - one to do it and two to argue whether it's principled to change it.
-- Bill Ware (?)
%%
Q. How many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb?
He reassured her, "You are as unlikely to come into contact with the
one as with the other."
%%
After winning the pennant one year, Casey Stengel commented,
"I couldn'ta done it without my players."
%%
The Mets drafted a catcher as their first-ever pick. Asked why,
Casey Stengel replied, "Well, without a catcher, we'd have a lot
of passed balls, don'tcha think?"
%%
One time as manager, Casey Stengel was sitting next to Mickey Mantle.
He mentioned playing in Yankee Stadium, and Mantle expressed
surprise. Stengel asked, "You think I was *born* sixty years old?"
%%
"[In the U. S. Army] An officer does not take an oath of loyalty to the
Commander-in-Chief. He takes an oath of loyalty to the Constitution."
-- Sam Donaldson
%%
"Debugging is anticipated with distaste, performed with reluctance, and bragged
about forever."
-- button at the Boston Computer Museum
%%
"I don't believe that the answer to white racism is black racism."
-- Spiro T. Agnew, then Governor of Maryland
%%
"When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results."
-- Calvin Coolidge
%%
"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy."
-- Howard Roark, in Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_
%%
"On the market, there can be no such thing as exploitation."
-- Murray Rothbard
%%
>This is a duplicate article, and old as hell...now, who could be doing this???
"Yes, Cache is a compromise. Mainly to your wallet and the speed of light."
-- Jim Hutchison (ucsd!celerity!hutch)
%%
"If it doesn't come from you, shouldn't it come from Gerber?"
-- Bristol Meyers baby formula ad
%%
"If you substitute other kinds of intellectual property into the GNU
manifesto, it quickly becomes absurd."
-- Cal Keegan
%%
Instead of whining to the net about it, why don't you talk to the news admins
at Berkeley? If they won't trash sci.skeptic there, pass around a petition.
Threaten to set their dog on fire. Whatever. If nothing works, you can, as a
last resort, unsubscribe.
-- Dave Mack, mack@inco.UUCP, responds to a flame in news.groups
%%
"Writing programs needs genius to save the last order or the last millisecond.
It is great fun, but it is a young man's game. You start it with great
enthusiasm when you first start programming, but after ten years you get a
bit bored with it, and then you turn to automatic-programming languages and
use them because they enable you to get to the heart of the problem that you
want to do, instead of having to concentrate on the mechanics of getting the
program going as fast as you possibly can, which is really nothing more than
doing a sort of crossword puzzle."
-- Christopher Strachey, 1962
%%
"And the Lord God said unto Moses -- and correctly, I believe ..."
-- Field Marshal Montgomery, opening a chapel service
%%
"No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in
his pocket, or at least had been fooling around with timetables."
-- Archie Goodwin
%%
"36 percent of the American Public believes that boiling radioactive milk
makes it safe to drink."
-- results of a survey by Jon Miller at Northern Illinois University
%%
Annex Canada now! We need the room, and who's going to stop us?
-- A Tom Neff .signature
%%
"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right
keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."
-- J. S. Bach
%%
"Of course, someone who knows more about this will correct me if I'm wrong,
and someone who knows less will correct me if I'm right."
-- David Palmer (palmer@tybalt.caltech.edu)
%%
"War is the health of the State."
-- Proudhon (?)
%%
"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the Legislature is in
session."
-- Lysander Spooner
%%
"I was brought up in the other service; but I knew from the first that the
Devil was my natural master and captain and friend. I saw that he was in
the right, and that the world cringed to his conqueror only from fear."
-- Shaw, "The Devil's Disciple"
%%
/*
* this atrocity is necessary on sparc because registers modified
* by the child get propagated back to the parent via the window
* save/restore mechanism.
*/
-- SunOS 4.0 vfork.h
%%
"Our liberty depends upon the freedom of the press, and that cannot be
limited without being lost."
-- Thomas Jefferson (1786)
%%
Commenting on the advantages of bisexuality, Woody Allen once remarked
"It doubles your chances of getting a date on Saturday night."
%%
Definition of a hermaphrodite: a bisexual built for two.
-- Jeff Daiell
%%
AN EXPOSTULATION (Against too many writers of science fiction)
And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars -- all
over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest
of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but
never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose -- there is
no such war in the history of the race."
"Now," said Satan, "you have seen your progress down to the present,
and you must confess that it is wonderful -- in its way. We must now
exhibit the future."
"You perceive," he said, "that you have made continual progress. Cain
did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with
javelins and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and
the fine arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian
has added guns and gunpowder; a few centuries from now he will have so
greatly improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter
that all men will confess that without Christian civilization war must
have remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time."
"Satan!"
%%
"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect
in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for
safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These
institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you,
affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of
minorities. There was never a country where the majority of people were in
their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions."
-- Mark Twain, _The Mysterious Stranger_
%%
Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane -- like
all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet
preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them
happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their
bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal
happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who
gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with
biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and
invented hell -- mouths mercy and invented hell -- mouths Golden
Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented
hell; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man
without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's
acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon
himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this
poor, abused slave to worship him!
THE SIMPSONS
%%
"Jesus saves sinners... and redeems them for valuable cash prizes!"
-- John Wichers (wichers@husc4.harvard.edu)
%%
"Perestroika: could it happen here?"
-- Tom Neff
%%
"We walked on the moon -- you be polite."
-- Joni Mitchell
%%
"My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch? Next April?"
-- L. Mulloy
%%
"UNIX should be used as an adjective."
-- AT&T
%%
"The real problem with SDI is that it doesn't kill anybody."
-- Tom Neff
%%
"DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT blow the hatch!"
"Roger....hatch blown!"
-- MAROONED
%%
"We have luck only with women -- not spacecraft!"
-- R. Kremnev, builder of failed Soviet FOBOS probes
%%
"The Nazis have no sense of humor, so why should they want television?"
-- Philip K. Dick
%%
"NASA Announces New Deck Chair Arrangement For Space Station Titanic."
-- Tom Neff
%%
"Knowing when to optimize is as important as knowing how."
-- Tom Neff
%%
"Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you will -- that will uncover a
lot of things. You open that scab, there's a hell of a lot of things...
This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have
nothing to do with ourselves."
-- Richard Milhouse Nixon, 6/23/72
%%
"Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat."
-- Thiokol management, 1/27/86
-- david@eng.sun.com
%%
The following appeared in my MCI bill this month:
o Fornicate
o Get a divorce
o Shoot suction-cup darts at photos of JFK
o Fornicate
o Call up your long-distance operator and emit an ear-piercing shriek
o Tell your parents how they've screwed you up for life
o Assist a gay couple in adopting or conceiving
o Use the word "Chappaquiddick" (sic?) in a sentence
o Buy your pre-adolescent children a copy of Blue Boy
o Fornicate
o Spit on a rich person
o Fornicate
Thank you.
- Erb (cooper@cs)
Church of the Four-day Workweek
%%
"Poor dead, there's nothing between his ears."
-- Margaret Thatcher, about Ronald Regan,
in the 6/2/88 issue of The New York Times
%%
"Satanic Verses is a despicable book that could not have been written by
a person who wished to behave decently and responsibly."
-- Orson Scott Card, Science Fiction author, Mormon, weenie
%%
"C is the assembly language of Tcl."
-- Karl Lehenbauer (karl@hackercorp.com)
-- Bloom County
%%
"In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me -
and by that time no one was left to speak up."
-- Pastor Martin Niemoller
%%
"You can't get snot off of a suede jacket."
-- Lenny Bruce
%%
"A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
He follows a lifestyle we don't endorse,
He drinks the blood of a sheep, by force,
The vampire horse, Count Ed!"
-- Ron (lev0@midway.uchicago.edu)
%%
[Pornography] causes premarital intercourse, perversion, masturbation in
boys, wantonness in girls... Attention is given to sensationalists such
as Kinsey and Eberhard... who, finding fellow travelers in erstwhile
respectable media, manage to disseminate, directly and indirectly,
their absurd and dirty bleatings and pagan ideas. It seems strange to
me that we credit -- I should say that our mass media credit -- the
unestablished generalities of a few so-called experts, but ignore the
overwhelming testimony of the true experts like J. Edgar Hoover.
-- Charles H. Keating, Jr., former anti-porn activist, the financier
behind the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal (his anti-porn organization
got in trouble in 1962 (!) for spending over 90% of the funds they
raised)
%%
"If it's a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected
within you is destroyed."
-- Kahlil Gibran, 1923
%%
"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that
they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what
they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."
-- Robert F. Kennedy
%%
In truth, there never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people
who did not resort to divine authority, as otherwise his laws would
not have been accepted by the people; for there are many good laws, the
importance of which is known to be the sagacious lawgiver, but the
reasons for which are not sufficiently evident to enable him to persuade
others to submit to them; and therefore do wise men, for the purpose
of removing this difficulty, resort to divine authority.
-- Machiavelli
%%
All religions have in common the periodical childlike surrender to a
Provider or providers who dispense earthly fortune as well as
spiritual health; some demonstrations of man's smallness by means of
reduced posture and humble gesture, the admission in prayer and song
of misdeeds, of misthoughts, and of evil intentions; fervent appeal
for inner unification by divine guidance; and finally, the insight
that individual trust must become part of the ritual practice of man,
and must become a sign of trustworthiness in the community.
-- psychologist Erik Erikson
%%
When one studies the biographies of the founders and leaders of the various
religions, one cannot help but be struck by the psychotic -- or at least
extremely abnormal -- behavior that has characterized so many of them.
Luther, Wesley, and Loyola had hallucinations ("visions"). St. Theresa
almost certainly was a hysteric. The book _The Psychotic Personality_,
by Leon J. Saul and Silas L. Warner, devotes considerable space to the
psychotic personalities of Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science),
Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Mohammed, and the Rev. Jim Jones...
It seems significant that the founder of Christianity itself, St. Paul,
also suffered from epilepsy.
-- Frank Zindler, "Religiosity as a Mental Disorder," American Atheist
magazine, April 1988, p. 27
%%
"For the church to say that abortion is not acceptable for a Catholic
is fine. To say directly or indirectly that on something that is a
church teaching that you must also vote according to that -- that's
not acceptable in a country based on the First Amendment."
-- Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy
%%
"Unlimited campaign spending eats at the heart of the democratic process."
-- Barry Goldwater
%%
"If we are to begin packaging ourselves as boxes of cereal, Democracy will
die... for you could not win the presidency without proving unworthy of
the job."
-- Adlai Stevenson
%%
"Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking
the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe,
from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man."
-- George Gaylord Simpson
%%
"We must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend
that we have nothing to express."
-- George Santayana, _Soliloquies In England_
%%
Memory: what wonders it performs in preserving and storing up things gone by
or rather, things that are!
-- Plutarch
%%
"Free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, I am free at last."
-- Martin Luther King
%%
"The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if
any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents
as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false."
-- Saint Thomas Aquinas
%%
"Ignorance transcends architecture."
-- James Gaskin
%%
"The C committee took something that wasn't broken, and tidied it up without
breaking it."
-- Dennis Ritchie (dmr@alice.UUCP), about ANSI C standard X3J11
%%
"Committees do harm merely by existing."
-- Freeman Dyson
%%
I think the best way I've heard this put is "Pascal gives you a water pistol
filled with distilled water. C not only gives you a loaded .357, it points
it at your head as a default. Why do you think Pascal is taught in school?
And which would you rather have when there was a hungry bear in the area?"
-- Jim Harkins (jharkins@sagpd1.UUCP)
%%
"So far from God, so close to the United States"
-- Old Mexican proverb
%%
In science, right conduct consists of evaluating evidence honestly and
according to the canons of scientific reasoning. To misrepresent the
evidence and the criteria of judgement is not merely to provide
misinformation; it is to set an example of dishonesty. Telling lies
to naive and trusting young persons is bad. Doing so for the purpose
of proselytizing is worse.
-- biologist Michael T. Ghiselin
%%
Our educational systems may very well be on the threshold of a new and
even gloomier Dark Age of the 20th and 21st centuries, unless the anti-
intellectualism and confused thinking creationists produce is overcome."
-- Reverend James Skehan
%%
In article <10796@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>I'm not going to be as kind to FICC in general as you have been.
>Something is wrong there. These three semiliterate fanboys send dozens
>of messages a day, fewer than half of which are about anything in
>particular. I haven't had a kill file since Weiner left, but I've been
>sorely tempted to use one to avoid seeing anything from ficc.
Me too.
"My friend Bob is a radio DJ, and when he walks under a bridge, you can't hear
him talk."
"My father built a quicksand box in our back yard. I was an only child,
eventually."
...
In common terms you can write a book, and no one can stop you or tell
you what to write, but no one else is required to publish the book, or
to read it. You can raise specious issues in net postings, but no one
is required to agree, to carry your postings, or even read them. If
everyone on the net adds you to their KILL file, you have no recourse.
If every site checks incoming postings and blows your stuff away,
that's their right.
Don't worry, a few individuals may ignore you, but the bulk of the net
will read every word, if only to disagree.
"If, on the morrow, the Germans defeat us at our national sport, be not
dismayed. For twice in this century, we've defeated them at theirs."
"It's not every workplace that allows you to have an autographed picture of
Christ on the wall."
-- Scott Lieberman
%%
"All Marxists, basically, are reactionaries, yearning for the Oriental
despotisms of pre-Hellenic times, the neolithic culture that preceded
the rise of self-consciousness and egoism."
-- Robert Anton Wilson, writing as "Justin Case".
%%
"Never put off until run time what you can do at compile time."
-- David Gries, in "Compiler Construction for Digital Computers", circa 1969.
%%
"...cops and reporters are much alike. Both are absolutely dedicated to
doing the job at hand, regardless of obstacles. And both, deep down, really
believe the rules don't apply to them".
-- Jim Barlow, Houston Chronicle
%%
"...the American dream, in recent years the object of much
denigration even within our own borders, turns out to have been
the world's dream, as well."
-- Louis Rukeyser on events in Eastern Europe
%%
Sometimes you get the elevator and sometimes you get the shaft.
%%
"Of course the US Constitution isn't perfect; but it's a lot better than what
we have now."
-- Eric Sheppard (ce1zzes@prism.gatech.EDU)
%%
"If you get somebody to give you a dollar, they'll vote for you for the rest
of their lives."
-- Hugh Parmer, Democratic candidate for the 1990 U.S. Senate, from Texas
%%
Ranger is very!
%%
Crystals are the subject of international fascination. From crystal balls to
lasers, they have been prized in healing and science throughout the centuries.
Now Randall and Vicki Baer explore completely new horizons of crystal-based
knowledge.
The Baers explore visions of a new age based on higher planes of reality
and ultra-advanced crystal technologies. An essential reference, _The
Crystal Connection_ is a landmark achievement in the field of crystal-based
sacred science.
Randall and Vicki Baer are internationally known authorities in the areas
of crystals, sacred science, and spiritual teachings. Widely sought as
speakers, they are codirectors of the Starcrest Academy of Interdimensional
Law and Science, a project dedicated to worldwide seminars and advanced
educational programs in the sacred sciences. They are the authors of
_Windows of Light: Quartz Crystals and Self-Transformation_, considered
the best work on the subject to date.
-- from the back cover of _The Crystal Connection_, Harper and Row,
ISBN 0-06-250033-3
%%
Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an Art.
-- H. L. Mencken
...and then all sorts of people started coming up with rube goldberg
schemes to avoid parsing dates. However, it turns out that even using
C news's getdate (which is 10% slower than the B news version), parsing
the dates in every article in a full Usenet feed takes about five Sun 3
CPU seconds per day. And if you were to use the lex-based date parser
included in the MH distribution, you could get it down below a second
per day, although it hardly seems worth the (minimal) effort.
[Pronounced "Pango Pango" by the natives and "Pogo Pogo" by Mr. Quayle.]
%%
VICE PRESIDENT DAN QUAYLE'S ADVENTURES IN...
El Salvador, Feb. & June 1989:
"El Salvador is a democracy so it's not surprising that there are many
voices to be heard here. Yet in my conversations with the Salvadorans...
I have heard a single voice..."
%%
God is real unless declared integer.
- Allen W. Sherzer (aws@vax3.UUCP)
%%
what urge will save us now that sex won't
- Jenny Holzer, word artist
%%
File names are infinite in length where infinity is set to 255 characters.
- Peter Collinson, "The Unix File System"
%%
Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons",
speaking on fans of "The Simpsons":
"Moisture"
- From the ABC series "Doctor Doctor"
%%
"Never knock on Death's door. Ring the bell and run away. Death really
hates that."
- From the ABC series "Doctor Doctor"
%%
Courage is the willingness of a person to stand up for his beliefs in the face
of great odds. Chutzpah is doing the same thing wearing a Mickey Mouse hat.
%%
A comment from the Space Shuttle (!) computer IPL code, power
failure handling:
"OK! LET'S GET ONE THING STRAIGHT. I'M IN CHARGE OF THE CPU FOR THE
NEXT 40 MILLISECONDS!"
%%
- Real programmers are a figment of the imagination.
%%
- Real programmers detest candy-ass architects. Candy-ass architects won't
allow Execute instructions to address another Execute. Real programmers
despise petty restrictions.
%%
- Real programmers disdain structured programming. Structured programming
is for compulsive neurotics who were prematurely toilet trained. They
wear neckties and carefully line up sharp pencils on an otherwise clean desk.
%%
- Real programmers don't believe in schedules. Planners make up schedules.
Managers firm up schedules. Frightened coders strive to meet schedules.
Real programmers ignore schedules.
%%
- Real programmers don't bring paper bag lunches. If the vending machine
sells it, they eat it. If the vending machine doesn't sell it, they don't
eat it. Vending machines don't sell quiche.
%%
- Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it
should be hard to understand.
%%
- Real programmers don't document. Documentation is for simps who can't read
the listings of the object deck.
%%
- Real programmers don't draw flowcharts. Cavemen drew flowcharts, and look
how much good it did them.
%%
- Real programmers don't drive cars, or any other complicated mechanical
contrivance. Walking or bicycling are okay. If a real programmer's bicycle
breaks down he has a technician fix it.
%%
- Real programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport which requires you
to change clothes. Mountain climbing is okay, 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 applications programs, they program right down
to the BARE METAL. Applications programming is for feebs who can't do
systems programming.
%%
- Real programmers don't write in APL, unless the whole program can be written
in one line.
%%
- Real programmers don't write in BASIC. Actually no programmers write in
BASIC after the age of twelve.
%%
- Real programmers don't write in COBOL. COBOL is for wimpy applications
programmers.
%%
- Real programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks
and crystallography weenies.
%%
- Real programmers don't write in LISP. Only dweeb programs contain more
parentheses than actual code.
%%
- Real programmers don't write in PASCAL, or BLISS, or ADA, or any of those
pinko computer science languages. Strong typing is for people with weak
memories.
%%
- Real programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for gutless people who can't
decide whether they want COBOL or FORTRAN.
%%
- Real programmers don't write specs - users should consider themselves lucky
to get any programs at all, and take what they get.
%%
- Real programmers have no use for managers. Managers are a necessary evil.
They exist only to deal with personnel bozos, bean counters, senior
planners, and other mental defectives.
%%
- Real programmers like vending machine popcorn. Coders pop it in the
microwave oven. Real programmers use the heat from the CPU. They can tell
which jobs are running from the rate of popping.
%%
- Real programmers never grow old. They suffer from burnouts, monumental
crashes, or bugs in their DNA.
%%
- Real programmers never work 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at
9 am, it's because they were up all night.
%%
- Real programmers scorn floating point arithmetic. The decimal point was
invented for pansy bed-wetters who are unable to think big.
%%
The Algol compiler used at Case Institute of Technology, after finding
25 errors in the source (e.g., like you spelled BEGIN as BEGNI), would
print
"At this point, we suggest you try re-reading the manual."
%%
Programming by Monte Carlo methods is frowned upon.
%%
Installing Unix fixes the [VMS] bug.
- Barry Shein
%%
vmunix: kbd: Too many keys down!
%%
"Code so clean...you can eat off it."
%%
"If we can't fix it, it isn't broken."
%%
"Never test for a bug you don't know how to fix."
%%
"Don't break it if you can't fix it."
%%
Final message received from the Titanic: "Fatal crash due to icebug."
%%
"Bugs bugs everywhere, and not a fix in sight."
%%
"A feature is a bug with seniority."
%%
He who fears he will suffer, suffers already from his fear.
- Marcus Aurelius
%%
Nothing is enough for the man for whom enough is too little.
- Epicurus
%%
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
- Henry David Thoreau
%%
I have been informed repeatedly, by persons who considered
themselves hard-headed realists, that men in business normally desire to
grow rich. Observation has convinced me that the persons who gave me
this assurance, so far from being realists, were sentimental idealists,
totally blind to the most patent facts of the world in which they live.
If business men really wished to grow rich more ardently than they wish
to keep others poor, the world would quickly become a paradise.
Bertrand Russell
%%
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism
is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express
sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Rebecca West
%%
A hallmark of crank manuscripts is that they solve
everything... A second hallmark of cranks is that they are humorless.
A third hallmark of the crank is that he is sure everyone is out to
steal his ideas. A fourth hallmark of the crank is that he is
determined to bring the newspapers in somehow. A fifth hallmark of
cranks is that they use a lot of capital letters. Jeremy Bernstein
%%
While the tabloids appeal to our craving for the mysterious, the
real world offers every bit as much drama--actually more, because editors
have limited imaginations, but nature has no such constraints. Howard
A. Smith
%%
The master of superstition is the people; and in all superstition
wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a
reversed order. Francis Bacon
%%
You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You
might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you have them.
George Bernard Shaw
%%
There is only one road to progress, in education as in other human
affairs, and that is: Science wielded by love. Without science, love is
powerless; without love, science is destructive. Bertrand Russell
%%
Great spirits often encounter violent opposition from mediocre
minds. Albert Einstein
%%
Our expression and our words never coincide, which is why the
animals don't understand us. Chazal
%%
To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in
avoiding them. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
%%
Whistling to keep up courage is good practice for whistling.
Henry Haskins
%%
Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a
crime to examine the laws of heat. John Morley
%%
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are
consequences. Robert Ingersoll
%%
Those who know the least obey the best. George Farquhar
%%
The three rudenesses of this world: youth mocking at age, health
mocking at sickness, a wise man mocking a fool.
%%
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking
others to live as one wishes to live. Oscar Wilde
%%
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to
make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell. Walter Bagehot
%%
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the
real with the ideal never goes unpunished. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
%%
It is questionable whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel,
we aren't lapsing into precisely the mistake of the child who hits the
chair he bumps into. Georg Christoph Licthenberg
%%
It takes time to ruin a world, but time is all it takes.
Bernard de Fontenelle
%%
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
%%
When you say that you agree to a thing on principle, you mean that
you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
Otto von Bismarck
%%
Truth does less good in the world than its appearances do harm.
La Rochefoucauld
%%
There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once some
mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an
essential ingredient of "real thinking". The ineluctable core of
intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn't yet been
programmed. This "Theorem" was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so
I call it Tessler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
Douglas R. Hofstadter
%%
Natural man has only two primal passions: to get and to beget.
Osler
%%
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only
animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what
they might have been. Nietzsche
%%
Anger is never without an argument, but seldom with a good one.
Halifax
%%
Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire to seem
so. La Rochefoucauld
%%
How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound!
Joubert
%%
He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.
Montaigne
%%
Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we
resort to to hide them. La Rochefoucauld
%%
Many would be cowards if they had courage enough. Thomas Fuller
%%
He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he
will do very few things. Halifax
%%
Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes. Oscar Wilde
%%
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually
fearing you will make one. E. Hubbard
%%
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the
neighbors will say. Connoly
%%
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.
Their tastes may not be the same. George Bernard Shaw
%%
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is
to fill the world with fools. Herbert Spencer
%%
It's always been and always will be the same in the world: the
horse does the work and the coachman is tipped.
%%
The great tragedy of science--the slaying of a beautiful
hypothesis by an ugly fact. T.H. Huxley
%%
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute
rejection of authority. T. H. Huxley
%%
Nothing hath an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not of
our side. Halifax
%%
What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.
Bertrand Russell
%%
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true. Francis Bacon
%%
A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of
finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over. Chamfort
%%
One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
Oscar Wilde
%%
A very popular error--having the courage of one's convictions;
rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one's
convictions. Nietzsche
%%
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Voltaire
%%
The girl who can't dance says the band can't play. Yiddish Proverb
%%
He who lies for you will lie against you. Bosnian Proverb
%%
Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight
acquaintance and without any visible reason. Halifax
%%
Most men who rail against women are railing at one woman only.
Gourmont
%%
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking
together in the same direction. Saint-Exupery
%%
Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable
sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled.
The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog. T.H.
Huxley
%%
Every great scientific truth goes through three states: First,
people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been
discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it.
Attirbuted to Louis Agassiz
%%
What will people say--in these words lies the tyranny of the world,
the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of
our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere. Berthold Auerbach
%%
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
Norman Douglas
%%
Death hangs over thee. While thou still live, while thou may, do
good. Marcus Aurelius Antonius
%%
Who shoots at the mid-day sun, though he be so sure he shall never
hit the mark, yet as sure as he is, he shall shoot higher than he who
aims at a bush. Sir Phillip Sidney
%%
Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock
strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to
instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and
unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one
starts lawsuits over their wills. Voltaire
%%
A vixen sneered at a lioness because she never bore more than one
cub. 'Only one,' she replied, 'but a lion.' Aesop
%%
A dog, lying in a manger, would neither eat the barley herself nor
allow the horse, which could eat it, to come near it. Aesop
%%
Breathe deep the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room
Bedsitter people look back and lament
Another day's useless, another year spent
Impassioned lovers wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love and has none
New mother picks up and suckles her son
Senior citizens wish they were young
Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is gray and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion
-Moody Blues
%%
It is I, Captain Vegetable
With my carrots and my celery
Eating vegetables cause they're good for me,
And they're good for you so eat them too
For teeth so strong your whole life long
Eat celery and carrots by the bunch
Three cheers for me, Captain Vegetable,
Crunch Crunch Crunch!
- Captain Vegetable
%%
But that's okay, there's treasures children always seem to find
And just like us, you must have had a once upon a time.
- Bernie Taupin (Elton John)
%-
While Titian was mixing rose madder
His model ascended the ladder
Her position to Titian
Suggested coition
So he mounted the ladder and had her.
%%
There was a young girl from New York
Who plugged up her quim with a cork
A woodpecker or two
Made the grade, it is true,
But it totally baffled the stork.
%%
A broken-down harlot named Tupps
Was heard to confess in her cups:
"The height of my folly
Was diddling a collie--
But I got a nice price for the pups."
%%
There's an oversexed lady named Whyte
Who insists on a dozen a night.
A fellow named Cheddar
Had the brashness to wed her--
His chance of survival is slight.
%%
A scandal involving an oyster
Sent the Countess of Clews to a cloister
She preferred it, in bed,
To the count (so she said)
'Cause it's longer and stronger and moister.
%%
On the breasts of a harlot from Yale
Was tatooed the price of her tail
And on her behind,
For the sake of the blind,
Was the same information in Braille.
%%
Said the nun as the bishop withdrew,
"This must be our final adieu,
For the vicar is slicker,
And slower, and thicker,
And two inches longer than you."
%%
There was a young man named Laplace
Whose balls were made out of spun glass.
When they banged together
They played "Stormy Weather"
And lightning shot out of his ass.
%%
There was a young man named Knute
Who had warts all over his root.
He put acid on these
And now when he pees,
He fingers the thing like a flute.
%%
A sweetheart named Teresa Arden
Went down on her beau in the garden.
He said, "Good lord, Tess,
Don't swallow that mess!"
And she replied, "Ulp, beg your pardon?"
%%
An amazon giantess named Dunne
Let a midget screw her for fun.
But the poor little runt
Was engulfed in her cunt
And re-born as the twin of his son.
%%
A frustrated lady named Alice
Used a dynamite stick for a phallus.
They found her vagina
In North Carolina
And bits of her tits were in Dallas.
%%
There was a young lady from Wheeling
Who had a peculiar feeling.
She laid on her back
And tickled her crack
And pissed all over the ceiling.
%%
A clever young man named Eugene
Invented a jack-off machine.
On the twenty-third stroke
The goddam thing broke
And beat both his balls to a cream.
%%
There was a young man from Racine
Who invented a fucking machine.
Concave or convex,
It served either sex,
But oh what a bitch to keep clean.
%%
There was a young man from Rangoon
Who used to lament 'neath the moon
That he had the luck
To be born of a fuck
That was scraped off the sheets with a spoon.
%%
The acrobats --Tom and Louise--
Do an act in the nude on their knees.
They crawl down the aisle
While screwing dog-style,
As the orchestra plays Kilmer's "Trees."
%%
"Well, I took your advice, Doc", said Knopp,
"And told my wife to try it on top.
She bounced for an hour,
Till she ran out of power,
And the kids, who'd grown bored, made us stop."
%%
A greedy young lady from Sidney
Liked it in up to her kidney,
Till a man from Quebec
Shoved it up to her neck--
He really diddled her, didn' he?
%%
For the sores on his prick he used Dial.
That failed; he gave Lava a trial.
But the one remedy
For contagious V.D.
Is the wonder drug sulfa-denial.
%%
A cute little twerp from Samoa
Had a cock of one inch and no moa.
It was good for keyholes
And debutantes' peeholes
But not worth a damn on a whoa.
%%
A lusty young maid from Seattle
Got pleasure by sleeping with cattle;
Till she found a bull
Who filled her so full
It made both her ovaries rattle.
%%
In the garden of Eden lay Adam,
Complacently stroking his madam
And loud was his mirth
For on all of the earth
There were only two balls and he had 'em.
%%
There once was a horny old bitch
With a motorized self-frigger which
She would use with delight
All day long and all night--
Twenty bucks: Abercrombie & Fitch.
%%
The new cinematic emporium
Is not just a super-sensorium,
But a highly effectual
Heterosexual
Mutual masturbatorium.
%%
There was a young man of Devizes,
Whose balls were of different sizes.
One was so small,
It was nothing at all;
The other took numerous prizes.
%%
A talented girl from Detroit
Could fuck you in ways quite adroit.
She could squeeze her vagina
To a pin-point or finer
Or open it out like a quoit.
%%
There was a young royal marine,
Who tried to fart "God Save the Queen".
When he reached the soprano
Out came only guano
And his britches weren't fit to be seen.
%%
There was a young girl of Spitzbergen,
Whose people all thought her a virgin,
Till they found her in bed
With her twat very red,
And the head of a kid just emergin'.
%%
There was a young girl from Samoa
Who pledged that no man would know her.
One young fellow tried,
But she wriggled aside,
And he spilled all his spermatozoa.
%%
There was a young lady named Wylde
Who kept herself quite undefiled
By thinking of Jesus;
Contagious diseases;
And the bother of having a child.
%%
That naughty old Sappho of Greece
Said: "What I prefer to a piece
Is to have my pudenda
Rubbed hard by the enda
The little pink nose of my niece."
%%
There was a young lady from Norway
Who hung by her heels in a doorway.
She told her young man,
"Get off the divan,
I think I've discovered one more way "
%%
There was a young girl who begat
Three babies named Nat, Pat and Tat.
T'was fun in the breeding
But hell in the feeding
When she found there's no tit for Tat.
%%
A busy young lady named Gloria
Was had by Sir Gerald du Maurier
And then by six men,
Sir Gerald again,
And the band at the Waldorf-Astoria.
%%
Oh pity the prince, Montezuma
He tried to make love to a puma.
Seems the puma, in play,
Tore his testes away--
An example of animal huma.
%%
A cautious young fellow named Lodge
Had seatbelts installed in his Dodge.
When his date was strapped in,
He committed a sin,
Without even leaving his garage.
%%
To his bride, said the sharp eyed detective,
"Can it be that my eyesight's defective?
Is your east tit the least bit
The best of your west tit,
Or is it a trick of perspective?"
%%
There once was a lady named Myrtle
Who had an affair with a turtle.
She had crabs, so they say,
In a year and a day
Which proved that that turtle was fertile.
%%
There once was a fellow named Brewster
Who said to his wife, as he goosed her,
"It used to be grand
But look at my hand
You're not wiping as clean as ya uster."
%%
A petulant man once said, "Pish
Your cunt is as big as a dish."
She replied, "Why you fool,
With your limp little tool,
It's like driving a pin with a fish."
%%
There was an old man from Bengal
Who liked to do tricks in the hall.
His favorite trick
Was to stand on his dick
While he rolled around on one ball.
%%
There once was a fellow named Sweeney
Who spilled gin all over his weenie.
Not being uncouth,
He added vermouth
And slipped his amour a martini.
%%
On a cannibal isle near Malaysia
Lives a lady they call Anastasia.
Not Russian elite--
She's eager to eat
Whatever or whoever lays her.
%%
There once was a maid from Mobile
Whose cunt was made of blue steel.
She only got thrills
From pneumatic drills
And an off-centered emery wheel.
%%
There was a young fellow named Feeney
Whose girl was a terrible meany.
The hatch of her snatch
Had a catch that would latch
- She could only be screwed by Houdini.
%%
There was a young lady from Wheeling
Who claimed to lack sexual feeling.
But a cynic named Boris
Just touched her clitoris
And she had to be scraped off the ceiling.
%%
A marine being sent to Hong Kong
Got a doctor to alter his dong.
He sailed off with a tool
Flat and thin as a rule -
When he got there he found he was wrong.
%%
There was a young girl from East Lynn
Whose mother (to save her from sin)
Had filled up her crack
With hard-setting shellac,
But the boys picked it out with a pin.
%%
There was a young girl named Sapphire
Who succumbed to her lover's desire.
She said, "It's a sin,
But now that it's in,
Could you shove it a few inches higher?"
%%
There was a young lady named Nelly
Whose tits would jiggle like jelly.
They could tickle her twat
Or be tied in a knot,
And could even swat flies on her belly.
%%
There once was a girl named Priscilla
Whose vagina was flavored vanilla.
The taste was so fine
Man and beast stood in line
(Including a stud armadilla).
%%
There was an old man from Duluth
Whose cock was shot off in his youth.
He fucked with his nose
Or his fingers and toes
And he came thru a hole in his tooth.
%%
There was a young lady from Rheims
Who amazingly pissed in four streams.
A friend poked around
And a fly-button found
Lodged tight in her hole so it seems.
%%
There was a young sailor from Brighton
Who said to his bird, "You're a tight'un."
She replied, "'Pon my soul,
You're in the wrong hole
There's plenty of room in the right'un."
%%
There was a gay countess of Bray,
And you may think it odd when I say,
That in spite of high station,
Rank and education,
She always spelled cunt with a 'k'.
%%
There was an old man of Connaught
Whose prick was remarkably short.
When he got into bed,
The old woman said,
"This isn't a prick, it's a wart!"
%%
There was a young lass from Surat.
The cheeks of her ass were so fat
That they had to be parted
Whenever she farted,
And also whenever she shat.
%%
There was a young lady of Gaza
Who shaved her cunt bare with a razor.
The crabs, in a lump,
Made tracks to her rump--
This passing parade did amaze her.
%%
A doctoral student from Buckingham
Wrote his thesis on cunts and on fucking'em.
But a dropout from paree
Taught him Gamahuchee--
So he added a footnote on sucking 'em.
%%
There was a young woman of Cheadle,
Who once gave the clap to a beadle.
Said she, "Does it itch?"
"It does, you damned bitch,
And it burns like hell-fire when I peedle."
%%
There was a poor parson from Goring,
Who made a small hole in his flooring,
Fur-lined it all round,
Then laid on the ground,
And declared it was cheaper than whoring.
%%
A potter who lived in Bombay
Once fashioned a cunt out of clay;
But the heat of his prick
Kilned the damn thing to brick
And chafed all his foreskin away.
%%
On the porch of a dude named Horatio,
His girl got a yen for fellatio.
As she sucked on his dingus
He tried cunnilingus
But the cops ran 'em off of that patio.
%%
There was a young man of Calcutta,
Who tried to write "cunt" on a shutter.
When he got to c-u,
A pious Hindoo
Knocked him ass-over-head in the gutter.
%%
There was a young man of Bombay
Who buggered his dad once a day.
He said, "I like, rather,
Fucking my father--
He's clean, and there's nothing to pay."
%%
There once was a fellow named Bob
Who in sexual ways was a snob.
One day he was swimmin'
With twelve naked women
And deserted them all for a gob.
%%
An exotic young lady named Suki
Once danced in a troupe of kabuki
When asked for a fuck
She said, "Solly, no luck--
See here: looky looky, no nuki."
%%
One evening a guru had coitus
With an actress, a whore and a poetess.
When asked what position
He used for coition,
He answered serenely, "the lotus."
%%
A pious young lady of Chichester
Made all of the saints in their niches stir
And each morning at matin
Her breast in pink satin
Made the bishop of Chichester's breeches stir.
%%
There was a young lady at sea
Who complained that it hurt her to pee.
Said the brawny old mate,
"That accounts for the state
Of the cook and the captain and me."
%%
Said a pornographistic young poet
"Although I perhaps do not show it,
My interest in sin
Is wearing quite thin,
And I'll soon tell those fuckers to stow it."
%%
There was a young fellow named Grant
Who was made like the sensitive plant.
When they asked "Do you fuck?"
He replied, "No such luck.
I would if I could, but I can't."
%%
There was a young monk of Dundee
Who complained that it hurt him to pee,
He said, "Pax vobiscum,
Now why won't the piss come?
I'm afraid I've the c-l-a-p."
%%
A pathetic old maid of Bordeaux
Fell in love with a dashing young beau.
To arrest his regard
She would squat in his yard
And longingly pee in the sneaux.
%%
There was a young woman, quite handsome,
Who got stuck in a sleeping room transom.
When she offered much gold
For release, she was told
That the view was worth more than the ransom.
%%
There was a young man from Bengal
Who claimed he had only one ball,
But two little bitches
Pulled down this man's breeches
And proved he had nothing at all.
%%
Have you heard of those trollops of Birmingham
And the scandal that's currently concerning'em?
How they lift the frock
And tickle the cock
Of the bishop while he was confirming 'em?
%%
There was a young lady from Wooster
Who complained that too many men gooster.
So she traded her scanties
For sandpaper panties,
Now they goose her much less than they used 'ter.
%%
A weary old lecher named Blott
Took a luscious young blond to his yacht.
Too lazy to rape her,
He made darts out of paper,
Which he leisurely tossed at her twat.
%%
An arrogant wench from Salt Lake
Liked to tease all the boys on the make.
She was finally the prize
Of a man twice her size
And all she recalls is the ache.
%%
A gifted young fellow from Sparta
Was widely renowned as a farta'.
He could fart anything
From "Of Thee I Sing,"
To Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata."
%%
A deep-throated virgin named Netty
Was sucking a cock on the jetty.
She said, "It tastes nice,
Much better than rice,
Though not quite as good as spaghetti."
%%
There was a young man of Lake Placid
Whose prick was lethargic and flaccid.
When he wanted to sport
He would have to resort
To injections of sulphuric acid.
%%
A certain young sheik of Algiers
Said to his harem, "My dears,
Though you may think it odd of me,
I'm tired of just sodomy
Let's try straight fucking." (loud cheers)
%%
An ambitious lady named Harriet
Once dreamed she was raped in a chariot
By seventeen sailors
A monk and three tailors,
Mohammed and Judas Iscariot.
%%
The old archeologist, Throstle,
Discovered a marvelous fossil.
He knew from its bend
And the knot on the end,
T'was the penis of Paul the Apostle.
%%
"Well, madam," the bishop declared,
While the vicar just mumbled and stared,
"'Twere better, perhaps,
In the crypt or the apse,
Because sex in the nave must be shared."
%%
The kings of Peru were the Incas,
Who were known far and wide as great drincas.
They worshipped the sun
And had lots of fun,
But the peasants all thought they were stincas.
%%
There was a young lady named Cager
Who, as the result of a wager,
Consented to fart
The entire oboe part
Of Mozart's quartet in F major.
%%
A whimsical fellow named Bloch
Could beat the base drum with his cock.
With a special erection
He could play a selection
From Johann Sebastian Bach.
%%
There was an old man of Hong Kong
Who never did anything wrong.
He would lie on his back
With his head in a sack
And secretly finger his dong.
%%
Well buggered was a boy named Delpasse
By all of the lads in his class
He said, with a yawn,
"Now the novelty's gone
And it's only a pain in the ass."
%%
A lad, at his first copulation,
Cried, "What a sensation! Inflation,
Gyration, elation
Throughout the duration,
I guess I'll give up masturbation."
%%
A charmer from old Amarillo,
Sick of finding strange heads on her pillow,
Decided one day
That to keep men away
She would stuff up her crevice with Brillo.
%%
A dentist, young doctor Malone,
Got a charming girl patient alone,
And, in his depravity,
Filled the wrong cavity.
God, how his practice has grown.
%%
There was a young lady named Alice
Who was known to have peed in a chalice.
'Twas the common belief
It was done for relief,
And not out of protestant malice.
%%
A distinguished professor from Swarthmore
Got along with a sexy young sophomore.
As quick as a glance
He stripped off his pants,
But he found that the sophomore'd got off more.
%%
A lady from Old Little Rock
In fidelity took little stock,
And deserted her man
In the streets of Japan
For a boy with a prehensile cock.
%%
There was a young lady from Munich
Who had an affair with a eunuch.
At the height of their passion
He dealt her a ration
From a squirt gun concealed in his tunic.
%%
An impish young fellow named James
Had a passion for idiot games.
He lighted the hair
Of his lady's affair
And laughed as she pissed through the flames.
%%
A cabin boy on an old clipper
Grew steadily flipper and flipper.
He plugged up his ass
With fragments of glass
And thus circumcised his old skipper.
%%
THE SEX LIFE OF THE CAMEL
-- Mason Williams
%%
There was an old pirate named Bates
Who was learning to rhumba on skates.
He fell on his cutlass
Which rendered him nutless
And practically useless on dates.
%%
There was a young man from Bel-Aire
Who was screwing his girl on the stair,
But the banister broke
So he doubled his stroke
And finished her off in mid-air.
%%
A pretty young lady named Vogel
Once sat herself down on a molehill.
A curious mole
Nosed into her hole --
Ms. Vogel's ok, but the mole's ill.
%%
A mathematician named Hall
Has a hexahedronical ball,
And the cube of its weight
Times his pecker's, plus eight
Is his phone number -- give him a call.
%%
Said Einstein, "I have an equation
Which to some may seem rabelaisian:
Let _#V be virginity
Approaching infinity;
Let _#P be a constant persuasion;
Chorus:
Clone, clone of my own,
With the Y chromosome changed to X.
And when we're alone,
Since her mind is my own,
She'll be thinking of nothing but sex.
-- Randall Garrett
%%
Living in Hollywood is like living in a bowl of granola. What ain't
fruits and nuts is flakes.
%%
There once was a man named Eugene
Who invented a screwing machine
Concave and convex
It served either sex
And it played with itself in between.
%%
Sex is like a bridge game --
If you have a good hand no partner is needed.
%%
"What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought you
didn't believe in God."
"I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears, "but the
God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's
not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be."
Purmal's Corollary:
As the limit of (Brains x Beauty) goes to infinity,
availability goes to zero.
%%
This limerick is **SO**FILTHY** that it would offend you. So I'll put
"di-dah" for the filthy words:
-- Ansel Adams
%%
The Split-Atom Blues
A: A fur coat.
%%
My brother-in-law has found a way to make ends meet. He goes around
with his head stuck up his ass.
%%
NEW ADDITION TO THE LIBRARY:
"Sally", the department's new inflatable doll, is available on a
short-term removal basis only -- please sign her out and return her
promptly to avoid extended waits. (We are still awaiting shipment of
our "Big John" doll.)
%%
Having discovered the possibility that other creatures could be used
for sexual intercourse, early man was likely to have made many such
attempts ... though it is doubtful that he was so sexually carnivorous
as the Christian and Jewish Adam, who, rabbinical interpreters of the
Old Testament tell us, had intercourse with every creature before God
finally hit upon the idea of woman and created Eve.
-- R. E. Masters
%%
I think pop music has done more for oral intercourse than anything else
that has ever happened, and vice versa.
-- Frank Zappa
%%
A hard man is good to find.
%%
Vidi, vici, veni.
(I saw, I conquered, I came.)
%%
Q: What's Jewish foreplay?
The Church of Counterfactual Belief has been set up to cater to all who
do not allow demonstrable truth to get in the way of their beliefs. In
addition to the flatness of the earth, the following beliefs have been
certified by Pope Duane as Church dogma:
-- That there is a hole in the Earth at the North Pole from which
UFOs come.
-- That pi equals precisely 3.000.
-- That sex can be enjoyed only by blacks and homosexuals.
-- That Billy Joe Wilson (Hoopla, Miss.) has successfully squared
the circle.
-- That Harry Truman is still president, and doing a fine job.
-- That pi equals precisely 22/7.
H's Dictum:
There is no magic ...
%%
Women who want to be equal to men lack imagination.
-- Graffito in a women's restroom
%%
Women Unite! Make _#h_#i_#m sleep in the wet spot tonight!
%%
"I own my own body, but I share."
%%
If you think sex is a pain in the ass, try a different position.
%%
When God created man, She was only testing.
%%
A friend with weed is a friend indeed.
%%
A non-vegetarian anti-abortionist is a contradiction in terms.
--Phyllis Schlafly
%%
A nymph hits you and steals your virginity.
%%
Anxiety, n: The first time you can't do it a second time.
YOU SHOULD:
(A) Offer to come back next week when the smell has gone away.
(B) Point to the Chief Executive and accuse him of the offense.
(C) Challenge anyone in the room to do better.
%%
Q: How do you play religious roulette?
A: You stand around in a circle and blaspheme and see who gets struck
by lightning first.
%%
When the surgeon came to see her on the morning after her operation, the
young woman asked her somewhat hesitantly how long it would be before
she could resume her sex life. "I really haven't thought about it,"
gulped the stunned surgeon. "You're the first patient who's asked me
that after a tonsillectomy!"
%%
I love this fucking University, and this University loves fucking me.
%%
Lisp hackers have to be bound (to-do 'it) ...
%%
You have prepared a proposal for your supervisor. The success of this
proposal will mean increasing your salary 20%. In the middle of your
proposal your supervisor leans over to look at your report and spits
into your coffee. You:
(c) Show him who's in command; promptly take a leak in his "In"
basket.
%%
You are at a business lunch when you are suddenly overcome with an
uncontrollable desire to pick your nose. Since this is definitely a
no-no, you:
(a) Pretend to wave to someone across the room and with one fluid
motion, bury your forefinger in your nostril right up to the 4th
joint.
(b) Get everyone drunk and organize a nose picking contest with a
prize to the one who makes his nose bleed first.
(c) Drop your napkin on the floor and when you bend over to pick it
up, blow your nose on your sock.
%%
You have just returned from a trip to Green Bay, Wisconsin in January
and tell your boss that nobody but whores and football players live
there. He mentions that his wife is from Green Bay. You:
(a) Pretend you are suffering from amnesia and don't remember your
name.